On Sun, 20 Jul 2008 07:49:49 -0700, you wrote: >Hello List!
Hello James. >Is there such a thing as a tagging program that one could put on a folder and >have it tag all of the tracks, putting the correct track and author names in >the title or one that could put the track in the correct format for playlist >finding, author - title format? Yes there is, but it comes at a cost. Not money, time and knowledge. Let's start at the beginning. Winamp has a tagging facility (Alt+3, five back-tabs, look for "Auto-tag button") which sends the first 30 seconds or so of the currently selected/playable track to a database where hundreds of thousands of such 30-second clips are stored. (Also accessible from the playlist window with right-click Send-To menu.) Your clip is compared against others', and if a matach is made, the associated tag information, as much as there is of it, is passed back and your file is tagged. Sounds great, doesn't it? It is--sort of. Firstly, it's a user-maintained database, which means any Tom, Dick or Harry can come along and submit song clips and identification information. Misspellings and artist and album mis-citings abound, and for whatever reason, the thing has a nasty habit of choosing tag information from compilations over the original album containing the song you're trying to tag. There are better programs, such as MP3 Tag Version 2.4 by Florian Heidenreich. This tagger does not work by scanning sound files, but rather by comparing tag information you provide with tag information stored in such databases as Amazon which, on the face of it, would seem much more reliable, and actually usually is, but it's not a perfect world in which we live, so watch what you get from them. The problem with MP3 Tag is that you have to provide something for the search to start with--namely, some piece of tag data (also called metadata) such as an artist, an album name, etc., , whereas in the Winamp tagger, the only thing you need is the file itself which gets listened to for a few seconds, then compared against a database as described above. The problem with MP3 Tag is more a problem with the Amazon database than the tagging program itself. Sometimes there are many, more than a dozen hits on a particular artist, and you have to go scrolling through a long list to find the one that's right for the collection of songs you have. This can be particularly time-consuming if multiple labels put out an album of the same name by the same artist, which is more common than you could possibly know unless you've been doing this tagging thing for a while. After you've located a match and pressed ENTER To select it for editing and applying to your folder of files (presumably sorted into folders by album within artist), you are presented with some metadata that occurs only once for the album--artist, album title, record label (called publisher), year of publication, and a few other things. Just after the publisher field you will find two lists. The first one is the list of tracks, in order, according to Amazon's database. The second is the list of tracks, in order, in your directory. There is a known bug in MP3 Tag which sometimes causes the track list from Amazon not to display. As you tab through the editing dialog and find the first list, if you do not instantly hear a track number and name, you must immediately press the ESCAPE key and try the search again. If you accidentally press the up or down arrow key to browse the list, MP3 Tag will abort with a very nasty sequence of errors and error messages from which it cannot recover without a system restart. In other words, you can't just close the program and restart it without a reboot. WARNING! The discussion that follows and the procedures outlined therein is to be heeded and adhered to strictly and without deviation, otherwise you'll mess up your file tagging very badly! On the screen, the two lists are presented side by side. On the bottom of the list are buttons labeled "Move Up" and "Move Down" (shortcut keys Alt-P and Alt-V respectively). Select a track in the second list window in the usual Windows manner and press either of these hotkey button keys to cause the selected track to physically change position in the list. There are two reasons you need to have this capability. The first is if the tracks are out of order in the filename view in your directory. If you don't number the tracks, and even sometimes if you do, Windows can, and often does, rearange file order so things show up in odd places. The second reason why the files may be out of order is if there are gaps where tracks belong which you might not have. Fir example, it is quite common for me to download and catalog complete albums, but every once in a while I hit one of those "Greatest Hits" collection things that might have duplicates of what I already have on other albums, so I don't bother downloading those particular tracks. Well, you can see that that would definitely cause gaps in the list of songs if I didn't have the tracks, right? So what I have to do is compensate by moving the tracks I do have into the proper position in the album song list as dictated by the Amazon database. MP3 Tag makes this possible by giving you a place-holder or dummy track name, which you can treat as a real track, move it up and down the list until it's in the proper position to occupy a slot where there is no real track on your disk drive. If you fail to move the tracks in the list of tracks on your disk drive into their proper position in the list of tracks on the album, MP3 Tag doesn't know this, and will tag them according to their position in the list, since that is the only index available. Amazon does not provide the track numbers in search results as a separate metadata item. My two biggest complaints about Florian's program are these: 1. The display window for searches in Amazon's database isn't wide enough to display enough of the list of found titles, so you have to pick and choose by listening to a very few letters at the beginning, and sometimes the one you think you want is not the one you asked for. An example of this could be where you typed "Bon Jovi - Greatest Hits" in the search box, but the actual album name turned out to be something like "Top 25 Greatest Hits of Bon Jovi". IN this case, because the window isn't wide enough (and I sure haven't found ways to stretch it), all you might see is "Top 25", and you'd think that was incorrect when it's actually the one you really want. 2. My second complaint is that Amazon will only return ten matches, so if what you want isn't in those ten matches, you've either got to find ways of narrowing your search to reduce the number of matches to ten or less, or you've got to go on Amazon's web site and search manually. There are other little quirks of the program, including the fact that sometimes it fails to display the song list for the chosen album, but if you search again, or sometimes restart the program, it displays correctly. Otherwise it's a very useful tool, it just takes a little time to learn just how to use it to make it useful. Jonathan Mosen List Founder Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... http://www.pc-audio.org To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
