AMG Commercial License question

[wackychimp]

Is it possible to use PerfectMeta apart from the batch ripping process?

My question arises because a group of friends and I are looking to go in on an auto loader and rip our individual collections. AMG gives you 400 lookups with the first license and you then need to pay for additional lookups. I'm not knocking them for getting money for their service.

What I'm wondering is if I can choose to start with the free databases' info (during the batch ripping) and then look over my batch of 50 ripped CDs and see if there's some that didn't turn out right and then chose only those to run against the AMG database.

The reason I ask is because 50 CDs X 15 songs per CD (average) leaves you with 750 files to look up and boom, you're paying for a new license. Some of us have 200+ CDs and were hoping to not have to pay that much to look up each song.

[bhoar]

Re: AMG Commercial License question

Is it possible to use PerfectMeta apart from the batch ripping process?

My question arises because a group of friends and I are looking to go in on an auto loader and rip our individual collections. AMG gives you 400 lookups with the first license and you then need to pay for additional lookups. I'm not knocking them for getting money for their service.

What I'm wondering is if I can choose to start with the free databases' info (during the batch ripping) and then look over my batch of 50 ripped CDs and see if there's some that didn't turn out right and then chose only those to run against the AMG database.

The reason I ask is because 50 CDs X 15 songs per CD (average) leaves you with 750 files to look up and boom, you're paying for a new license. Some of us have 200+ CDs and were hoping to not have to pay that much to look up each song.

To your first question, no.

It's priced per CD, not per track. That should take away some of the sting, right? Note also that the gift of 400 starts counting down *with the trial*. So I always recommend testing the batch ripper with AMG disabled.

But yes, you can disable AMG in the batch ripper first (note: I believe disabling AMG also disables Perfectmeta), and then run all your CDs. You'll also not get any (or as much? maybe musicbrainz has some?) album art, but you can manually add that later with third party tools if you want.

For CDs that ended up with very bad metadata, you can then reactivate AMG+Perfectmeta and run them through again. But at the point, you might want to just use the manual cd ripper where AMG is a per year price rather than a per CD price.

Note also that by default there's no caching of AMG data in the batch ripper. To address the concern of users who may resubmit discs after resurfacing with a scratch-removal machine, Spoon added the optional capability to enable a 24-hour temporary cache by changing the shortcut's "Target" field to this value: "C:\Program Files\Illustrate\dBpoweramp\Batch Ripper.exe" --locmetcache

-brendan

[Spoon]

Re: AMG Commercial License question

Lookups are either with AMG or not, you cannot lookup with freedb then later when the files are ripped lookup with AMG (also the 400 lookups are disc lookups).

[wackychimp]

Re: AMG Commercial License question

Ok, thanks for the info.

Glad to hear that "lookups" are disc lookups and not track lookups. Yes it does take the sting out a little. :D

[dougstrach]

Re: AMG Commercial License question

You can do what you are requesting with the GD3 database. You'll need to use the GD3 Tagger tool which is able to do a GD3 lookup for albums that maybe didn't get good metadata back from your free sources. Here's how it'd work in your scenario...

Use the batch ripper to rip the CDs using just the free services. When completed, load the collection into GD3 Tagger to review the tags. On those CDs that don't have good metadata, you can easily search for covers with GD3 or even hit the GD3 button to see if there is a good return from GD3 for that CD.

Let me know if that helps out in your situation.

Thanks,
Doug Strachota
GD3 Data