My personal wish list

Let me start by saying the dbpower tools are amazing and easy to use. The only reason I dont use the ripper is that I trust EAC more. Andre has had plans to liscense EAC for some time. I know I would be very willing to pay for a version of poweramp with EAC ripping!!! I would also like to see all the tools integrated into one app for complete music collection management.

Im sure spoon has already seen this but here is my personal wish list for my ideal music management tool. dbpoweramp already has much of it covered under different apps. From my HA post (found [url=http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=21158&]here[/url]:

To start, you have to get music into the collection...
CD Ripper
-using EAC tech, with online database of cd drives and self configuring of eac
-accurate rip for further confirmation of rip
-ability to rip protected CD (TOC correction, ect...)

Default Encoding:
-encoding to FLAC (compression lvl?) - HD sizes are getting outrageous, so size is becoming less of an issue and this would avoid lossy-lossy transcoding for many ppl
-digital signature of audio content (verify that content was ripped accuratly and encoded to flac from an accurate rip)
-Auto Tagging: pretty self explanitory the only thing that should be changed (and new data base may be required) separate tags for each artist (no more artist x featuring y crap)
-Apply replaygain per album and per track

Network Sharing
-Many ppl have multiple comp is different locations and would like to have access to their collection(s). This would in essense be a small private p2p network (no sharing your files with the world here)
-Large p2p network sharing of song rating. If u rate songs similiar to other, could look for things they like and therefor u might
-Large p2p sharing of playlist (not the songs, just the playlists created)

Data backup
-creation of par2 files for the audio content of the flac
-large scale sharing of par2 files- no need to make your own par2, it the program senses that a file has become corrupt it goes on a p2p network requesting a par2 file to correct the file, a par2 is made on demand remotely and shared over the network (legal??? - should be its just fixing the song, not sharing any copyrighted data)

Transcoding
-to LAME -APS, AAC (if purchased), MPC or whatever, at the recommended default settings
-Direct transcoding to portables

Management
-Dir creation (My Music\Artist\Album\track*-title.flac)
-All the regular sorting by song, genre, ect...
-playlist creation (not based on location of song on hd- making playlist transportable)

Audio Player
CD Burner

Since I've gone through all this recently, I'd like to say it would be great to see something like this. But just as important as having this done by an app or some sort of front end, is the documentation to properly set up everything. Even if all this could be fit into a single app, it would still take a bit of effort to properly configure everything. Of course a simplified options menu and wise default settings would help in this area, but they are no replacement for documentation and explanations.

Ripping - I used EAC simply because it had the best chance of getting an accurate rip. But configuring it properly for my drives was not easy. Still needs some work here, either in the drive setup wizard and/or the documentation surrounding this issue.

The other reasons I used EAC were because it can log every CD rip and report errors. I think the logging could be a little more detailed but it could be I just did not see how to turn up the logging detail. I missed generation of logs for some of my CDs because the documentation I used to set up EAC didn't mention in. Again there is no replacement for good docs. The other reason I used EAC is because it ties in nicely with LAME. Using the ability to start up 2 LAME encodes and 2 CD rips at once really helped me speed up the process, because I have 2 optical drives and 2 cpus.

Better support for lossless formats would be nice. It took me a bit to figure out how to configure for FLAC vs LAME because you need to pass all the tag info. There are some docs out there but they give config strings without really explaining everything, or use undocumented tags for example. With FLAC being open I'm looking forward to seeing more support for it in other apps. The difference in speed and size in lossless formats to me is really a non-issue. FLAC can be streamed, and it has wide support, so for my uses it was the best choice. As mentioned, disk space is becoming less of an issue. Even if it is, FLAC can easlily be backed up to cdr/dvdr and provide a lossless, gapless backup of your CDs. The nice thing though is using it to create any other format that you need, without ever having to touch your CDs again.


ReplaiGain: wish I could say more about this but I can't. I know it's a better and more widely supported solution to the loudness issue than others which only work with certain apps or certain hardwarre. But the docs on the main web site are several years old. Learning how to use it properly means drilling through many forum posts and hoping that you don't make the same mistake of answering a question that's already been answered. Properly configuring your music shouldn't have to be like this.

Network support would be nice, especially for those who are setting up media servers and would like to stream to media PCs around the house. Beyond that, I don't know. Touchy area.

Transcoding is something I'm sure we all wish we could avoid but it's a fact of life. Best you can do is use the best decode and encode process possible and avoid the known bad mistakes and combinations.

Data backup and track verification go hand in hand. You could use MD5 for just the verification of tracks, or you could use par2 to do verification and reduncancy as well.

Management of the music is also a weak area right now. For example, there aren't a lot of apps out there that have really mastered the art of intelligent playlist creation. Even the ability to just generate folder-based playlists easily and automatically is missing from most apps, if you want to do several hundred folders at once for example.

Really where I'm getting most of my ideas from is from a web site I found where someone posted their "uber list" of lossless music ripped from CDs. They had a very specific set of criteria for the end result of the music, the quality of the rip, the final format, etc. Once the end point is clearly defined, it's just a matter of helping people get there as easily as possible.

Right now, the easiest thing to do would be to document all the bits and pieces used, because a) I'm not a programmer and b) I don't have the time for much more. But down the road I can see there is a lot of room for an app that can do these things and save the user some time. I just bought Tag & Rename because the user interface worked for me and saved me a lot of time fixing my FLAC tags. And that's a pretty limited set of functionality compared to what we are talking about here.

Thanks for the post and the suggestions.

Would also like to see musicbrainz support (possibly moodlogic, though it would be nice to see musicbrainz add all of the metadata that moodlogic is building to their database)

Hmm, I was told that musicbrainz had separate artist listings for "artist x featuring y" discs. This is not the case. Does anyone know of a cddb that does?

Also would like something along the lines of:
[url]http://gotchacoveredonline.com/[/url]

BTW, yes, I enjoy talking to myself ;-)

AFAIK freedb and cddb do not support multiartists, even tagging does not support multiartists on most formats (I want to create something in that area).

[QUOTE=Spoon]AFAIK freedb and cddb do not support multiartists, even tagging does not support multiartists on most formats (I want to create something in that area).[/QUOTE]

You are right. I cant find any db that has support for multiartist songs. Thats why I made this request over at freedb:
[url]http://www.freedb.org/cgi-bin/ib31/ikonboard.cgi?;act=ST;f=1;t=460[/url]

of course we'll see if I have better luck with them then I have had with you and the tiger tree hash for the accurate rip db.

[QUOTE=EliC]You are right. I cant find any db that has support for multiartist songs. Thats why I made this request over at freedb:
[url]http://www.freedb.org/cgi-bin/ib31/ikonboard.cgi?;act=ST;f=1;t=460[/url]

of course we'll see if I have better luck with them then I have had with you and the tiger tree hash for the accurate rip db.[/QUOTE]


Update:
[QUOTE=megari]
We have very little time to consider new features such as this one. Adding an artist field would require introducing another protocol level. Believe me, you are not the only one asking for this feature and we don't ignore you. It is just unlikely that this feature would be added anytime soon due to our scarce resources. We've said just about everything we have to say about this issue in this thread. I really hope an important feature like this could be introduced quickly but the reality is harsh :([/QUOTE]

Well, it looks like they are open to the feature if anyone has the skills to help them implement it.

My wish list??? hah;
- dbpoweramp with many winamp features, easy playlist, da "j" key
- dbpoweramp doing conversion like dmc to filez in m3u
- dbpoweramp doing dir creation (like cd extractor)
- dbpoweramp READING AND ENCODING atrac3plus filez
- compression RULZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (if ya know hot to do it)
- dbpoweramp ripping audio, dvd;
- dbpoweramp reading video filez and compressing/dec them;
- dbpoweramp having a more NON-userfriendly version
- dbpoweramp kicking the crap outta Winamp and Wmp
- dbpoweramp acting like nero (only music and video filez)

When i see this happening I SWEAR i'm gonna pay whatever the cost to get this motherfooking program... :supersmil

anybody wants to continue this thread?????? :yawn:

I like dbPowerAmp very much because it's very easy to use with WavPack, which is a format that I use very much.

So, let me suggest a simple thing about multiartist: is it possible to have a "key" character to divide the artist from the song title, just like in CDex? I understand it is a "trick", but it works quite well, as often I found in FREEDB compilations with artist and song title divided through character "/".

Or, at least, you can edit the title list on your own and have mp3 (and WavPack ;) ) with correct tags.

Hope it's useful.

Sorry, I completely misunterstood what you intend for "multiartist" in this topic.

I'll post a specific question for my problem.