Masstag existing tracks/ library

[egd]

dBpoweramp Reference edition is a great boon to anyone looking for ease of operation, quality rips and accurate metadata - it's now my ripper of choice.

What would really round it out nicely is the ability to masstag a pre-existing library so that users can get consistency and accurate metadata across their entire collection. The way I'd envisage it working would be something along the lines of:

1. move your albums in need of masstagging into a discrete folder tree
2. arrange your library one folder per album e.g. "artist - album" (easily done)
3. have a masstagger load each directory sequentially
4. sort the contents of the folder by filename to get the correct track order
5. check existing metadata to inform artist/ album name, if that's not enough resort to folder name
6. look up album using PerfectMeta sources
7. write changes

Of course one could tie in AMG's acoustic analysis it would be another option for album recognition, but the abovementioned approach should suffice in most cases and could be configured to require a) no confirmation b) confirmation for albums the masstagger isn't sure of and/ or c) no confirmation/ manual intervention. I guess it could also save the changes to a database to allow a user to subsequently confirm changes that will be written should they initiate the update process.

Thoughts/ comments?

[EliC]

Re: Masstag existing tracks/ library

You would probably have to pay commercial rates for disc lookups. Meta-Data Providers would be concerned that companies would use such a tool to rip discs without commercial lookups then tag afterwords for free. Hopefully such a tool will be made, but I think it will be more expensive then you are hoping to look up the meta-data...

[egd]

Re: Masstag existing tracks/ library

You would probably have to pay commercial rates for disc lookups. Meta-Data Providers would be concerned that companies would use such a tool to rip discs without commercial lookups then tag afterwords for free. Hopefully such a tool will be made, but I think it will be more expensive then you are hoping to look up the meta-data...

Agree it could be abused if it were batch/ database driven in that the data could be reused. Having said that though, I'm pretty sure any company doing ripping for commercial purposes would only be ripping a CD once and would then reuse the rip if another customer brought in the same album. If it were an online music store I'm sure they'd only rip an album once also. So it's likely the metadata providers would only be getting the revenue from these sources once anyhow.

For home users it is no different to ripping each CD and retrieving the metadata, except you wouldn't need to rerip - you'd just be using your paid subscription to update/ obtain metadata.

[bhoar]

Re: Masstag existing tracks/ library

Agree it could be abused if it were batch/ database driven in that the data could be reused. Having said that though, I'm pretty sure any company doing ripping for commercial purposes would only be ripping a CD once and would then reuse the rip if another customer brought in the same album.

No, that is not the case. Ripping companies do not keep copies of customer data after the ripped data is returned to the customer.

To do otherwise would run seriously afoul of copyright laws.

If it were an online music store I'm sure they'd only rip an album once also. So it's likely the metadata providers would only be getting the revenue from these sources once anyhow.

No, the revenue model of the commercial metadata providors is to generate a per-lookup revenue, regardless if the customer already looked up the same disc before.

It would be nice if they'd allow either time-limited local caching of lookup data and/or time-limited amount of repeated lookups for the same disc at a one-lookup price. Both of which are necessary to prevent paying double, triple or more when dealing with scratched/damaged discs.

If spoon is able to keep up a good business relationship with the companies, over time he may be able to win concessions to help with these issues.

-brendan

[Teknojnky]

Re: Masstag existing tracks/ library

Check out musicbrainz picard and/or jaikoz for tagging based on acoustical properties and relatively high quality and consistent metadata based on musicbrainz.

[egd]

Re: Masstag existing tracks/ library

No, that is not the case. Ripping companies do not keep copies of customer data after the ripped data is returned to the customer.

To do otherwise would run seriously afoul of copyright laws.

Ripping companies do not OFFICIALLY keep copies of customer data after the ripped data is returned to the customer.

It would be nice if they'd allow either time-limited local caching of lookup data and/or time-limited amount of repeated lookups for the same disc at a one-lookup price. Both of which are necessary to prevent paying double, triple or more when dealing with scratched/damaged discs.

If spoon is able to keep up a good business relationship with the companies, over time he may be able to win concessions to help with these issues.

Agreed. I guess what I'm really after is AMG's Tapestry functionality to become available to my Squeezebox or to find a way of emulating it. If I can get the track based metadata I can emulate Tapestry playlisting using a Erland's SqueezeCenter plugins. This leads me to a question regarding dbPoweramp's metadata retrieval - is it track- or album-based, specifically insofar as AMG's Style metadata is concerned?

[egd]

Re: Masstag existing tracks/ library

Just thought I'd mention that Qsonix enables you to import your pre-existing audio library into its music management system and it then adds AMG metadata to every one of your pre-existing tracks, so AMG definitely allow it to be done, it's just a question of negotiating the right commercial terms.