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Music Tagging Applications and You
I recently purchased an iPod touch, because I was quite impressed with its software features, screen size, physical size and pretty much everything else about it. One of my favourite features of it is that it can display high-resolution pictures of cover art for my mp3s, which have been loaded in from iTunes. However, while iTunes is capable of automatically downloading the cover art, it seems to be incapable of finding art for large sections of my music collection. I can accept that part of this might be due to the fact that some of the files are older and not tagged correctly, but there also seems to be a lot of missing cover art for albums I've recently purchased and ripped. After investigating a bit, I've found out that this is likely because WMP has incorrectly tagged some of my files or not provided a correct identifier for the CD.
With the aforementioned problem in mind, I decided that there must be an application out there to simply automatically re-tag my collection en-masse (I have way too much music to do it manually). While there are numerous batch tagging applications, they all seem to lack the ability to do what I want specifically, or do it inadequately. So far, the closest I've come is using Magic MP3 Tagger, which is based on MusicBrainz. However, I found even Magic MP3 tagger to be inadequate in several areas, not the least of which being that it is a closed-source product which requires purchasing to activate its full functionality. I also found using it to be difficult when there are numerous files which are not properly tagged. While its main purpose is supposed to be to fill in tags with as little metadata as possible, it can't even seem to search cd databases properly without me making a manual check to make sure that the artist, cd and track names are correct.
Given that there seems to be no decent, free, solution to do what I want, I'm going to try writing my own application. I'm going to be strongly emphasising the batch philosophy, as I feel that micromanagement should be an option, not a requirement, of a piece of software of this nature. The application will have several goals:
- Free alternative to existing solutions
- Performs lookups with as little as one piece of information about the file and presents the user with a list of choices in the absence of a direct match
- Adds all the information necessary for iTunes to look up the correct cover art
- Simple interface oriented around batch processing
- Pluggable components to allow different music databases and additional file types to be added/used in the future
I hope I can achieve these stated goals, because I have found the attempts so far at this kind of software have mostly fallen way short of the mark.
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Tags:
Idea, iPod Touch, Music, Tagging, Software
