Category: MusicBrainz

Posts related to the MusicBrainz encyclopedia in general: community, data, client, server, etc.

Lucene enabled Picard

In the last couple of days I’ve stuffed Lucene into Picard and it has given me some quite amazing results. I’ve opened a collection of untagged files and watched it open the right albums and populate it with tags automatically. Mind you, none of the tags were previously tagged with MB ids. Plain amazing! I … Continue reading “Lucene enabled Picard”

In the last couple of days I’ve stuffed Lucene into Picard and it has given me some quite amazing results. I’ve opened a collection of untagged files and watched it open the right albums and populate it with tags automatically. Mind you, none of the tags were previously tagged with MB ids. Plain amazing!

I have this hip-hop compilation that my friend put together and its utter crap — duplicates, many files without tags, crappy spelling and mostly from greatest hits albums. Ick. The original tagger identified less than 15% of the tracks. The new tagger identifies 50% – 60% of the tracks — that’s a really good rate for this crappy collection.

Continue reading “Lucene enabled Picard”

Trod trod trod

I have Picard starting up on Gentoo linux! Finally sorted out some permission problems and got the last of the requirements installed, and it runs! Well, almost. I can’t actually do anything; dragging files has no effect, the application complains a bit and won’t shut down properly; but still, progress! On the Mac, I’ve managed … Continue reading “Trod trod trod”

I have Picard starting up on Gentoo linux! Finally sorted out some permission problems and got the last of the requirements installed, and it runs! Well, almost. I can’t actually do anything; dragging files has no effect, the application complains a bit and won’t shut down properly; but still, progress! On the Mac, I’ve managed to work around some Python issues with respect to case insensitive filesystems, but now wxPython won’t compile, so I’ve taken a break from that and turned to the Windows front: I’m installing Windows XP into a VirtualPC as I write.

As an aside, I’ve almost got the my MusicBrainz test server up and running again, having some issues with the database import though. I forgot how many perl modules you need to install to get this thing running, but it only has to happen once.

They're not barriers, they're challenges

Mac OS X: I’ve decided Fink can suck er .. something rancid, and I’ve gone down the path of compiling everything from scratch, including gtk+2 and all of its dependancies, and Python. Now that I’ve got that all out of the way, it turns out that OS X has it’s own version of Python, and … Continue reading “They're not barriers, they're challenges”

Mac OS X: I’ve decided Fink can suck er .. something rancid, and I’ve gone down the path of compiling everything from scratch, including gtk+2 and all of its dependancies, and Python. Now that I’ve got that all out of the way, it turns out that OS X has it’s own version of Python, and this version of Python doesn’t play ball with the ctypes package. Ah well, getting closer, slowly.

Lucene rocks!

I’ve been playing with the Lucene text indexing system (in particular, I’m playing with PyLucene, which is a GCJ compiled version of Lucene with Python bindings). Lucene does text searching really well and its fast! Eventually I’d like to use Lucene to power the MusicBrainz searches as was as building a copy of it into … Continue reading “Lucene rocks!”

I’ve been playing with the Lucene text indexing system (in particular, I’m playing with PyLucene, which is a GCJ compiled version of Lucene with Python bindings). Lucene does text searching really well and its fast!

Eventually I’d like to use Lucene to power the MusicBrainz searches as was as building a copy of it into Picard. Picard? Yes! Lucene is so good, that you can give it a track title and chances are its going to find the right track. My idea is this:

  1. Cluster new files and determine which artists these files cover.
  2. Download and cache the metadata for the artists locally, and build a lucene index of it.
  3. Throw each of the tracks at lucene to see what it can match.
  4. If nothing matches, maybe do a full DB search via the web service or do a TRM calculation.

I’m excited by this — the proof of concept looks fabulous. Executing it on the full scale where things are getting cached and locally indexed, is going to be a fair amount of work. Unfortunately.

But, this gives me hope that Picard will have some serious brainz under the hood. 🙂

Two steps forward, one step back

I’ve been trying to set up various environments to install Picard (Mac OS X 10.3, Gentoo linux, and Windows XP via VirtualPC on the Mac). It’s been a rather trialing process…

I’ve been trying to set up various environments to install Picard (Mac OS X 10.3, Gentoo linux, and Windows XP via VirtualPC on the Mac). It’s been a rather trialing process…

Continue reading “Two steps forward, one step back”

MusicBrainz Tagger 0.10.4

The 0.10.4 version of the tagger fixes a number of problems related to saving tracks.

This version contains the following bug fixes:

  • VBR MP3 files that have no ID3v2 tag, but have an ID3v1 tag may have had
    their Xing header corrupted, which could cause these MP3 files to show up with
    incorrect durations in audio players.
  • The tagger now reads the release year from the TYER ID3v2 tag, which means that
    if the ID3v2 tag has the right year, but MB does not, the release year from the ID3v2
    tag will be used when renaming the files.
  • Some files that were previously saved and then saved again, may have had an erroneous (1) appended to the filename.
  • Don Redman provided two improved bitmaps for the save and submit buttons, so that they look better when they are disabled.
  • Don also provided a new animation for the ‘page loading’ animation in the tagger. Thanks Don!

Robert Kaye

MusicBrainz Tagger 0.10.3

The 0.10.3 version of the tagger fixes a number of bugs and provides new options for configuring the file names.

This bug fix version fixes problems in the id3v2 tags generated by the
0.10.2 version. This version also supports logging, removing id3v2 tags
from ogg files, sports new toolbar icons, shows special too short
and silence trms.

With the increased load on the TRM signature server tagging clients may encounter
TRM server busy messages and the tagger now captures those and reminds the user
to donate money to MusicBrainz when the TRM server becomes busy. The tagger also
supports the new %type (album type), %status (album status), %year, $month, %date
(for first release date of the album) and %country (first release country)
variables for the saving tagged files. These values are now also written to
the metadata tags.

Bugs and RFEs Closed

Robert Kaye

MusicBrainz Tagger 0.10.2

The 0.10.2 version of the tagger fixed a number of problems from the 0.10.1 version.

This version fixes a few important bugs from the 0.10.1 version.  Files that were
tagged by clicking on the tag icon may have incomplete artist sortname and artist id
tags.  The saved tab can now be sorted by clicking on the header fields, and the
filename in the tabs will never be cut off — now it gets reasonably truncated
and the most important info should always be visible.  Finally FLAC tagging had
some bugs where tags were getting cleared or not written to disk.

Bugs and RFEs Closed

Robert Kaye

MusicBrainz Tagger 0.10.1

The 0.10.1 version of the tagger fixed a number of problems from the 0.10.0 version.

This version fixes a number of bugs from the 0.10.0 version.  Some MP3s
would have corrupted ID3 tags after being tagged with the tagger – this is now fixed. 
If you have any files that got corrupted by the tagger, download and install this new
version, and then enable the ‘clear tags before writing’ option.  Then re-identify all of
the corrupt files and write new tags.

Also, tagging Ogg Vorbis files would crash fairly often, and tagging via proxy was also broken.  Both of these are now fixed.

Bugs and RFEs Closed

Robert Kaye