Category: WindowsTagger

What started out as a joking suggestion has actually extended the life of the Classic Tagger! 🙂

One jokester at the recent summit suggested that we return random TRM values (as opposed to matched acoustic fingerprint ids) and just switch the TRM server off. Turns out, that suggestion was actually brilliant!

Doing this essentially makes every TRM lookup return “I don’t know this one”. But in that case the MusicBrainz server falls back to doing a metadata match (without the acoustic fingerprint). And it turns out that works pretty well all around! And I think some people may prefer this method, since you won’t have to clear up TRM collisions anymore.

So, what does mean for when we switch off the TRM server? The Classic Tagger lives on and may match fewer files than before — life may actually be better once we shut it off! But I think that many people will find it useful still.

Huzzah!

We’ve been able to improve the performance of the database server, so that we’ve been able to turn on TRM support again.

Happy tagging!

Marco Sola pointed out that there is a new Italian review of the tagger. I saw that it mentioned the pending Picard tagger, but that is about all I understood. 🙂

The Washington Post covered the MusicBrainz Tagger in their weekend edition (reg required):

MusicBrainz does this by computing a music file’s digital fingerprint, based on its length and acoustic properties, then seeing if it can find a match in a growing online database of songs. The program will then work its magic, even reporting its confidence in less-than-exact matches. It was right in most of our tests, even when it reported that a song’s fingerprint matched only 55 percent of a title in the database.

Just wait until they see Picard… Speaking of which, I’m supposed to be working on that right now.

This version contains the following bug fixes:

• 946646 period causes misnaming
• 946833 version string not updated in 0.10.4
• 950087 Tagger erroneusly chooses last release date for filename

This may be the last version until the Picard Tagger is complete.

Robert Kaye

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

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

• 915266 Failure to rename tracks with short Artist names
• 684227 Change default sort on pending tab
• 905759 Bad colours on the interface (and web page)
• 684495 Album not listed on identified VA tracks
• 910740 Silent mp3/ogg cannot be tagged
• 907823 Install in Windows XP
• 852295 Shuts down
• 653650 Add improved track length matching
• 868289 o(n^2) operation in tag updating?
• 882374 To continue….
• 884537 artist BT replaced by null character when writing
• 894801 Win XP crash
• 900194 Renaming problem
• 870492 Tags dont show in Windows XP Explorer
• 841274 crashing
• 857187 File renaming/moving not working
• 882365 Downloaded file gives error and warns to close
• 870753 Fields w/ less than or equal to 2 chars get blanked
• 764181 Album is in MB, but some tracks have artist "Unknown"
• 913257 The id3v2.3 tags that the tagger writes dont meet spec
• 845328 Em dashes in file names problem
• 844946 Program crashes upon finding filenames w/non-alpha chars
• 886641 Tegger Crashes With punctuated names
• 898319 Allowed Filename Characters does not apply to directories
• 864184 False Leading Bytes
• 874903 Directories Not Created
• 863442 Buggy id3v2 tagging
• 902374 Decoder crashing
• 878439 Artist left out of file and directory naming but in tag
• 863436 renaming problem artists/albums/tracks with numbers.
• 855573 Request %abc use album in VA field
• 857196 Tagger omitting track name for 1 character tracks
• 850163 1 character strings omitted in tracknames
• 855106 Errors when taggin "U2"

Robert Kaye

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

• 838805 Local TRM page needs HTML-encoding
• 832778 "Saved" pane can't be sorted
• 834536 Manually IDed tracks can't be saved by sortname
• 811130 Need horizontal scroll in tagger
• 842299 Retagged FLAC files delete replay_track_gain tag
• 842295 FLAC not tagged / only tagged with track # in .10.1
• 832777 Too-long filenames can't be saved

Robert Kaye