Category: Picard

Given that my elaborations are not making things more clear, I will try one last time to make things more clear. But before I go on, remember that there are bugs in the system right now. What I am going to explain is NOT how its currently working. If you observe behavior that is different from what I am saying, its BECAUSE THE SYSTEM ISN’T WORKING PROPERLY YET! If you’re confused and don’t understand, stop using Picard 0.7.0.

Music analysis vs fingerprinting:

There are two processes that MusicIP makes available. Fingerprinting and music analysis. Let’s touch on music analysis first — this is the process that takes a while (Yes, I know its slow. Yes, I know its going to take days to analyze your collection. Please stop telling me that!) The process of doing music analysis examines up to 10 minutes of a track and examines all sorts of things I know nothing about. All I know is that in order to generate a new PUID, you must analyze a track fully. This full data collection portion is what allows the MusicIP mixer to generate playlists of similar music. This is the secret sauce that makes MusicIP tick and thus this is not going to be open sourced, no matter how much we ask.

Fingerprinting is much smaller process — it only analyzes about 2 minutes of the track. You cannot generate a new PUID to insert into the database from the fingerprinting process. There is not enough information in this process. There is enough information to create a PUID that is suitable for doing an identification, but not for submission. This works a lot different than TRM — this system doesn’t create rampant amounts of useless fingerprints that will never be used.

Submitting PUID’s from Picard:

When the process works, you do a full music analysis on a track and the system generates a PUID for you within 24 hours. But this is not working right now, so Picard will not likely prompt you to submit PUIDs. This means the submit button stays greyed out.

Why can’t we have Picard generate PUIDs?

Because we don’t have that code. Please stop asking for ponies — we’re fresh out and you can’t have one. Telling us that this sucks won’t make it any better. Please keep your comments to constructive criticism.

I don’t understand — its not working as you say it should:

Did I mention that there are some bugs? If it doesn’t work for you, stop using it. We’ll fix it.

Rude comments:

“Reading up on good interface design would also be a suggestion Just google good user interface design” — Please tell me where your FREE software is so I can download it and insult your hard work. I’m sorry that this FREE program isn’t working for you.

Technorati Tags: musicbrainz, picard

There seem to be many questions about Picard at the moment and a lot of people who love the old tagger interface and are frustrated with Picard’s UI. So, let me address the feedback we’re getting from our users:

• “MBTagger was perfect. Picard sucks.” — Ok, this feedback doesn’t help much, but we understand that you are frustrated. We’re working to improve Picard as we speak and the latest release is a beta release, so please bear with us.
• “I don’t understand the Picard interface.” — We understand that there are some people who prefer to tag tracks, not albums. We also understand that the UI is not immediately intuitive. We have plans to fix this, and to allow Picard to be usable by people who prefer to tag tracks and those who prefer to tag albums. For our thoughts on this improved interface, check out this wiki page. For more documentation on how to actually use Picard, see HowToTagFilesWithPicard. And to calm down all the people who are threatening to leave the project if the old MBTagger goes away, we plan to improve the interface of Picard way before the old MBTagger stops working.
• “Picard keeps crashing on me.” — It works for us, which is sucky since we can’t fix your crashes if it doesn’t crash for us. We’re actively soliciting feedback from people who can reproduce crashes. If you have a case where Picard crashes for you consistently and repeatably, please file a bug report.
• “Picard screws up my files!” — First, check to make sure you’re writing the right version of id3v2 tags. Depending on what other programs you use, you may need to switch to version 2.3/2.4 or vice versa. We know about some incompatibilities between the MusicIP Mixer and Picard. We’re going to start working on these issues soon.
• “How do I get PUID’s into MB?” — This answer has two parts. First, to create a new PUID for a file that MB doesn’t have a PUID for currently, you need to download and run the file through the MusicIP Mixer. (Yes, we know not everyone wants to use the Mixer application — for you we’re going to create stand-alone analyzer applications soon). Once a file goes through the MusicIP Mixer, in theory it should become available to the MusicDNS.org service (that MusicBrainz uses) within 24 hours. In practice, this is not happening yet. The MusicIP folks are working on this! Once the MusicDNS.org service has a PUID, you can re run the file through Picard and it should pick up the PUID and prompt you to submit the PUID to MB. Again, there may be bugs in the process — we’re working to iron out the bugs as we speak.

What can you do if you’re affected by these issues? Here is a quick check list for you:

1. Do you have an issue not addressed herein?
2. Can you reproduce the issue?
3. Yes: Please review the open bugs for picard and if this bug doesn’t already exist, please add a new one.
4. No: Please stop using Picard 0.7.0 for the time being and go back to Picard 0.6.0 or the old MB Tagger. Then wait for a new release of Picard and see if your problems have improved.

Bottom line: If you’re frustrated by how things are working right now, go back to a non-beta release and give us more time to iron out these issues. We’re aware that you are frustrated and we’re working on it. But if people keep pestering us with the same issues over and over again, it only keeps us from fixing actual bugs.

Technorati Tags: musicbrainz, picard

libmusicbrainz and libtunepimp and many of the requirements of Picard are in Debian, but Picard itself has not been packaged up for inclusion into Debian. I would love to find a volunteer to take on the task to package Picard into a .deb so we can get it into the Debian respositories. If you’d like to help, please post a comment!

Technorati Tags: picard, debian

After too many months of tinkering the latest stable release of Picard has been released:

• picard-0.5.0.tar.gz (Linux tarball)
• picard-setup-0.5.0.exe (Windows installer)

Big thanks goes out to Lukas Lalinsky for fixing many bugs and creating the Windows installer. Also, many thanks to everyone who helped work on the Norwegian, German, French, Russian and Slovak translations!

Technorati Tags: musicbrainz, picard, release

Continue reading “Picard 0.5.0 released!”

In the last few days I’ve been playing around with Picard on OS X. After fixing a few bugs in libtunepimp that prevented it from compiling on OS X, I managed to get Picard to come up. However, there are so many UI bugs that it is essentially unusable:

1. Drag and drop does not work
2. Some options dialog items won’t un/check
3. Adding files from Add Files dialog doesn’t work
4. The UI is butt-ugly

This is the same code that has undergone a fair amount of debugging on Windows and Linux. Given that the code works fairly well on those two systems, I have to suspect the wxWidgets toolkit on Mac OS X. I looked into a number of UI bugs listed above only to be stumped by these bugs on multiple occasions. The code looks ok and works great on two platforms. No manner of tweaking the code allowed me to make any headway on any of the bugs.

My conclusion: wxWidgets on OS X, even the 2.6.x version, is still not ready for prime time. Thus, I’m sad to say, Picard won’t be coming to OS X soon. If someone has more experience with wxWidgets on OS X and would like to take a stab at looking at these bugs, please do. At this point I should spend my time on bugs that will make Picard better on the two platforms where there is hope.

I’m bummed. 🙁

With much help from Lukas Lalinsky and Dave Evans, we’ve finally managed to scrape together the next picard release. The highlights for this release are:

• Full UNICODE support on all supported platforms. Tags and filenames are now read and written with the proper encoding support.
• ID3v2.3 AND ID3v2.4 support — selectable in the options dialog.
• Increased stability
• A more rounded feature set
• Tons of bug fixes
• UI improvements
• Built on top of a release version of wxWidgets, for greater stability
• New windows installer

Downloads:

• Linux tarball
• Windows installer (NT, 2000 and XP only!)

Continue reading “Picard 0.5.0-test2 released!”

I previously mentioned that Lucene rocks — well, that is not giving it enough credit. I’m working on the guts to a Lucene enabled Picard tagger, and in doing so I have created a simple script that chewed through a given set of mp3 files and attempts to match them up with MusicBrainz.

My friend Vee once gave me a CD full of hip-hop music to give to my GF. I took one look at it and stared in shock! What a mess — not many id3 tags, mostly no album names at all. Lots of friends vs friendz problems — much slang used in inconsistent ways. Ick!

I ran this through the old tagger a while back and it matched roughly 30% of the tracks. I’ve been using this set of files to tune the new tagging engine and once things got cached into memory, it chewed through over 100 files in under 7 seconds:

60% matched: 64 files matched, 41 files with suggestions, 1 files not matched.

60% !! Check the results for yourself!

And of the 41 files that have suggestions at least 80% of them have the correct match in the top 3 closest matches. I’m floored — it works so well, and there are a number of improvements still left to make. The downside? You need the 700Mb lucene index on your hard drive. That’s going to be more than 250Mb to download. 🙁 I’ll have to work out the right combination of BitTorrent, caching, and P2P solutions to tackle that minor issue.

But this is really stunning!