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Grex Music Item 10: Music Organizer with Tagging? [linked]
Entered by remmers on Wed Feb 22 18:15:05 UTC 2006:

Here's my problem.  I have fairly large collection of music CDs, well
over 100.  It's mostly ragtime, although the genre is unimportant for
this discussion.  My collection needs organizing -- not just by artist
or album title, but at the track level, in a way that lets me quickly
find, browse, and play tracks that share some common set of
characteristics, for example:

  (1) All performances of "The Maple Leaf Rag".
  (2) All works by Scott Joplin performed by Scott Kirby.
  (3) All performances of Joseph Lamb compositions that I consider 
      "too slow".
  (4) All performances of Charles Johnson compositions performed by
      an instrumental ensemble (as opposed to solo piano).

You get the idea.  I need to be able to zero in on tracks in my CD
collection by criteria that I invent -- tracks that may be randomly
scattered over different CDs.  As a performer, this kind of capability
would be very useful to me.  I get ideas for my own performance of a
piece by hearing how other performers interpret it, for example.

Okay, to start with I'd need to get to get all the tracks of all my CDs
stored as individual objects on a random-access mass storage device. 
Storing them as MP3 files on a hard drive is an obvious and technically
feasible solution to that part, especially since I'm pretty sure my CDs
don't have any form of DRM.  It'd be a big job to transfer my current CD
collection to disk, but once done, it would be easy to update the
collection as I acquire new CDs or acquire tracks from other sources
(e.g. MIDI or MP3 files on the internet).

Indexing the collection for flexible search adds another layer of
complexity for which a standard off-the-shelf solution doesn't seem to
exist as far as I can tell.  I need to be able to attach metadata to
each track that describes the properties that are significant to me --
not just "title" or "artist", but any other properties that might occur
to me now or in the future (such as "too slow" in example (3) above). 
What I need is a "tagging system" that lets me add, delete, and edit
keywords (tags) for a track just as easily as I can add or delete tracks
themselves.

Portability is another important consideration.  I'd like to be able to
carry this system with me when I'm on the road.

Now, I have iTunes software on my Apple Powerbook laptop, which is
definitely portable.  It appears that iTunes supports a good part of
what I want.  You can attach a "comment" to any music file.  The comment
can be a list of keywords.  You can then create "smart playlists"
associated with those keywords -- for example, if I've attached a
"tooslow" tag to a bunch of tracks, I can create a "tooslow" playlist
that lists all such tracks.  The playlist will be automagically updated
whenever I add a new track with that tag, or delete the tag from a
track.  I can display the playlist, browse through it, and select and
play any of the tracks I want to.  It will be automagically updated
whenever I add a new track with that tag to the system, or delete the
tag from an existing track.

That's all very nice, but the process of editing the comment field of a
track in iTunes is a bit cumbersome, involving more mouse clicks and
window navigation than I want to deal with.  I'd like something that's
dead simple.  Does anybody know of software (e.g. an iTunes add-on?)
that simplifies the process?

Actually, for optimal portability and convenience, I'd really like to
have a system like this on a specialized music device like in iPod or
similar miniaturized player.  Is there anything like that out there?

10 responses total.

#1 of 10 by mcnally on Wed Feb 22 19:04:29 2006:

 AFAIK iTunes stores the information it uses in ID3v2 tags (for MP3
 files, at any rate, I've got no idea how metadata for AAC and other
 iTunes-compatible filetypes are stored..)

 You should easily be able to find command-line tools that will do
 MP3 tag editing for you, as well as Perl and Python libraries that
 offer sophisticated tag manipulation interfaces if you decide you
 want to write your own tools.

#2 of 10 by kingjon on Wed Feb 22 19:19:56 2006:

iTunes, too, can connect to a server to get the composer, performer, title,
etc., data for CDs. (You have to check this yourself, but it's easier than
entering it by hand, constantly moving your hand from mouse to keyboard.)

#3 of 10 by mcnally on Wed Feb 22 19:34:27 2006:

 I'm sure remmers is aware of that.  It's the custom remmers-specific
 tagging information that it sounds like he's concerned about entering.
 I very much agree that iTunes' tag editing interface is unduly
 cumbersome.

#4 of 10 by micklpkl on Wed Feb 22 20:05:28 2006:

I must admit, I doubt the following suggestions will work for remmers' needs,
but I wanted to mention the following that fit my needs quite well.

Tag & Rename - http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm
I use this handy tool constantly, to get mp3 (and also wma, ogg, flac, etc.)
tags the way I need them to look. The software will also connect to amazon
and download album art thumbnails and save those in the tag.

CATraxx - http://www.fnprg.com/catraxx/catraxx.html
The music database software that I have used for my music collection since
1998, or thereabouts. It has capabilities for many custom fields.

#5 of 10 by keesan on Wed Feb 22 20:09:42 2006:

Have you tried a generic database program?  I am using cdbf, shareware from
Russia (I retranslated the documentation for the author), which exists in DOS
format as well as Windows and Linux (rather buggy, I gave up on it).  You can
search or sort on field.  Set it up with any labels you like, fields of any
size.  I have my LP collection organized with it.  You can display, for
instance, all the lines with Beethoven in them, or all the lines where
Nonesuch is the label, or sort alphabetically by any column (field), or print,
or convert to other formats such as plain text.

#6 of 10 by krj on Wed Feb 22 21:48:37 2006:

  (( Winter Agora #121 linked as Music #10 ))

#7 of 10 by other on Thu Feb 23 02:24:20 2006:

I use a freeware program (for mac) called tritag which does batch
editing of metadata for audio files.  There may be something out there
which provides access to more fields...

#8 of 10 by remmers on Thu Feb 23 13:28:00 2006:

This response has been erased.

#9 of 10 by remmers on Thu Feb 23 13:41:07 2006:

Re #5:  I thought about the relational database approach, but it didn't
seem like a good fit for what I actually want to do.  Extending the
database schema every time I invent a new tag strikes me as overkill.

Softpointer looks interesting but appears to be Windows-only.  I'll have
a look at Tritag.

I found a discussion thread on iTunes tagging:
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/itunes/tag-your-songs-in-itunes-153970.p
hp
This pointed me to TuneTag, an Applescript that somebody developed to
simplify the tagging process in iTunes: http://christopholis.com/?p=87
I'll check it out and let y'all know how well it works.

#10 of 10 by wilt on Tue May 16 23:52:22 2006:

HACKED BY GNAA LOL JEWS DID WTC LOL

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