Tag Archive for ‘Jinzora’ at elwoodicious

Tag Archive for 'Jinzora'

Unravelling the Mess…

Published by james on October 16, 2006 in Music. Closed

A better part of last week was spent teasing apart the disgusting knots that I had been letting pass as tagging among my files. The very same knots that made Jinzora damn near unusable and made Amarok look like a dollar store threw up all over MySQL. It took about 24 man hours but I tackled the genre issue along with the problem of null artists and albums, however there still appears to be some lingering issues as Amarok is reporting dead or unplayable tracks. Permissions maybe?

I’m coming to the conclusion that huge collections can be a real nightmare if tagging and preventive maintenance is not addressed up front. Having left mine to evolve over some seven years I am now really paying the price as I try and get it into a functional whole. Thankfully, there are some solid tools out there as I am leveraging Amarok with a MySQL backend for reporting (N to the E dropping in on the R and D), EasyTag, and Picard (Amarok has it baked in but it is nice to have discrete tools).

To get started I imported everything into amarok and then wrote a group of reports looking for malformed tags, particularly ones using reserved characters like “;” which would cause Jinzora to choke. Combing through the report for the obvious issues like null genre I used the sort and mass edit feature of Amarok to fill them in which made for smooth sailing. Tracks that were an absolute disaster I fixed either with EasyTag or Picard, though I found the later to offer up some less than desirable data due to taggers as lazy as I posting to Music Brainz.

At the moment I feel like I am about 80% finished, more than enough to listen to my collection the way that I like but with still enough bugs to get me hot under the collar. The bonus with a cleaner collection is now we can play music off the server for our greyhound which means I can track his listening over at Last.fm. Yes, I am that much of a dork.

Intractable Mess?

Published by james on October 9, 2006 in Music. 5 Comments

For all intents and purposes my cheap-ass home stereo solution has been working out real well but there is one minor problem and it is a problem that many of my friends have laughed at me for or just shook their heads in disgust muttering, “Have you no shame? None!?” My tags are a total mess. Worse than having non-existent, bizarre combinations like “CountryFusionSpaceJazzBop”. No, I have bleed-over where song titles end up in track numbering and genres become a string of unsupported characters. It is sickening to look at especially since it renders Jinzora damn close to useless for the way I listen to music (smartlists on random).

Here are some highlights from the genre tag:

■Hip-Hop
“Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp min
0.03
03_Chaconne con variazioni.mp3
4
false
Nameless (Radio App..”
true

To give you an indication of how big the problem is there are 6446 tracks tagged with either “-” or are empty in the genre field and on top of that I have some 33049 tracks to check. An egregious case of WTF if there every was one. So now I need to figure out how to remedy this problem and wishing that I were more diligent about my tagging like some of my friends isn’t going to get me very far.

What I need is stupid simple, easy, and relatively accurate system as I have neither the time nor the patience to hand tag every single track. So to get my feet wet, I’m going to narrow the directories down to smaller groups and give the auto-tagging feature of EasyTag a shot and see how that works. In the past EasyTag has served me well but I’ve only used it in small isolated instances and am not sure how it will handle chewing on hundreds if not thousands or tracks at a time. Time to roll up my sleeves and get to work.

File Under: Apology, Heartfelt

Published by james on September 19, 2006 in Random. 2 Comments

Dear Jinzora,

Earlier today I besmirched your honor falsely accusing you of not wanting to partake in festivities with my friend Last.fm. I was wrong. I did not understand that when you said:

Edit settings.php (located in your Jinzora root directory) and set:

$audioscrobbler_user = “YOURUSERNAME”;

$audioscrobbler_pass = “YOURPASSWORD”;

What you really meant was:

edit settings.php (located in your Jinzora root directory) and set:

$enable_audioscrobbler = “true”;

and ignore:

$audioscrobbler_user = “”;

$audioscrobbler_pass = “”;

because you set that information in your user settings. Completely my fault.

Let’s move on from this ugly incident and spend a little more time getting to know each other and I promise to listen more intently.

Sincerely,

elwoodicious

Jinzora 2.6 or How Annoying Can One Thing Be?

Published by james on September 19, 2006 in Random. 2 Comments

My love hate relationship with Jinzora continues in my quest for the right method for sharing my music collection, on a Linux server, to my XP crippled work machine. For the indefinite future it looks like I need to keep one XP-crippled machine at home running J. River MediaCenter so that I can (A) listen to my music and (B) update my Last.fm profile; with Jinzora I can only get (A), (B) is a non-option at the moment, even though they insist that it is and it is easy. However, Last.fm doesn’t top my list of annoyances. Here’s what the as_debug.log shows:

9/19/06 1:11:01.02, user:james, jzCreateLink: ssid = e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:11:01.03, user:james, jzCreateLink: ssid = e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:11:01.04, user:james, jzCreateLink: ssid = e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:11:01.04, user:james, jzCreateLink: ssid = e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:11:01.05, user:james, jzCreateLink: ssid = e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:11:10.89, user:anon, mediabroadcast: SID = jza=e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:11:10.94, user:james, AudioScrobbler: Starting up (inside startup routine)
9/19/06 1:17:44.62, user:anon, mediabroadcast: SID = jza=e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:17:44.67, user:james, AudioScrobbler: Starting up (inside startup routine)
9/19/06 1:27:44.63, user:anon, mediabroadcast: SID = jza=e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:27:44.67, user:james, AudioScrobbler: Starting up (inside startup routine)
9/19/06 1:31:01.08, user:anon, mediabroadcast: SID = jza=e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:31:01.13, user:james, AudioScrobbler: Starting up (inside startup routine)

From what I can figure out it is generating the playlist and then the AudioScrobbler routine kicks off and then… Well, then nothing shows up at Last.fm.

When Jinzora is running, it is a well oiled machine that can take you to the places you want in style but getting started is a hassle beyond belief. Importing media is a huge pain in the ass. “What? How? All you do is let the little import wizard work its magic! n00b!” Yeah. Right. The wizard works great with small collections as anything over 9k will have it seize up like you shot it with a tranq gun tethered to a taser. the collection I tried importing over-and-over-and-over is only a paltry 23k and to finally get it imported I have to break it up into discrete 4-5k blocks. Not a big deal, I suppose, but one that had me gnashing my teeth for about two hours.

*Sigh*

I’m back to doing research on implementing a robust media serving solution, one that can come close to the functionality of J. River’s Media Center, but I’m not too optimistic.