Tag Archive for ‘Tags’ at elwoodicious

Tag Archive for 'Tags'

Music Collection, Amarok Style

Published by james on December 19, 2006 in Music. Closed

I’ve been slowly working on re-tagging my collection as well as improving its organization on the server. Working it old school with cut-and paste in Nautilus for moving tracks into sub folders by artist and album and then editing the tags with EasyTag and Amarok.

Tedious and arduous would be the best adjectives for this process as I have only managed to take care of some 23,000 tracks since October and am only two-thirds of the way done. I am cursing my laziness over all these years as well as eMusic’s sloppy ass tagging between 2001-2003 when I acquired the bulk of my collection.

Well, at least I’ll have something to do with all those forthcoming sleepless nights.

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.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

Published by james on April 20, 2006 in Site. 6 Comments

Seeing as I cannot go more than a week or so without playing around in the guts of this site I’m trying out another plugin. This one is to assist in tagging up my posts, hopefully to yield better Technorati results as well as give another way to view the content on the site.

UTW, as plugins go, appears to be on steroids with a million ways to Monday to tweak and configure. I’ve only had it installed for a whole 3 hours but have managed not to kill the site so I’ll chalk that up to being a success thus far. I’m hoping that it works out well because I would like to see tags become a sort of sub-category, sort of loose and fast. If it works out I’ll likely carry it over to Candied Pop as I am looking for a more flexible system of tagging our posts over there.

Over the next couple of weeks the tag list should grow and then I should be able to implement one of those nifty Tag Clouds in the side bar. All the cool people are doing it and at the end of the day don’t we all just want to be cool? I thought so.