My Problem with ID3 Taggers
I have yet to find one that will automatically tag my vast library of music that isn’t English.
I love animé, and until about my third girlfriend I didn’t have much or any music on my computer, I didn’t watch many videos either. My library was dull and void. But now, I have 532 songs occupying 2.7 Gibibytes of data, and I’m pretty sure less than 100 of those are English. Some of the music I don’t expect to get any data from, music my friends made, or I don’t know the origin of at all, but I have a lot of Japanese singles that were openings and endings from anime, or were in an anime, but all of these singles also belonged to albums, or had album artwork, or an artist, or all kinds of rich information that isn’t in my library – or are in any of the main databases.
To top it off, I tried using some auto-tagging software I don’t remember the name of anymore, didn’t clearly understand the instructions, and screwed up the tags on a whole heck of a lot of my music, so now I have some songs I don’t know the names, artists, or album info to at all as its improperly labeled (and in Japanese).
Someone (I’d be willing to help any way I could) should compile a database of the way songs sound (Some type of wavelength ID that could easily identify a song via a piece of it, identify different versions, etc.), approaching music labels and artists from the United States, Britain, Australia, Japan, and all those other countries.
Or does such software already exist, and I simply don’t know about it? If you know something I don’t, please leave it in the comments =)
YouTube Audio Player Updates
The YouTube Audio Player has gotten three much-needed updates.
- Autoplay
- Loop
- Playlist Support
The first two, Autoplay and loop – which is self-explanatory, are checkboxes that allow you to enable them. (You’ll need to click Make to update the embeddable code).
The third, Playlist Support is fairly self-explanatory. This allows you to embed not just a single video, but an entire playlist using the audio player. There are two ways to use this feature. Either enter the URL of a playlist URL, or the URL of a video in a playlist and check the “Entire Playlist” option.
Of course, with these updates comes an update (hopefully the last) to the bookmarklet, which can be added to your browser bar by dragging this link: Generate Audio Player.
Enjoy!
The King of all Music Apps
Five years ago, I didn’t care a single little bit about music in any way shape or form. Now, I have over 4 gibibytes or so of it, and I can’t seem to find an application to manage it decently.
I recently tried MediaMonkey, but what i thought would auto-update all of my music, just assigned it to the album of a completely unrelated artist and screwed up a good bit of my library! Ughh!
So, I’m still trying to find a Music Management Application that can do the following:
- Update MP3 ID3 Tags (with:)
- Update Album Artwork (High Resolution)
- Update Album and Track names and Artists, Year, Genre (basics)
- Add/Update Lyrics (Unsynchronized & Synchronized if Possible)
- Move into custom directories the user specifies.
It needs to do this for both English/Japanese tracks. iTunes and Windows Media Player both do most of these functions fairly well, but their library isn’t nearly big enough.
If I had an app that could do all that perfectly, and almost automatically, that would be great. Pulling the data from wherever it needed to, FreeDB, Gracenote, Amazon, anything it could possibly get its hands on.
Does anybody know of an app that does all/most of this, or am I eventually going to have to write my own?
YouTube Mini Audio Player
If you read my personal blog (which a lot of you probably don’t even know exists) you’ll commonly see music embedded as mini-YouTube embeds. It turns out, the magic height is 25 pixels, and the magic width (for play/pause and mute) is 62 pixels.
However, it is kind of a burden to do this every time you want to embed a mini player (you have to edit at four fields in the HTML!) So to simplify this process, I, like any programmer before me, created a generator. Just type in the URL to the YouTube video and press make, and you’ll get a preview as well as the cross-browser HTML-esque mess of a code to embed.
Of course, if you’re truly lazy, just drag the bookmarklet below to your bookmark bar in your web browser, and click it on any YouTube video and you’ll be taken to the page with the code already generated.
Source code is available via link at the bottom of the page.
![80x15[1]](http://tech.gtaero.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/80x151.png "80x15[1]"){kind=small}
Small Update: class::mp3Data v0.2
I just wanted to publish a small blog post letting you know that I have updated the mp3Data class to version 0.2.
Change log:
- Added function getArts() to retrieve ALL artwork embedded in ID3v2. These function returns an ordered array of PHP Image Resources.
Hope that if you use it, you enjoy the small change (not that it will be useful to many people)!
Code is located at pastebin and retains the same usage permissions as v0.1.
PHP class mp3Data – Get ID3 Info from MP3
So recently, I submitted a bid on a project to make a lyrics website using PHP. I haven’t been contacted about whether or not I won the bid yet, but I decided that I might as well start some preliminary work on backend coding – It’ll make my life easier, and deliver a faster and better result to the client, so why not?
Why am I mentioning this, you ask? What does my personal life have to do with my tech blog? Well, I’m getting to that!
I almost immediately thought. “Hey, wouldn’t it be really cool if the admin of the website could simply upload an MP3 file and pull almost, if not all of the data from it to use on the site?” After which, I quickly searched around for something that would allow me to do just that, to read the ID3 tags on an MP3 file.
The first thing I came to, was the search result on the PHP website for “id3,” the ID3 PECL Library. Unfortunately, after trying for a very long time on DreamHost, I not only couldn’t get it to install, but had just wasted probably an hour in an attempt to. Not only that, but the library was still in its alpha stage.
Some quick internet searching took me to the getid3 library, a robust library programmed to read ID3 data tags (and other types of metadata?) from almost any type of file. I quickly set about to using it, and found its internal structure complicated and confusing. It didn’t even offer me a quick and easy way to access the album artwork.
After a good period of time learning some of the basic structure of ID3 and how the getid3 library worked, I set about to coding up a library of my own to quickly interface with getid3 and retrieve the information I needed.
The result is class::mp3Data. A very, very simple library built exclusively to interface with getid3 and retrieve basic information about an mp3 file while still retaining more advanced information for coders who need it. Take a look at some example code and the licensing permissions after the break.
