Cultured Perl: Fun with MP3 and Perl, Part 1

Ted writes "Every self-respecting computer and music fan needs to be able to manipulate MP3s -- the defacto standard for recreational digital music use. In this article, I'll look at ways to manage and manipulate MP3s (searching, tagging, renaming, commenting, etc.) using the autotag.pl application. I'll also take you through the application, illustrating how CPAN modules enable the application."

Comments

and like every Linux geek..

[rf0]

I'm going to say "Where the ogg version?" :)

Rus

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[ViolentGreen]

I'm going to say "Where the ogg version?" :)

That's the beauty of open source. You have the perl script, look at the OGG documentation and write it yourself.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Simon (S2)]

here you go:
An object-oriented interface to Ogg Vorbis information and comment fields, implemented entirely in Perl.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Simon (S2)]

just search for some ogg modules on cpan, and put something together :)

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Josh Coalson]

I'm going to say "Where the ogg version?"

Right here. Or here for FLAC.

Josh

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Anonymous Coward]

and like every Linux geek...

you're going to get your ass kicked.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the beauty of open source. You have the perl script, look at the OGG documentation and write it yourself.

Yup, and that's the mantra of open source. "RTFM, write it yourself and submit a patch."

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[bwhaley]

I'm going to say "Where the ogg version?" :)

At the risk of wasting some karma...

I'm sick of hearing about Ogg. Great, it's free as in beer and freedom. I'm pro freedom. But seriously, it's not going to catch on. mp3 is here to stay my friends, and while ogg may be a technically superior format, the rest of the world is not going to convert the mp3 collection to ogg's. It's just not going to happen. And if nobody converts their files to ogg's, why would manufacturers waste development time and costs putting ogg support into their products?

Maybe I'm being cynical but I think it would take a miracle at this point.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Naikrovek]

that's the beauty of open-source advocates. they state what everyone already knows then get modded up for being insightful. insightful. look up insight in the dictionary one day, its not what the mods here seem to think it is most of the time.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Minna Kirai]

And if nobody converts their files to ogg's, why would manufacturers waste development time and costs putting ogg support into their products?

So they can have a superior format without the risk of Apple or Microsoft quadrupling the license fees 9 months down the line.

Actually, because Microsoft is pushing their own audio format, manufacturers will have a low-cost chance to push Ogg. They're going to have to expand the devices to recognize non-mp3 files anyhow... why not throw in the free integerized Ogg code while they're at it?

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Anonymous Coward]

And the mantra of closed source ? "Shut the fuck up."

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Ogg Vorbis has caught on in some filesharing services. I usually search for oggs and, if I don't find any, only then for MP3s. But for most of what I'm looking for, there's already oggs out there. It might not be popular on the bigger, teenager-populated services like Kazaa, but on the smaller, nerd-populated services (which I guess I'm part of musically) they're abundant.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[monkeyserver.com]

I think you have a good point. But I also think this is somewhat analagous to VHS vs. DVD. It might take a while, but ppl will start to use it, and companies will start to support it. The geek segment is the biggest market segment for most of the high end mp3 stuff, if they hear ogg being talked about, and it's not too hard to do, they'll include it. Some manufacturers already do. I do agree it gets old to keep hearing ppl moan about it though.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Anonymous Coward]

And the mantra for IBM? "Expect that feature to be implemented in 6-12 months"

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[dotwaffle]

Errr. OGG support is like really tiny, and could EASILY fit into space left on a ROM etc... I'm sorry, but there is no excuse not to support all the major codecs on a player (MP3/OGG/WMA/WAV) as the data they take up is minimal. Who fills up a ROM chip these days anyway? They're ridiculously cheap, and they often have loads of space...

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Anonymous Coward]

And the mantra for SCO? "That feature infringes our intellectual property."

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[ratamacue]

the rest of the world is not going to convert the mp3 collection to ogg's

I certainly hope not. Once you go lossy, you're stuck. Re-encoding with lossy compression would be (in a metaphorical sense) like replacing your 2nd generation analog tapes with 3rd generation copies: pointless.

If you have a collection of mp3's which you don't have the original cd-quality audio for, the best thing you can do is leave it alone.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[pediwent]

Ah, but is that the correct analogy or is it more like VHS vs. Beta? Beta is a clearly superior videotape format, yet VHS had the manufacturer's support (you would think Sony would have remembered that when they came out with the memory stick). Try to find a Betamax VCR these days - good luck. I don't pretend to know which audio format will "win", but don't underestimate the impact of manufacturer's support and don't forget all the hidden business agendas present in decisions to support a given format. It's not only about technology.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[great throwdini]

I also think this is somewhat analagous to VHS vs. DVD. It might take a while, but ppl will start to use it, and companies will start to support it.

Hmmm... perhaps I'm remembering things incorrectly, but DVD uptake was actually quite rapid. Maybe three or so years from geeky high-end to mass mass mass consumption? I seem to recall its adoption rate being something to crow about among manufacturers.

Ogg seems to me more like a LaserDisc than a DVD if you really want to stretch an analogy. Geeky, offers some benefits over MP3 (~VHS) but not without cost/hassle (remember LD flipping?), and not widely adopted or likely ever to be.

In terms of relative benefits to consumers and market penetration, though, Ogg (Vorbis) certainly is not to MP3 as DVD is to VHS.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[ViolentGreen]

I don't consider myself an "open source advocate". I think there is a place for both open source and commercial software and I support both.

I'm just a little tired of people complaining on message boards about project X not doing such and such. Take it up with the developers or do it yourself.

I wouldn't consider my post insightful either but if someone wants to mod a post up/down, there aren't always applicable choices.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[fiftyfly]

And if nobody converts their files to ogg's, why would manufacturers waste development time and costs putting ogg support into their products? So they can have a superior format without the risk of Apple or Microsoft quadrupling the license fees 9 months down the line. Actually, because Microsoft is pushing their own audio format, manufacturers will have a low-cost chance to push Ogg. They're going to have to expand the devices to recognize non-mp3 files anyhow... why not throw in the free integerized Ogg code while they're at it?

Exactly. I'm certainly not going to rerip my 400+ disc collection but when buying new hardware codec support & expandability are very important to me. Just because I don't want to duplicate a massive prior effort doesn't mean that, one day, I won't have to.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Artifakt]

Then there's the other open source way, as in "I can't code, but I will send beer, brownies, or otherwise pass the hat". Seriously, people who wnat more support for OGG or FLAC can expect some coder to have the same interest, and wait a few months, or they can try to interest more coders in doing the work. Show one who shares your taste in music how much better OGG can sound, and get him motivated. Offer to beta test, or do graphics for a GUI, or ask around until you find several people who have an interest and then put them in touch with each other. You'ld be surprised how quickly you can have that Ogg based software you want.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[hachete]

For ogg you've got a decent language like Python. http://freshmeat.net/projects/pyvorbis/

Tell me again, what is this thing you call Perl?

h

Ah-ah. Nothing like a good sig first thing in the morning.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Chump1422]

Exactly. It's a vicious (or virtuous, if you were a VHX manufacturer) cycle.

Market share matters more than quality when there are positive network effects. More mp3s on the net = more people using mp3 over OGG = more mp3s on the net. Latehr, rinse repeat.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that Beta, while technologically superior to VHS (except for recording times), was so mired in patent issues that nobody wanted to bother with it when VHS worked well enough. Vorbis, on the other hand, is not only superior to MP3 in pretty much every technical way, it's also much easier to use from a legal standpoint. It's basically the best of both worlds.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[juhaz]

Tell me again, what is this thing you call Perl?

Line noise. Some systems execute it anyway, must be by accident.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[spike hay]

I use eMule quite a bit. There is a huge, huge amount of Ogg music and RAR-archived albums on the eDonkey network. It's already very well established. In addition to that, a huge number of video files, close to 50%, on that network have Ogg audio. Everyone who at all cares about digital music has the ogg codec. Even electronics companies are taking notice. Many new MP3 players have Ogg support.

Ogg is big now. It's not just some obscure codec.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[shellbeach]

and while ogg may be a technically superior format, the rest of the world is not going to convert the mp3 collection to ogg's. It's just not going to happen.

No, they're not going to convert their mp3 collection. But if they're like me, they may start ripping new cds using ogg instead of mp3. Personally, I find the difference in sound quality between the two formats to be very noticable, especially with classical music rips (to the extent that before oggs came along I refused to rip any classical cds to mp3 because they sounded so crap, and only had a rock mp3 collection) And ripping a CD is so fast these days that it's not really much of an effort to re-rip your old mp3s (something which I'm gradually doing).

Anyway, the point is - what does it matter what the rest of the world does? This article is talking about searching/manipulating your own collection. For some of us, and especially the subset of geeks who read slashdot, vorbis tools would be very useful.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[ottawanker]

the rest of the world is not going to convert the mp3 collection to ogg's.

Good, and I don't ever want to download an OGG file that was converted from an MP3. No point in making a high-quality OGG file from an MP3 file that has (in my opinion) worse quality. All my OGG files are ripped straight from the CD at a nice high (192 kbit nominal) bitrate.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[sinistral]

AAC is MPEG-4 audio. Apple doesn't own it, and can't charge licensing fees for it. WMV on the other hand....

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[cloudmaster]

Man, I sure hope that Apple and Microsoft don't quadruple the $0 license fee for a decoder that they don't own rights to anyway. I hope they don't quadruple the licenes fee for lame, either, cause 4 times $0 will be *way* more than people would normally be willing to pay.

Now the Fraunhofer people, I'd worry a little bit about. However, given that the compression scheme has been pretty widley disseminated with no attempt to collect license fees since their initial little fiasco, that's not much of a worry, either.

There are lots of "really free" schemas available, but it's stupid to put them into hardware when no one uses them. That's partially how Microsoft software gets so buggy - lots extra features no one really wants.

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[TedZ]

I may write it some day - patches welcome if you feel the urge.

From the sidebar "A Word About MP3 Tags," which also mentions Ogg Vorbis:

I have tried very hard to abstract tags as content from the actual ID3 tags. It will be easy, when the time comes, to modify autotag.pl so it will handle other tagging formats besides ID3.

Ted Zlatanov

Re:and like every Linux geek..

[alexpage]

Many of my audiophile friends use Ogg. They wouldn't know what a "Linux" was if it smacked them in the face, but Ogg means they can have better sound quality for smaller disk space. I've got my CD collection stored as Ogg Vorbis now, and I get random ogg-fan p2p users thanking me for ripping to their preferred format.

Another MP3 tagging library....

[tcopeland]

...written in Ruby, can be found right here. From the project page:

mp3taglib is a id3v1/id3v2 mp3 tagging library for ruby, based on id3lib. At
this early stage it already supports most of the fields of id3v2 tags. Mp3
encoding informations can also be retrieved.

Re:Another MP3 tagging library....

[akedia]

On the Windows side of things, I favor Renamer for organizing my MP3s. I've used it since version 3.5 and it's a godsend for large collections. You can really make file listings look professional and easy to read in just a few minutes if you set it up right.

Re:Another MP3 tagging library....

[Evil Adrian]

How does a file listing look professional..?

Re:Another MP3 tagging library....

[kalaef]

By containing all off the relevant information correctly

Re:Another MP3 tagging library....

[GustavoT]

And just so Python isn't left out...here's one for Python!

Re:Another MP3 tagging library....

[mirko]

On the OSX side, iTunes is just magic, you have very little work to perform when it comes to renaming files after tags or to tag files after their names.

Nice to know...

[jargoone]

It's nice to know you can do this, and I've used the modules referenced for custom fixes. But don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have to: EasyTag probably does 90% of what you would write something custom for.

Re:Nice to know...

[rf0]

Hes an engineer so he will, like most of us spend 20 hours writing something when he could do it in 10 with someone else code or in 5 if doing it manually

Rus

Re:Nice to know...

[redtail1]

Good point about reinventing the wheel but I appreciate tutorials like this one when I've been wondering how to go about writing such a thing. Sometimes I want to learn how it is done more than I want to use the finished result.

Re:Nice to know...

[peter_gzowski]

Another good one is cantus, although I don't think it's active anymore. Cantus does batch retagging based on filenames, or batch renaming based on tags. Also has great controls for stripping leading/trailing spaces, fixing buggy tags, etc.

Can't someone please integrate cantus or easytag with a library management system, along with an mp3 player?!? It can be a gnome or kde app, I don't care. I want an (xmms | noatun | juk) & (madman | rhythmbox) & (easytag | cantus) combo.

Re:Nice to know...

[fm6]

I've tried a lot of tagging software over the years, and a lot of it is pretty good, but the authors always seemed to have their own notions about which features were important and what was the easiest way to do thing. And figuring out exactly how to get the software to do what I want is also a lot of work. I've mostly ended up thinking that major retagging is not worth the trouble. I haven't tried doing it in Perl, but for what I need it might actually be less work than a high-level application.

You claim that EasyTag does about 90% of what you might do with scripting. I don't know EasyTag, but that sounds about right. In most applications, about 90% of what you need to do is built right in. But that other 10% can be really painful and time-consuming if you have to do it by hand. That's why scripting languages are so important. Of course, the ideal is a good application that exposes just the right API to a scripting language, so a programmer can extend the app's functionality without being constrained by it. But that's pretty rare. A good alternative is a non-application scripting API that covers all the basic functionality of common applications. That may be slightly redundant, but it's hardly "re-inventing the wheel".

Re:Nice to know...

[TedZ]

Have you looked at autotag.pl? It is text-based whereas EasyTag isn't. Some people, myself included, don't find GUIs with "tree based browsers" all that useful. EasyTag looks nice, but it has the typical GUI kludges such as "process selected files of the selected directory" - as if that was a feature!

Anyhow, 90% is a little ambitious. I'd say EasyTag overlaps with autotag.pl in 50% of the functionality, and the other 50% of each application is completely different. GUIs have their uses, and I'm sure that those who like them will prefer EasyTag or other similar applications.

The "reinventing the wheel" argument is valid, though. You should look at autotag.pl. Most of the complexity is in the user interface and command-line options. I would argue that those *should* be reinvented, otherwise applications would all be the same and quite boring.

Ted Zlatanov

Re:Nice to know...

[Myxorg]

Reminds me of a quote "Why do something by hand in 2 days when I can spend the next 5 years of my life automating it"

Perl.com article

[twoshortplanks]

On a similar note, there's a perl.com article on using MusicBrainz that was published recently.

Identifying Music with MusicBrainz

Re:Perl.com article

[blech]

To be fair, the MusicBrainz article for perl.com (that, full disclosure time, I wrote) doesn't cover as much ground as the Developer Works article, which seems to be going through all the steps needed to write an autotagger in Perl.

However, I was a little dissapointed that Teodor didn't spell out more of his reasoning for his choice of modules. I covered the (then) available Perl mp3 modules for a talk at YAPC::Europe this summer, and if you're not sure which modules to use, I'd suggest having a look at the slides (80K PDF) and notes.

In any case, I look forward to the second part of the article, to see how the script shakes out in the end.

Re:Perl.com article

[TedZ]

The reason why I didn't explain my choice of modules in detail is that a) I don't have a lot of room, b) most readers won't care, and c) the article is already in two parts.

It came down to ease of usage and size and correctness of the CD database (for the lookup modules). Rest assured I tried all the modules I list and more, and it was painful experience that made me choose the modules I did.

Ted Zlatanov

Perkasdflop

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest, I'm waiting for the Common Lisp port...

Self-respect

[trentblase]

Every self-respecting computer and music fan needs to be able to manipulate MP3s

Have those lossless compression afficionados no dignity?

Re: Self-respect

[Anonymous Coward]

Have those lossless compression afficionados no dignity?

Of course they don't, there was no room after fitting their elitist egos.

Re:Self-respect

[Anonymous Coward]

dignity, yes. clue, no.

a 50% reduction over WAV with no audible improvement over ogg at q 7.5 is, well, a stupid, shortsighted waste of bandwidth and disk space.

Re:Self-respect

[Anonymous Coward]

Vorbis, even at 7.5, or 10, is lossy. It's not acceptable. Every time you encode to it, data is thrown away. Sure, it might be fine and dandy for your crappy headphones and small portable, but try using it for A) archiving your music collection, or B) storing audio files you've created.

Have fun re-ripping once Monty releases Vorbis 2, or being stuck in the past on your original stuff.

Re:Self-respect

[spike hay]

Vorbis, even at 7.5, or 10, is lossy. It's not acceptable. Every time you encode to it, data is thrown away. Sure, it might be fine and dandy for your crappy headphones and small portable, but try using it for A) archiving your music collection, or B) storing audio files you've created.

What other alternative do you propose? Ogg is the best codec for bitrates 256. All codecs are lossy, with the exception of a few like FLAC. They take a 50 mb WAV down to 5 mb by throwing away stuff you (hopefully) cannot hear.

Ogg does this better than any other codec, including MP3. There is no better option unless you want huge wave files or not quite so huge but pretty large FLAC files. I really don't think you could tell, in practice, the difference between a 224 or even a 190 kbps Ogg and a CD, in a blind test.

Re:Self-respect

[Frizzle Fry]

Boy are you hypocritical. You criticize people who want to use mp3 instead of ogg because the "sound quality is worse" and then you also criticize people who want to use flac instead of ogg because "you can't hear the difference anyway".

Maybe the people who like mp3 instead of ogg can't hear the difference between the too, even if you can. Maybe the people who like flac instead of ogg can hear the difference, even if you can't.

Talking down?

[GeorgeH]

MP3s -- the defacto standard for recreational digital music use

Really? I had no idea! What's next, the Internet on computers? Man, that would be cool, maybe they could put dancing hamsters on it.

Re:Talking down?

[herrvinny]

Yeah, what will they think of next?

Re:Talking down?

[sean23007]

Huh, what do you know -- the internet's on computers these days?

Re:Talking down?

[Anonymous Coward]

-1, dumbass

Tagging my ass...

[Anonymous Coward]

ID3v1 tagged before the MP3 stream. ID3v2 tagged behind the MP3 stream.

And in celebration of inconsistency: ID3v3 will put it's tag in the fucking middle of the broken-to-be MP3 stream.

BTW... cddb (and it's free counterpart) DON'T(!) need ID3vX to identify anything correctly.

Re:Tagging my ass...

[Anonymous Coward]

cddb (and it's free counterpart) DON'T(!) need ID3vX to identify anything correctly.

Good point. Why are there tags needed if the song length, the track number and the length of the other tracks are sufficient for a successful cddb query?

Properly named MP3's and an intelligent(!) algorythm can deliver all three values w/o problem and the need of tagging.

Re:Tagging my ass...

[Anonymous Coward]

ID3v1 tagged before the MP3 stream. ID3v2 tagged behind the MP3 stream.

Actually, you're wrong. ID3v1 placed it's tags in an MP3 file by appending 128 bytes to the end of the file. ID3v2 inserts its tags at the beginning of the file.

Re:Tagging my ass...

[Gwala]

The only reason for that was that you couldnt add anything more to the beggining of the stream, unless you broke backwards compatibility. The first (?)128 bytes were assigned for the ID3v1 tag, in the initial MP3 standard, when ID3v2 was designed, adding it to the end of the ID3v1 tag would have resulted in nastly click's and pop's, when an older player didn't understand it. When it was added to the end, past the end of the track, it retained backwards compatibility (without ugly pop's), and allowed unlimited storage of additional data. ID3v2 is scalable enough, that if ID3v3 is realised for some god-foresaken purpose, it could be fitted on the end, without any future problems.

That being said. Foresight that people would need more than what ID3v1 offered shouldnt have been too difficult to muster, an extra forced 256b surely wouldnt extend everyones downloads by too much.

-Adam

Re:Tagging my ass...

[drinkypoo]

ID3 tags exist so that even "improperly" named MP3 files can have valid information. Also, would you prefer to encode artist, title, album, and track number information in every MP3? I god damn HATE it when people put ALL that in there. The filenames frequently exceed filesystem limits; They won't even fit on a mode 2 ISO9660 cdrom (let alone MODE1), so you can NOT put all that information into the title. An ID3-tagged mp3 will preserve all that information and more (You can even put lyrics into your ID3v2-tagged files) regardless of the filename.

Filenames are not an appropriate place to store metadata because they are volatile when moving a file between media.

Re:Tagging my ass...

[drinkypoo]

I also have one directory for my MP3s. I organize by artist, then my album, and my songs are labeled "Track. Artist - Song.mp3" because the artist's name is the second most significant thing (after the title of the song) but once you have them into album directories, the track number is the last piece of info you need to keep them sorted. Some people use m3u files which are easy enough to parse, but the problem with that is that track numbers kept first will be kept through any filename changes (including all the way down to 8.3) so they can be depended on, and an m3u file won't work if the filenames change.

As for initial population of ID3 tags, I use the CDDB, but I also doublecheck the tags. It's right more often than it's wrong, and if nothing else it gives you some starting values to work from.

Re:Tagging my ass...

[mr_mischief]

So how about an extra file? file_id.diz, README, 00_index, et cetera are powerful tools. Playlists are stored as separate fiels. Why not track info?

Re:Tagging my ass...

[drinkypoo]

As I said above, "Filenames are not an appropriate place to store metadata because they are volatile when moving a file between media." This also means that they are not an acceptable pointer to metadata. Your extra file is going to point to filenames, and they may change. That is no solution. Putting the information in the file continues to be the only real solution; if you want the metadata faster you can then cache it at some other level, but the metadata in the filename is the only reliable way to keep it with the file. My experience using Apple computers has led me to believe that depending on metadata (Type/Creator flags) is a horrible mistake if it's not stored in the file itself. Similarly, putting the metadata in the file itself is the only reliable way to make sure it stays with the file.

Re:Tagging my ass...

[Carthag]

Sorry, but that's incorrect.

The ID3v1 tag, according to this document, was "a fix-sized 128-byte tag that would reside at the end of the audio file. It would include title, artist, album, year, genre and a comment field." these are fixed-width fields. As an example, a trackname can be a maximum of 30 chars long.

This was not enough (as anyone who listens to Godspeed knows :)), and it was completely replaced with a real tag-based system. Each ID3v2 tag has a header with a type and a length, etc, so that they can have variable length. They're placed at the beginning, as MP3-players usually look for the proper mpeg-patterns before playing. No pops...

Written partially from memory. Anyway, back to coding bsp-trees. Please kill me.

Re:Tagging my ass...

[bonhomme_de_neige]

BTW... cddb (and it's free counterpart) DON'T(!) need ID3vX to identify anything correctly.

I was under the impression that CDDB and FreeDB (its free counterpart, and BTW please learn the spelling of its coz I'm only going to sing this one more time) just used the number and duration of all the tracks on a CD, hoping that few enough CDs in the database would have that particular combination of number of tracks / duration of each track that you could pick your one from a reasonably short list. That's why you often get some bogus completely unrelated hits from CDDB.

But back on topic, it's useless for naming a single song, only if you have a full audio CD of them and one that's in the database at that (so compilation cds are excluded, unless you add yours to freedb, which you could the last time I checked -- which may have been a few years ago).

Why stop with tagging?

[Dr. Zowie]

Perl (with PDL) is powerful enough to remix, comb-filter, compress, depop, noise-gate, and generally munge your mp3s as much as you want.

We're in an exciting time when many of the scripting languages are being augmented to be able to handle Real Data (Numpy is another example).

Re:Why stop with tagging?

[scumbucket]

Absolutely, Give me PERL/CGI over WebSphere anyday. In fact, compiling code for an interpreter is laughable. Java should be a scripting language. Compiling millions of lines of Java is such a joke it is no longer realistic with Makefiles. You have to use ANT which doesn't support any other platform. The benefits of a scripting langauge far outweigh the benefits of byte code in my opinion. My experience with the WebSphere is that the web application claims over CGI are exaggerated especially with regards to performance. Furhtermore, the expenses of porting from WebSphere 2.0, 3.0 to 4.0 are far greater than any other C porting expense I've had to date. Java may be write once, run anywhere, but Java/XML/JSP/XSL/XSLT code written for application servers is not. The switch to EAR, WAR and J2EE was expensive with no discernable payoff. Web application servers are a waste of time because the standards change so fast.
However, 1/2 million lines of C/CGI scripts written 7 years ago compile on Solaris, AIX, and Linux with only one person spending two-weeks porting code that is still run in production today. Because ANSI C is a mature standard it is far closer to "write once, run anywhere" than Java is if the authors of the C code know it needs to run on multiple platforms and stay within the ANSI C/ POSIX universe.

Re:Why stop with tagging?

[neglige]

...deleting! Don't forget deleting! unlink() forever! ;)))

Oh, you said "generally munge"...

Re:Why stop with tagging?

[11223]

Why use JIT or a scripting language? You can have all the garbage-collected, dynamic benefits of Perl and Java, with mature native-compilers for an ANSI standard language, Common Lisp. I've written several web applications using the Araneida web server for SBCL, and I love it. Using the SLIME Emacs/Common Lisp interface, you can simply edit the definition of objects, methods, et al, hit Control-Meta-x, and refresh to see your new code compiled and running in the lisp image.

CLiki is a Common Lisp wiki written using Araneida. Other popular web systems for Common Lisp include CL-HTTPD, used for Bill Clinton's 96 campaign and Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, and Franz's AllegroServe.

So why would you pick Lisp for a web server? You said it yourself - "the standards change so fast". Lisp is not a language for AI, it's a language for rapid development in a changing domain, and it provides good-to-excellent performance at the same time (much better than Perl, PHP, and Java). The fact that it's an ANSI standard brings it much closer to "write once, run anywhere" than Java, and the large standard library makes certain programs even more portable than their C counterparts. So, the question is not "why Lisp?", it's "why not Lisp?".

Re:Why stop with tagging?

[Dr. Zowie]

>why not Lisp?

Because, unlike any of the JIT or scripting languages, Lisp requires turning your head inside out to use it. I like evaluative syntax as much as the next guy, and it's certainly the right tool for lots of things -- but using it requires a mindset that appears only to exist in a tiny fraction of the hacker population, sort of like an RPN calculator. Those who could adapt to RPN really, really loved it; but those who couldn't (which, unfortunately, was most people) found it cumbersome. So, while RPN was arguably better than the expression syntax that calculators use now, it faded away due to lack of mass appeal.

Re:Why stop with tagging?

[11223]

Lisp really isn't all that hard - you spend a little time up front getting used to it, and then you're never confused about the semantics of anything again (and if you are, the HyperSpec is there to help, with its clear and precise wording of all the language primitives). This advantage can't be beat - the quality of the ANSI Common Lisp spec really is a cut above anything else, and makes life much easier on a daily basis.

There are enough people using Lisp to sustain it as a community. This means that if you want to use it, you won't really want for support - it's an acceptable choice. So, if you can "turn your head inside out" you'll get a lot of advantages for it.

BTW, I still enjoy using my HP48GX, and HP has their new 49G+ out, with a 75MHz ARM processor and a SD slot. It's far beyond any other calculator on the market. Sometimes the slightly more difficult syntax has great advantages :-)

Re:Why stop with tagging?

[11223]

Oh, and I forgot to mention - prefix syntax is all the rage now, with XML. And all Lisp web servers that I'm aware of provide HTML-from-S-expression generation, which lets you use the prefix notation of lisp to generate your HTML inline. Very handy, and very relevant to web programming.

Re:Why stop with tagging?

[ajs]

Uh... What?

Your post is a melange of incherent sound-bites. I'm honestly wondering if someone just wrote a program to harvest blocks of text and re-post them when it saw a keyword. I can't buy that there was any thought behind that post.

I'm a die-hard perl programmer, and I'm honestly offended by your defense of the language.

Re:Why stop with tagging?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, then, what about ML? There are several high-quality native-code implementations, including SML/NJ and OCaml. It uses static rather than dynamic typing, but the compilers infer the types of most variables for you, so you rarely have to declare any types, and this approach also means you know about any typing errors at compile time.

With OCaml in particular you get most of the speed of C, and most of the convenience of a dynamic language, in one package. And if you want to use C libraries, there's a rather nice FFI. If you want to call Perl code, guess what? You can.

Hmm... maybe I'm overdoing the advocacy a bit here... but anyway, Lisp is obsolete, 'cause ML does most of the same stuff and has human-readable syntax to boot. :p

Re:Why stop with tagging?

[DaChesserCat]

Anyone who's familiar with Lisp (or, in my case, Scheme) and Perl promptly discovers that Perl has more in common with Lisp than with C.

Example:


#! /usr/bin/perl

@_ = map { $_ * 2.0 } (1, 2, 3, 4, 5);
foreach (@_)
{
print "$_\n";
}


Yes, this will kick out 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 on separate lines. And yes, that is using a closure. I could've squashed it further, but this is relatively small, yet legible. Like Lisp, I could've put the whole "map" expression inside the parens on the "foreach" and done away with the intermediate array.

Additionally, since it can handle hashes of arrays of hashes of integers, floats and strings (mixed), it is about as free-form in its data structure capabilities as Lisp/Scheme. It takes a while to get used to all the different syntax needed for each level, but it CAN do it. If you have the Camel Book (Programming Perl), take a look at the example on pages 273-274, which will show you a hash of hashes, where each element may contain a string, an array or another hash. It's not quite as simple as the nested levels of parentheses used in Lisp/Scheme, but it's not far from it. Unlike C/C++ or Java, you don't have to declare the data structure; the structure is programmatically enforced, like Lisp/Scheme.

Oh, and by the way:

#! /usr/bin/perl

sub example()
{
my $bogus = "chessercat";

if ($bogus)
{
1;
}
else
{
0;
}
}

print example() . "\n";

will also work. In this case, the "1" or "0" is implied to mean "return 1" or "return 0." This begs the question as to whether or not Perl is imperative (like C, Pascal, ForTran or COBOL), functional (like Lisp/Scheme) or object oriented (like Java/C++). The reality is that it is somewhere in between.

I, too, was quite impressed with Lisp/Scheme when I learned about it in college. The rest of the world, for whatever reason, seems uninterested in it, though. In the meantime, I've found that quite a few of the things I liked about Scheme are also applicable to Perl. This has allowed me to pull some "how did you do that??!" tricks, and still use a language which is readily available and reasonably popular.

MP3 is Evil

[Thinkit3]

Especially when there is a patent-free option (ogg) available. MP3 is Evil. It is based on the same system that killed many due to "patent protection" on AIDS drugs. Do not use or support an evil system, especially when alternatives are available.

Re:MP3 is Evil

[geekoid]

that makes the companies who wouldn't negoitiate a decent liscensing deal evil, not 'the system'. By which, I assume, You mean the Patent system.

Now, if there wasn't away to make money from their discovery, how many companies would pour the millions into research?
I'll tell you: ZERO.

Of course 'the system' also allows for linux and ogg to exist. by 'the system' I mean copyright.

Re:MP3 is Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

great I'll switch to it! where's the ogg firmware for my car stereo, my audiotron, my portable CD player, my Mp3 capable boom box, my pocket mp3 player and my dvd player...

oh wait... Ogg isnt supported on any of those... so in order to support this "FREE" format I need to go spend $5000.00 on all noew gear...oh wait I can't even BUY anything that support's ogg except for one obscure pocket mp3 player...

nevermind, I'll stick with the mp3 format that is free as far as I'm concerned and use the items I already own.

Re:MP3 is Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

One obscure player? Someone hasn't looked at the market recently. There are a number of devices on the market now that play ogg vorbis.

Re:MP3 is Evil

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Baby Jesus cries when you play an mp3.

Re:MP3 is Evil

[Malic]

I thought it was stuffing that was evil? (re:Good Eats-Food Network) ;)

What about emacs MP3 mode?

[crow]

Seriously, I've been thinking it would be cool to have an emacs mode for MP3 files. The raw data wouldn't be displayed, but the ID3 tags would be available for editing.

Re:What about emacs MP3 mode?

[McAddress]

first of all, that is GNU/emacs. Second of all, did it ever occur to anyone that a text editor should be used for editing text. It should not give you html tags. it should not color your code. it should just display what you wrote. next thing you know we'll be seeing GNU/Clippy. "it looks like you're designing a web page. it looks like you're designing a web page." wtf. text editors should not be made up of over a million lines of code. what happened to the good old days of vi. screw RMS, he should have stuck with compilers.

Re:What about emacs MP3 mode?

[brer_rabbit]

in the event that you're not trolling, perhaps you haven't seen the emacs mode for tar files? I think the mp3 mode the poster proposed would be pretty cool.

Re:What about emacs MP3 mode?

[Xerithane]

screw RMS, he should have stuck with compilers.

He did, he just got confused whilst working on emacs.

Re:What about emacs MP3 mode?

[rifter]

first of all, that is GNU/emacs. Second of all, did it ever occur to anyone that a text editor should be used for editing text. It should not give you html tags. it should not color your code. it should just display what you wrote. next thing you know we'll be seeing GNU/Clippy. "it looks like you're designing a web page. it looks like you're designing a web page." wtf. text editors should not be made up of over a million lines of code. what happened to the good old days of vi. screw RMS, he should have stuck with compilers.

The GNU/Clippy? Well, it is not afaik available for emacs, but it is for vi, vim, and xmms... It is GPL so you can always port it if you wish... :)

Re:What about emacs MP3 mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

30 seconds with google revealed, among several MP3 player modes, this MP3 tag editor mode for emacs, released in 1999. Next question?

Re:What about emacs MP3 mode?

[self assembled struc]

i assume you've already tried ctrl-x ctrl-b meta meta esc ctrl-j meta x mp3id3v1-tag?

that would be my first guess.

Re:What about emacs MP3 mode?

[gmhowell]

The sad thing is, I have no idea whether or not you are serious. Either that is a legitimate command sequence for emacs, or a skillful troll.

Re:What about emacs MP3 mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it was Jamie Zawinski that created the byte compiler for Emacs Lisp. RMS only made an interpreter. It is hoped that within the next decade or two, they'll be able to port GNU Emacs to Guile and implement a native compiler. Meanwhile, during the past two decades there have been a number of Emacs-alike systems on native-compiling Common Lisp systems, but they have failed to achieve the critical mass of GNU Emacs and XEmacs.

genre splitting

[digitalsushi]

Does anyone remember that perl module that would "listen" to the mp3 and decide which musical genre it thought it was? I'm not referring to matching the ID3 tags against something... it would make a guess based on stuff like the tempo and frequency range, et cetera. (I have no idea how it actually works, and I have no idea if it is even real. I just know I read about it a long time ago and figured someday it might be something a nonprogrammer like me could use)

Re:genre splitting

[Da w00t]

MusicBrainz::TRM does that. Also, there was the project Songprint (now defunct). The perl bindings for TRM (the part that listens to the song and makes a fingerprint) are currently broken. I can't manage to get them to work :/

The developers of musicbrains hang out on irc.freenode.net/#musicbrainz. They'll tell you to use libtunepimp, which can be found in their CVS repository on musicbrainz.org

There's an extremely cool website that is being developed by the audioscrobbler folks, Last.fm. It's a personalized radio station. You pick what songs you like, and it learns what you like. Very, very cool.

Re:genre splitting

[Alan]

Not really. The TRM will fingerprint the song and identify it in the database and get the album, artist and track information, but not the genre. That information is not (AFAIK) part of the musicbrainz stored info.

It sounds like he's referring to something that will analize the peaks and valleys in the song and try to figure out if the waveform looks like a rock or classic or whatever song (ie: strong bass beat == rock, mostly in the voice range == audiobook, etc). Sounds like audioscrobber or something like that.

Hopefully iTunes will defeat mp3

[blueworm]

Let us pray that iTunes and iPods can help to destroy MP3 forever.

Re:Hopefully iTunes will defeat mp3

[pyite]

Huh? It's interesting... because my iPod has nothing BUT mp3s on it.

Re:Hopefully iTunes will defeat mp3

[Lumpy]

that is a completely stupid comment.

Apple is not going to make a iStereo for my car. The same as they are not going to make a iTuner for my home stereo and plugging the ipod into my car stereo is not an option as it sucks. right now I can select from thousands of mp3's via the now discontinued Rio mp3 player. My friend has a clarion Joyride that play's DVD's full of mp3's from it's 5 disc DVD changer that play's mp3's better than any iPod made on this planet (It's the A2D converter kiddies...)

Not to miss the fact that my Audiotron kicks the crap out of a ipod sitting there in the equipment rack, or the one in my whole house audio rack that I can control from either IR remote or from any Pc in the house via web interface.

Ipod is only cool that it will play an mp3, their wierd itunes format is not desired as it is not compatable with 99.9% of the hardware out there.

Besides, I will not tolerate ANY DRM in my music files.

Re:Hopefully iTunes will defeat mp3

[karnal]

"It's the A2D converter kiddies..."

Actually, it's the D2A converter, or for us non leet speakers, the DA converter.

Wouldn't get very far with an mp3 "player" if you had only an AD converter, although you could record a lot... :)

Re:Hopefully iTunes will defeat mp3

[Anonymous Coward]

Also known as a DAC.

Re:Hopefully iTunes will defeat mp3

[jdreed1024]

Ipod is only cool that it will play an mp3, their wierd itunes format is not desired as it is not compatable with 99.9% of the hardware out there.

Besides, I will not tolerate ANY DRM in my music files.

By "weird itunes format", I assume you're referring to the AAC MPEG4 format, which is an industry standard.

Also, there's only DRM in files that you buy from iTunes Music store. Please stop spreading the FUD that "AAC == DRM", because it's simply not true. Just like "EXE file" does not translate to "software which needs a registration key" and "VHS tape" does not translate to "protected by Macrovision". AAC is an open MPEG4 format to which DRM _CAN_ be applied. By default, it is not applied.

Also, what do you mean by "A2D" converter? Why would an MP3 player, which decodes digital signals into analog signals which your ear can hear need an "analog to digital to converter"?

Re:Hopefully iTunes will defeat mp3

[Alan]

This was voted interesting how? I like itunes and ipods, but that's like saying "let us pray that the ford f150 and it's engine can help destroy all other work vehicles". It's pretty stupid.

Re:Hopefully iTunes will defeat mp3

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple zealot detected. Default +5 insightfull.

How come many Mp3's don't have this data?

[192939495969798999]

How did it come to pass that mp3 ripper's don't pull this data from the CD? RealPlayer, Windows Media player, etc. all show me data for the CD I am listening to, if available. Are there really that few CD's that include the proper information?
Furthermore, are there programs that are erasing the data from these MP3's when they are being circulated?

Re:How come many Mp3's don't have this data?

[blech]

Generally, CDs don't have all the track information on the CD. RealPlayer, Windows Media, iTunes and so on all use a computed identifier of some sort, based on the length of tracks, typically, to look up the CD information from an online database.

Of course, because this means that *someone*, *somewhere*, ended up typing in the data, there are errors in a lot of the data. Most of the CD lookup databases are very bad at handling compiliations, and can have problems with any of the items of metadata other than title and artist (for example, 'year' often ends up as the year the CD is ripped, not the year the music was produced).

There aren't many programs that strip the data that's produced, though. Thankfully.

Re:How come many Mp3's don't have this data?

[Dr. Zowie]

No standard audio CDs contain digital author or title information. It was an oversight or stupidity on the part of the people who invented the CD standard. When you fire up Grip or WMP and pop in your CD, the track listing you get is retrieved from a database, based on a hash made from (among other things) the precise length of each track that is found.

Re:How come many Mp3's don't have this data?

[E-Lad]

You're referring to CD-TEXT, a standard of sorts introduced by Sony where Artist, Album name, and track titles are encoded onto an audio CD in the subcodes.

It's true, not every commercial pressed CD out there has this feature, and believe it or not, not every CD-ROM (particularly older ones) can read the subcodes to extract the CD-TEXT info.

Sony Music includes CD-TEXT on all the CDs in it's catalog (to complement the CD-TEXT display features on most of it's car CD players.) I don't know about the other major labels.

My own experience with small labels tends to indicate they're not large users of CD-TEXT, but you can find the odd release which does have it.

Re:How come many Mp3's don't have this data?

[E-Lad]

Read the following URL and my post below:

http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa571/cdtext.htm

Re:How come many Mp3's don't have this data?

[Lumpy]

mostly from lazy ripping (that explains the low quality of 90% of the mp3's out there) or many MANY of them are ripped on a computer that has dial-up and the person ripping is not interested in connecting to the net.

Also horrible mis-configuration of the ripper.

Re:How come many Mp3's don't have this data?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Are there really that few CD's that include the proper information?

I think the problem is that people don't let the software handle it, and decide instead to fuck it up themselves.

Yeah! I love crypted source!

[nirvanis]

$filename =~ m/([^-_]{3,})\s*-\s*(.{3,})\s*\.[^.]+$/

;-)

Re:Yeah! I love crypted source!

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems you failed the course:
"Introduction to computer science"

It's called a regular expression
not crypted source!

BTW it's also present in PHP, Ruby and other shell scripts.

$filename =~ m/([^-_]{3,})\s*-\s*(.{3,})\s*\.[^.]+$/

The filename stored in $filename must match
([^-_]{3,})
Any character except '-' and '_' 3 or more of them
this part of the file name is tagged 1 through parenthesis grouping.

Followed by \s*
i.e. facultative spaces, tabs, returns, form feed

Followed by a dash -

Followed by \s*
i.e. facultative spaces, tabs, returns, form feed

Followed by a tagged expression numbered 2
of 3 or more ASCII characters (.{3,})

Followed by \s*
i.e. facultative spaces, tabs, returns, form feed

Followed by a DOT .

Followed by any character (i.e. extension)
at least one which contains no DOT [^.]

The $ means up to the end of the expression.

To mention also other stuff could be stacked
in front of tagged expression 1, since there is no ^ begin of the expression tag.

-- Your C.S. Teacher who gave you an F last term.

Re:Yeah! I love crypted source!

[nirvanis]

Obviously, I was joking.

Re:Yeah! I love crypted source!

[arevos]

$filename =~ m/([^-_]{3,})\s*-\s*(.{3,})\s*\.[^.]+$/

Shouldn't that be:
$filename =~ m/([^\-_]{3,})\s*-\s*(.{3,})\s*\.[^.]+$/

Re:Yeah! I love crypted source!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, since you have the - right at the beginning of the character class, it's not used.

For those of you who do not read regular expressions, this evaluates to:

Condition is true if filename matches the pattern:
(anything but a - or _ that occurs 3 or more times), zero or more whitespace chars (spaces, tabs, etc.), a -, zero or more spaces again, (any char three or more times except a newline, since we're not using the m modifier), zero or more spaces, a period, one or more of anything EXCEPT a period, then the end of the string

What? It's not even that complex for a regex. I don't see why they didn't use /o for it, but whatever :)

Re:Yeah! I love crypted source!

[arevos]

No, since you have the - right at the beginning of the character class, it's not used.

Oh, of course :)

Still, doesn't hurt to backslash dashes, just in case ;)

Re:Yeah! I love crypted source!

[TedZ]

/o was not used because it was not necessary. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. This regex will be run what, 10 times? 100 times? Let's be realistic.

Ted Zlatanov

That would be bad.

[DAldredge]

Sorry, MP3 playback does not need to be builtin to the OS. Having MP3 playback handled by another app is ok.

Damn, did you used to work for Microsoft?

Re:That would be bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot. First of all Emacs is not an operating system (all joking aside). Secondly, he was talking about editting ID3 tags, not playing MP3s. You could've clearly seen this if you were capable of reading. Third, MS does not have any way of playing back MP3s "builtin to the OS".

Re:That would be bad.

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

"MS does not have any way of playing back MP3s "builtin to the OS"."

Yes, They do.
Windows Media Player (Part of the Microsoft Windows System, as they proved to a court) plays them. It actually is pretty embeded, if you click on an mp3 file or are in a dir filled with mp3s there is a 'play all' button on the left, or play song if only one is highlighted. All of the 'Sort By' stuff becomes ID3 info (which is annoying, I wan't to sort my mp3s by creation date.)

Re:That would be bad.

[DAldredge]

It was a joke.

And EMACS is an OS. What do you think SkyNET evolved from?

Re:That would be bad.

[rifter]

You are an idiot. First of all Emacs is not an operating system (all joking aside). Secondly, he was talking about editting ID3 tags, not playing MP3s. You could've clearly seen this if you were capable of reading. Third, MS does not have any way of playing back MP3s "builtin to the OS".

Sure they do! It is called Windows Media Player.

Re:That would be bad.

[fiftyfly]

You are an idiot. First of all Emacs is not an operating system (all joking aside). Secondly, he was talking about editting ID3 tags, not playing MP3s. You could've clearly seen this if you were capable of reading. Third, MS does not have any way of playing back MP3s "builtin to the OS".

Sure they do! It is called Windows Media Player.

special purpose app + shell integration != OS component

Re:That would be bad.

[rifter]

You are an idiot. First of all Emacs is not an operating system (all joking aside). Secondly, he was talking about editting ID3 tags, not playing MP3s. You could've clearly seen this if you were capable of reading. Third, MS does not have any way of playing back MP3s "builtin to the OS".

Sure they do! It is called Windows Media Player.

special purpose app + shell integration != OS component

Well, Microsoft seems to think it is an OS component. You certainly cannot remove it and it does come with the OS. So it is as much an OS component as IE. Dither over whether MS knows what an OS is much less an OS component if you will, but...

Necessary evil

[nuggz]

The system didn't kill people, AIDS did.
The system encouraged someone to research and provide a treatement that saved some lives.

The system isn't evil, it is just indifferent. Come up with a better system, aboloshing IP wouldn't have stopped those AIDS related deaths that WERE prevented (or delayed)

Re:Slashdot is SLOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Score: -1? Why? At least give a moderation reason, editors. :p

And quite frankly, your moderation being what it is, the simple fact is that this story WAS posted on codingstyle.com much earlier than Slashdot had it. ;-)

I can tell

[metalhed77]

I did some testing between flac and ogg at its highest setting. Quite simply the ogg was very good BUT on certain parts, with some strange harmonics, the ogg would drop certain frequencies. Besides, with hard disk space so cheap these days I have no qualms ripping my music to .flac. I'm going to lose the CD anyway, might as well have a viable backup (/me cannot hold on to a CD for more than a few months without scratching it).

MusicBrainz

[Mr_Silver]

MusicBrainz::Client and AudioFile::Identify::MusicBrainz were not used because MusicBrainz appears to be a less comprehensive database of released CDs than FreeDB.

True, but the point of MusicBrainz is not to hold a database of released CD's but more snapshots of MP3 tracks.

At the moment, without MusicBrainz I cannot automatically populate my ID3 tags with the information about an album unless I get it out of the cupboard and type the details in myself.

MusicBrainz allows me to do all this without any access to the CD's

Re:MusicBrainz

[Alan]

Yes, he's right, it is less complete, but MB tries to be accurate and consistant. freedb has a huge number of different capitalization schemes ways of people entering artist information (Eagles, The Eagles, Eagles, The, THE EAGLES, etc). MB takes it's information from Freedb, but reliese on it's users and moderators to munge the information into something consistant.

The beauty of it is that if you find something that's missing, it's very very easy to add it :)

Re:MusicBrainz

[gimpboy]

actually freedb states somewhere that the prefix "the" should be eliminated, except for the band "the the", which will retain the 'the'. since i use lower case for everything, this isnt much of a problem.

the problem is more pertinatnt imo when you have things like multi disc sets is it: dis{c|k} 1, dis{c|k} 1 of 3, etc. is it '&', or 'and' etc. so yeah mb is more accurate and consistant. plus mb frequently merges the freedb into their own, with moderation of course.

Re:Slashdot is SLOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Read the FAQ before posting.
2. Moderation is done by users, not editors.
3. Slashdot is a news digest, not a news source. They never break new stories, just link to existing ones so people can discuss them, so telling people that the story appeared elsewhere first (or even on Slashdot before) is utterly pointless.
4. Read the FAQ before posting, dumbass.

I'll just use some shareware app...

[CrackedButter]

...called mp3 rage. Does the job without /.'s help.

Re:I'll just use some shareware app...

[Anonymous Coward]

Kindly fuck off will you? It's nit picking cross-eyed pricks like you that further increase my social incompatibility.

R

Re:I'll just use some shareware app...

[CrackedButter]

Its pricks like you that don't get jokes either.

Re: is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, it was crap.

tootin' my own horn

[brer_rabbit]

while on the subject of Perl & mp3, I put together a object persistence module I called AudioDBI for audio metadata. It works with PostgreSQL, but with a little work it should play nicely with any database DBI supports (it extends DBI).

I know their are currently about five thousand object persistence modules for Perl, but I wanted one that was designed for audio metadata (artist name, album title, genres, etc etc) and provided for easy searching of metadata.

Re: is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I assumed it was. In that case, it is CERTAINLY the best work of literature the world has ever seen. You should be nominated for the Nobel Prize. How can I contribute to your literacy campaign?

I remember

[Salsaman]

About 4 years ago I bought an mp3 player. People told me mp3 would never catch on. "Oh it's too difficult" "but it doesn't sound as good as CD". Then I showed somebody else "wow - no moving parts, that's cool". Guess who was on the right track and who was wrong ?

Re:I remember

[(trb001)]

You had 'discovered' a new way to store music...that being a small in size, digital way to store music. Prior to mp3, there was no way to store music digitally without taking up a lot of honking space. Remember, this is also before hard drives were sickly big (in 1996 when I started ripping to mp3, I had a 6 gig hard drive...and that was large).

Ogg is *nothing new*. It's different, not *new*. Until mp3 licensing fees start affecting Joe User, he's not going to care about different formats. MP3 is mainstream, Ogg isn't, and the audio quality difference matters about as much as the quality difference between mp3s and cds...that being none at all, except to the 1% of people that are self-proclaimed audiophiles.

Ogg is wonderful, sure, but your argument that it's equivalent to the mp3 revolution is lacking.

--trb

Re:Slashdot is SLOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

All those points are true with the exception of (2). Editors have unlimited mod points and occasionally DO moderate people into oblivion. There are several documented cases of this abuse. You should read at -1 threshold so your eyes can be opened.

Obviously, this particular case is just user moderation as nobody gives a flying shit!

Re:Slashdot is SLOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

1. I've been using this site long enough to have a 4 digit userid. I think I know how it works.
2. Editors also can, and often do, moderate postings. They have no shortage of points, and do not face retribution for bad moderation through meta-moderation.
3. Codingstyle.com is also a news digest, posting links to existing stories. The point of my post was to point out the fact that codingstyle.com linked to the story days earlier.
4. Go fuck your hat, fuckie.

Python

[wackysootroom]

How is it done in python?

Any takers?

Re:Python

[Slashdotnewbie]

Check out http://py.vaults.ca/parnassus/apyllo.py/63131194 Parnassus has a bunch of modules for Python.

Re:Python

[Anonymous Coward]

More slowly, and in 3rd grader speak.

Re:Python

[Anonymous Coward]

probably using something like: http://csl.cse.ucsc.edu/~ben/python/

or some other third party module (nothing in the base dist).

Of course, you could always write your own :)
after all, there is more than one way to do it

Re:Python

[Anonymous Coward]

But Python's motto is "There Should Only Be One Way To Do It". Which means, yes, no variety:

It is "see spot run", not "look, spot is running!" or "observe spot running towards us".

I immensely dislike Python.

Re:Python

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the poster above was trying to be funny.

You immensely dislike python eh?
Do you also dislike giving reasons?

Python vs Perl in a nutshell:

Perl is only very slightly faster for some things, slower for others.
Perl is harder to read.
Perl is older, and has more users.
Python is clean, simple, and elegant
Python is newer, yet still has an impressive user base
Python is easily extendable.

Vive Python!

Rehash

[panxerox]

The only thing I want to do with mp3s besides playing them is to "rehash" them, ie have a program that will go thru my collection and generate and save new hash codes. Mp3's are all well and good but the issue now is security.

Re:Rehash

[Tin Foil Hat]

Please explain. What is "rehashing" an mp3 file, and why would you want to do that?

TIA.

Rio Karma

[CodeRed]

Actually, I use OGG on my Karma, so I guess it has caught on with me who have used mp3's since Franny's encoder was released.

Since I rip all my cd's anyway, its no big deal switching. I'm sure filesharing services have plenty of ogg's for others.

I don't understand why people say "never going to happen" like they have a crystal ball that doesn't see change :) It's happening buddy. Sorry you can't see it.

windows based tagging?

[British]

Is there a quick and dirty Windows utility that will let me batch tag MP3s?

For every MP3 I get that has no URL tag put in, I just put in my website name. A little bit of free advertising :)

Re:windows based tagging?

[drinkypoo]

Amusingly enough I've been using iTunes lately (though it is pretty big and bloaty so I may stop) and it has a pretty decent tagging facility built into it which will indeed do batch tagging. You can select a range of songs, fill in the artist, album, and the number of tracks in the album, then go back and edit the song name and track number of each individual mp3. There are almost certainly better utils out there but I've been too lazy to find them :)

Re:windows based tagging?

[mopslik]

...quick and dirty Windows utility...

AnalogX's TagMaster is pretty slick.

Obligatory Windows Whine...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Where's the Visual Basic code Waaaaah....

.wav

[Anonymous Coward]

Some say that with hardware getting cheaper and HD space no longer at a premium, mp3 and other compression schemes have very little hope of surviving the next decade. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the record companies actually release their catalogs in an even better quality format than wav.

2 questions:
What is the bitrate at which the human ear can distinguish quality from crap?

At what point will compression become obsolete?

Re: .wav

[thnmnt]

1. how good is your stereo?
2. how good are your ears?

i can't stand 128bit mp3's - they sound squidgy. but at 256bit on my decent home stereo i don't mind them at all. but, when i listen to uncompressed - there's just something a little bit more sparkly about the music.

compression is already obsolete as long as you've got the drive space and the bandwidth.

there's no such thing as better than a lossless compression, so by better than .wav i assmue you mean better than a perfect rip of a CD. as long as master recordings are available in high quality analog or as better than 16bit 44.1khz digital files you can create a better better quality digital file..but it will be bigger.

Re:.wav

[spike hay]

Some say that with hardware getting cheaper and HD space no longer at a premium, mp3 and other compression schemes have very little hope of surviving the next decade. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the record companies actually release their catalogs in an even better quality format than wav.

2 questions:
What is the bitrate at which the human ear can distinguish quality from crap?


There is no better format than WAV, as it is uncompressed audio. However, there are two new formats called DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD, both of which store uncompressed audio data on a DVD. Since DVDs hold 7 times more data than a CD, the sound can be much higher quality. You can actually buy SACDs of quite a few albums now. The great thing is that they are dual layered discs. One layer has just conventional CD audio on it that is playable on all current players.

The MP3 bitrate in which the vast majority of the population cannot distinguish from CD is 256 kbps, from what I've heard. If you used Ogg, this number would be closer to 190 or even 168, as it is a far superior codec.

Many audiophiles use FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec, which will give you WAV quality lossless sound at around a third the size.

At what point will compression become obsolete?
A couple years down the road, when I have maybe 500-1000 gigs of storage, I may see no reason to encode my audio that I rip from CDs. An entire album would take up about 600 megabytes. That is an infestimal portion of such a huge amount of storage. However, compression still will be needed to distribute songs over the internet.

Re: .wav

[bonhomme_de_neige]

but, when i listen to uncompressed - there's just something a little bit more sparkly about the music.

That's because compression drops data from the very high and very low ends of the audio spectrum (typically taken to be 20Hz-20kHz for most home audio equipment). That's why 128kbit mp3s never have good bass and seem to have a static hiss (static is high frequency sound, >~16kHz) in the background. 256k or any bitrate has the same effect but to a lesser degree, which is why you can still hear a difference (albeit maybe too small and difficult to put into words) between a CD and a 256k mp3.

However with 256k mp3s we're already in the sort of area where you can correct a significant portion of the damage with good equaliser settings. Play with the equaliser in your winamp or xmms or whatever, and you'll see what I mean (provided you play with it 'correctly' ;p). Of course it won't be as good as an uncompressed recording, but a damn sight better than without the compensation. Certainly close enough that you won't hear the difference on any headphones/speakers costing less than $50 ;p

compression is already obsolete as long as you've got the drive space and the bandwidth.

I dunno, I have a PC with a 120gb drive, but I dunno if my (measely) 10gb of mp3s would fit on it uncompressed. Maybe just barely, and I do use a good portion of the drive for other stuff (no, not pr0n, that goes on CDs for archiving ;p). They certainly wouldn't fit on my 20gb Nomad Jukebox - compression still has a very propsperous future life in portable devices.

Hard to have dignity when...

[Denyer]

...you're weighed down with the bigger hard drive your portable requires. ;)

More complete analysis of your "system"

[jared_hanson]

It is based on the same system that killed many due to "patent protection" on AIDS drugs. Do not use or support an evil system, especially when alternatives are available.

What the "system" you refer to does is set up a risk-to-reward ratio that encourages ideas to be pursued and developed. It is a serious money risk to develop AIDS drugs, or any other complex product for that matter. To encourage the capital outlay required, the reward is granted to encourage development.

With out this "Evil" system, the AIDS drugs would likely not have even be pursued, and all the people would have died. Regardless of weather overpriced drugs cause some people to not be able to afford drugs, less people died with the current system than would have in a system in which no risk-reward ratio exists.

Take communist Russia for example. When people are guaranteed equal pay regardless of effort, the effort level of everyone goes down. Eventually, no work is being done and pay drops to zero, resulting in a very bad situation. If there were to be no return on AIDS drug research, there would be no research even started. Of course, governments could always fund it, but governments need resources too. And the best system in which to increase resources in one that encourages rewards.

Re:More complete analysis of your "system"

[Anonymous Coward]

More classic American ignorance. Are you aware that in communist europe working class wages were actually higher than working class wages in America for all but the last 5 years of communism? Uncomfortable fact, isn't it? What capatilism (and patent / copyright systems for knowledge works) promotes is innovation, and in that it is actually superior.

Re:More complete analysis of your "system"

[Anonymous Coward]

If the communist system is so superior, why did it fail? Perhaps because capitalism accounts for human desires.

Re:More complete analysis of your "system"

[jared_hanson]

Wages being higher or not, it was simply an unsustainable system. The key factor in the equation is that productivity goes down. When this happens, no matter how much the wages are, the money with which to pay it will dry up. Its at that point that the system collapses.

The only ignorance here on display here is yours for only considering money in your analysis.

Same problem, different approach

[Anonymous Coward]

There's another guide called Bringing beauty and order to massive MP3 collections which approaches the same problem (beautifying millions of MP3s) from a different angle.

speaking of tags

[JSkills]

Anyone have a good suggestion as to what to use for creating CD inserts for jewel cases? I use eroaster and I've ended up writing a script that parses the CD songlist and creates a printable text document. I'm pretty sure eroaster is not writing the song/artist track info to the CD :-(

MP3::Info and Apache::MP3

[don_carnage]

I wrote my own little Perl scripts using MP3::Info and MP3::ID3v1Tag. While you're at it, you may want to check out Apache::MP3 and my own pet project, TVDinner Streaming MP3 Server.

EasyTag

[CanadaDave]

Fuck perl, just use EasyTag

Pitch shift???

[lavaface]

But can it pitch shift? I realize this is a bit offtopic but does anyone know how I can pitch shift mp3s in realtime? Winamp has a plugin. Is there something comparable for Macs? It's about the only thing I don't like about iTunes. Thanks!

Re:Pitch shift???

[Dr. Zowie]

I don't know about "realtime". Audacity is an interactive sound editor that, I believe, has a GUI pitch-shifter. PDL can certainly shift pitches on existing files (just fft, pad or clip, and fft back), but the interface is a little lower level than you seem to be looking for.

Re:Pitch shift???

[Jon Abbott]

I realize this is a bit offtopic but does anyone know how I can pitch shift mp3s in realtime? Is there something comparable for Macs?

There are quite a few programs you can use to do real-time pitch and/or tempo shifting on a Mac. The only question is what level of shifting you need. Here are some programs for OS X that you may find useful (sorted in order of price):

Roni Music's The Amazing Slow Downer. Shareware, $40 registration fee.

DSP-Quattro's i3. $129.

AntaresTech's Auto-Tune 3. $359.

Ableton's Live. $399.

Celemony's Melodyne 2.0. $449.

Serato's Pitch 'N Time, a plug-in for Pro Tools. $799.

You can always search around for VST-based pitch/time shifting plug-ins as well, which are useful with a number of audio editors (even the free Audacity sound editor now supports VST plugins). Apple also includes a pitch shifter for free with OS X (in Audio Unit form), but it can only shift the pitch a little. It is more of a tuner than anything, as its range is only around +/-100 cents. The Amazing Slow Downer (linked above) probably provides the most functionality with the cheapest price tag.

Re:Pitch shift???

[lavaface]

Thanks. I actually have protools & ableton live. I was looking for something more like this though. I'd like to be able to shift the tune while it's playing in iTunes (it's handy sometimes) rather than pulling the song into a seperate program. You mentioned an audio unit that can tune within 100 cents. Do you suppose this can be tweaked? Can some change to quicktime help? Thanks again.

Re:Pitch shift???

[Jon Abbott]

I'm not sure if the tuner audio unit can be tweaked or not -- perhaps it is included under Darwin, but I somehow doubt it...

I forgot to mention that I used the tuner audio unit inside of Audio Hijack Pro, which can alter iTunes output in realtime. There may be another VST pitch/time shifter out there that will work with it, but I didn't find any when I searched around... Good luck!

WebService::FreeDB might be fragile

[morgue-ann]

freedb.org haven't added a general purpose search to the cddbd server. It can only be searched by discid.

The full-text search is still labelled experimental in CVS, though the page at freedb.org doesn't warn about that anymore.

I've chosen to download the database to a local server and tweak the server code (in C-- I'm nowhere with Perl) to allow full-text searches. I ripped about 30 CDs with EAC before I knew how to set the tagging options right so I'm missing track numbers.

mp3 tagger for windows

[elohim]

I've tried some German program called MP3Tag, but I'm looking for something better. Does anyone have a recommendation for the best mp3 tagging and renaming utility for windows?

Re:mp3 tagger for windows

[startleman]

Tag & Rename see this comment

Re:defacto?

[Alan]

When was the last time you heard someone say they were going to download some wmas off the internet? MP3 is what people use to refer to digital music files, be it an actual mp3, a wma, an ogg, or whatever.

Personally I think that wma will gain a foothold only because the default tools in windows only rip to that, but I think that mp3 is "easier" as all the hardware and software that plays digital music play it. It might not be as good as ogg or aac or wma, or allow the music industry to control it through DRM, but it's the lowest common denominator that everyone understands and supports.

Also, I doubt that there's a WMA *only* hardware player out there :)

Agreed. Ogg is going nowhere.

[Ars-Fartsica]

Ogg files do not decompress as simply as MP3s. More processing activity == more power used == less battery life. So Ogg is dead in the portable market.

Re:Agreed. Ogg is going nowhere.

[spike hay]

Ogg files do not decompress as simply as MP3s. More processing activity == more power used == less battery life. So Ogg is dead in the portable market.


The excess power taken up by that is exceedingly minimal. Absolutely nothing compared to the power going to your headphones, for example. In my experience, OggDrop, the encoder I use, encodes much faster than Lame. If this power consumption was such a problem, then why do you think so many mp3 player manufacturers have Ogg support?

People here seem to have the misconception that Ogg is hardly ever used. It's very popular. Make no mistake.

Re:Agreed. Ogg is going nowhere.

[MooseGuy529]

Worse, they require a large, floating-point (yes, there is an integer version, too, but it's still big) decoder that needs memory space to store decompressed music. From the sound of iRiver's website, it's pretty hard to implement OGG in a player that wasn't really designed to have large new codecs installed.

Re-ripping

[Anonymous Coward]

Last week I started re-ripping my 2,000+ CD collection to OGG. It's going well. I should be finished near end of 2004.

Re:Re-ripping

[Anonymous Coward]

Last week I started re-ripping my 2,000+ CD collection to OGG. It's going well. I should be finished near end of 2004.

I re-ripped all of my (mere) 120 CDs over a weekend, with it running in the background while I was doing other stuff. :-)

where to start?

[Daytona955i]

I've thought it would be a great idea to start looking at an open source project and learn to code that way. Unfortunately it's been a hair pulling experience. I know the basics (like loops, variables, functions etc...) and I can write small little programs but I never quite know how to help a large project. I've looked at the kernel... voom, right over my head.

My biggest luck has recently been with perl. I've found it very useful in even writing small useful programs. Since it is one of the higher level languages, there is usually less code and can sometimes be quite readable. (though sometimes not) Howevever the desire is still there to help on larger projects in c or c++.... I just don't know where to start. Can anyone recommend a smallish well documented program that a beginner can look at and possibly help with?
-Chris

Re:where to start?

[Emil Brink]

[Perl]can sometimes be quite readable.

Whoa man, when you start with the compliments, things just turn to butter in your hands, and plain melt! Amazing. :)

Re:where to start?

[kj0rn]

try coding something usefull to you, then interest other people in adding patches/improvements to you code... it's a good way to start. Don't limit yourself to computery people, I'm coding a kite design program for kite designers. kjorn

Re:defacto?

[Artifakt]

WMA actually has some real uses which will give it at least a small minority share. (Until Microsoft's DRM tech doubtless obliterates them, by about Longhorn). If you've ever seen an MP3 sampled at 192 or 256 K and 44 Khz stereo, for a source on analog tape or LP, Microsoft offers free (as in beer) conversion programs that will make it a WMA file about 1/5th to 1/10th the size with no significant losses. (Naturally for MS, they don't work the other way). Until a lot of home rippers realize that there is just no way to get more quality out of a source than it has, or someone writes OSS to "distill" an oversized MP3 to a smaller one, this will make WMA popular with people whose hard drives have become overly filled with oversampled old Vinyl.

looks alot like something I did recently

[Anonymous Coward]

This looks very similar to a little Perl program I recently wrote, although mine doesn't use a CDDB-type system.

Anyway, it's called 'Audiotag,' and is designed to be a decent mass tagger with sane options and supports MP3, OGG, and FLAC.

If you're interested... Audiotag

OCD too strong...

[racas]

To use a utility like this.

So I wrote my own. When you use a utility that downloads the information off the internet, you're sometimes left with foreign or otherwise incorrect spelling, incorrect information, and incomplete information. So I spend an extra couple of minutes at rip time and ensure my ripper has the right information. The result: All my ID3 tags are properly formatted have have the correct inforamation, with Track, Artist, Album, Genre, and Year.

At current count, I've got 8,486 files, totalling 44.5GB.

The information is stored in a mysql database, as well as the ID3 tags in the files themselves.

looks similar to Audiotag

[Ender Ryan]

Shit, I didn't mean to post this anonymously... Here it is again logged in...

This looks very similar to a little Perl program I recently wrote, although mine doesn't use a CDDB-type system.

Anyway, it's called 'Audiotag,' and is designed to be a decent mass tagger with sane options and supports MP3, OGG, and FLAC.

If you're interested... Audiotag

Tag and Rename

[startleman]

Tag & Rename is a great utility (windows) for . . .you guessed it - Tagging and Renaming MP3's (works for .ogg and .wma too). It can connect to FreeDB to retreive track info from your mp3's (if they're in the correct order, organized by album, etc). I've use it since ver. 1.3 and have loved it, once you get used to the interface.

Sad state of open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't the searching/orginization/manipulation of extended attribute info for a file done with the orginal macintosh OS filesystem?

For the most part, this mp3 file/tag orginization library, package, user interface thingy is a solution looking for a problem to solve.

If i use both the artist, cd title, and song title in the file name, and use a seperate directory for each artist and maybe if i use a subdirectory for each cd....

How about spending the time to write a user friendly front end and user friendly documentation for text processing/text manipulation/file searching/file manipulation which does everything using the standard diff, cat, grep, tail, cut, sed, awk, etc.... included in unix/linux?

Please exclude the 'RTFM' comments since 99% of end users won't want to use command line tools and many /. linux readers complain about the lack of desktop linux usage.

Healthy attitude (OT)

[janbjurstrom]

redtail1's point and attitude is sadly a bit rare. Learning, exploring, sharing; while understanding those who "just want to get [var.thing] done". But I'd say the former is more central to the open source way, than the latter.

Pride in one's accomplishments is fine, but--and I'm not saying that's what the grandparent (jargoone) is doing--the bashing and negativity is so unuseful (unless very witty); stop energy as Dave Winer calls it. I mightn't like Winer very much, but I've learned plenty from him and his code.

There are things to learn, and to improve upon, everywhere. (Even stuff out of fortress Redmond ..once in a blue moon.) We should concentrate on finding all-the-possible-(GPL-or-BSD-compliant)-uses-under -the-sun for all this open source.

Good post, redtail1. Power to you. Sorry to go OT on y'all.

Real geeks use shell scripts

[sprekken]

This doesn't do tagging, but I'd love to see someone hack support for it in the shell... any takers?

Here you go: mkaudiocd.sh

hmmmm.... interesting.

Tagging MP3s with CDDB

[Willard B. Trophy]

I was a bit disappointed with what autotag.pl could do. I've been looking for a program that would, given a directory of MP3s ripped from a CD, calculate the freedb DiscID, and get the names from there.

Today I found mp3cddb, a Perl/shell program to do just that. It's a little old -- it only supports ID3v1 -- but it's GPL, so we can fix that.

Hoping some other folks find this useful ...

Re:'cause ripping != encoding

[rduke15]

How did it come to pass that mp3 ripper's don't pull this data from the CD?

The rippers do pull it. But ripping is not encoding.

I rip to WAV and get the data in the file name. If/when I later batch-encode to mp3 (with lame), there is no tag. I may add it later with yet a different tool.

Windows Media player, etc. all show me data for the CD I am listening to

It may have improved, but it used to show completely wrong data from god knows where. It was not querying freedb or cddb which had the correct data, but some other broken database. It was amazing.

ID3.org has the standard

[Anonymous Coward]

id3.org contains good reference material for both id3v1 and id3v2 tagging information. There is also an overview of ID3 tags implementations for C/C++, Java, ActiveX and Delphi. The implementation page also has pointers to most of the sources referenced in the excellent IBM article.

Re:SHUT THE FUCK UP

[mrondello]

Thank you very much for saying that. It keeps me from having to say it myself.

difference between MS and Emacs

[themusicgod1]

MS will force Clippy on you, whereas Emacs will let you use him if you alt-c-ctr-p-delete-ctr2-pageup. ie you have to want something to get it.

Re:defacto?

[b17bmbr]

holy crap. what's a guy gotta do, surround my comments with ahumor tag?

Re:defacto?

[Alan]

Sorry :) It's hard to tell where the troll ends sometimes these days :)

Yet Another MP3/Ogg Vorbis cataloger

[amitshah]

I've written an MP3 / Ogg Vorbis cataloger, Audiolink, which reads ID3 info from MP3s and Ogg Vorbis comments and populates this info in a database. You can also enter extra information, like "male artist", "female artist", "composer", etc. You can later search the database for music by your favorite composer, or your favorite artists. The search results can be exported to a playlist (symlinks to the original music, so it's audio-player format-free!).

Re:Yet Another MP3/Ogg Vorbis cataloger

[amitshah]

.... and yes, they're all perl scripts.

tag - is this it?

[Doc Ruby]

Perl is my favorite dataprocessing language. Tag editing is great, but where's the Perl module for extracting metadata from the audio data? Tempos? Rhythms? Instrument identification? Tablature transcription? Bayesian correlation? Or in-stream editing MP3S? Mixing? Volume? EQ? Looping/branching on pitches? C'mon, Perl, impress me with your eclecticism.

brainwave

[Doc Ruby]

Hey, it looks like Slashdotters think that MusicBrainz does some of this stuff. Any other contenders?

Easy? Maybe. Professional? Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a godsend for large collections. You can really make file listings look professional

You know what keeps listings of large collections from looking professional?

The fact that they're almost certainly made up of illegally copied music. Yup, really professional there, Skippy.

Re:'cause ripping != encoding

[Lehk228]

Why do it in two steps when CDEX will rip and encode with LAME, it also will put the files into a folder named with the artist name

Re:'cause ripping != encoding

[rduke15]

Why do it in two steps

Because I do it on an old P200. Encoding is very slow, and when I rip I usually want the WAV files fast (for a custom CD, or just for a playlist to use right now). The encoding can wait.

Also, I now encode on my new P4 notebook, but still want to rip on the old P200 which has a Plextor SCSI CD-ROM.