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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."
I'm going to say "Where the ogg version?" :)
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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.
Identifying Music with MusicBrainz
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
To be honest, I'm waiting for the Common Lisp port...
Have those lossless compression afficionados no dignity?
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
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).
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.
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)
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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
#!/bin/csh cat $0
;-)
nirvanis
Filenames are not an appropriate place to store metadata because they are volatile when moving a file between media.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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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.
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).
Photos.
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.
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
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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.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
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"?
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
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
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