There are a few nice and shiny services out there that offer automatic MP3 re-tagging, but I have never found one that does everything I want. The fully automated solutions really scare me, and others require that you use iTunes. I'm sure they work fine for the majority of people (in fact a lot of them work on both PC and Mac), but I wanted something a little more powerful. For a long time it's been a dream of mine to find a program that can query the Last.fm database and re-tag my music (specifically genres) using their accurately crowd-sourced information. I even went so far as to hobble together my own PHP script that did this, but it was clunky and I am not very proud of it (so I won't be posting it here). This dream came true when I found MusicBrainz Picard Tagger.

Right out of the box, Picard will scan your music library and find the proper band names, album titles, release dates, and song titles for your music. It will also find all kinds of extra information such as the publisher, country of origin, catalog number, and barcode for specific albums. If you agree with the information it suggests, you can click "Save" and rest easy knowing you're on your way to MP3 tag bliss.

So what's this about Last.fm tags? Picard Tagger supports plugins, and more specifically, there is a plugin called LastFMPlus. LastFMPlus extends Picard's tagging capabilities to include very specific genres, grouping (more broad genres), moods (happy, sad, trippy), occasions (summer, driving), and more. What's even better is Picard will perform searches on a per-track basis, so you don't have to worry about artists or albums that cover more than one genre. There is a pretty detailed tutorial on how to install and use it on their website, but it's been down for me more than once, so I've hosted the tutorial myself which you can download right here. I've also hosted the plugin myself, which can be downloaded here. Their tutorial doesn't cover everything and assumes you already know how to use Picard, so I'll quickly go over the main points so you don't have to read any more than you already are.

Installation & Setup

After you've downloaded Picard, install it but don't open it yet. Download the LastFMPlus plugin and extract it to the plugins folder within your Picard installation directory. Once you've extracted it, there should be a lastfmplus folder in the plugins folder. Within that, there should be two python (.py) files. If you're hardcore, you could open these in a text editor and modify the plugin yourself, but you probably won't need to.

Run Picard and do what any self respecting geek would do first: open the options. You can click through and enable and disable whatever you like, but in order to enable the plugin, you'll have to click Plugins and enable Last.fm Plus. You can also enable other useful plugins that came bundled with Picard, like Disc Numbers, which will properly tag multi-disc albums. When you're done, click OK to close the options panel, and then open it back up again. Next to Plugins on the left side, there should be [+] icon indicating there's more underneath that menu item. Go ahead and click that to reveal the Last.fm Plus plugin options. You can play with these settings or leave them all at default, but what you have to do is go over to the 2nd tab and click the bold "Load Defaults" button at the bottom. Now click OK.

Let the tagging begin

Now you're ready to really get started. Picard has two main windows: the left side which shows you unmatched files, and the right side which shows you songs that are ready to tag. Use the toolbar buttons at the top to add individual files or an entire folder to the left window. Once they are listed, click "Cluster" to group them by album. If you're tagging individual songs, there's no need to cluster. If you already have fairly well tagged music, you can select which songs from the left window that you want to look up and click "Lookup". The selected songs will be moved to the right side and let you know it's "loading album information". A few seconds later, you should be able to see which, if any, of your selected songs were found. There will be a rectangular meter next to the matched songs indicating how well your song was matched to the one in the database. If it was a perfect match, you'll see a fully green meter. You can right click on the song in the right window and inspect its details to see the custom tags that were added by LastFMPlus. If you're happy with the results, select the song(s) you want to save and click "Save".

If your tags are a mess or the "Lookup" button is finding incorrect matches, there's still hope. Picard uses fingerprinting to determine the origin of your music even if you have completely incorrect tags or no tags at all. Add your music to the left window as you normally would, except click "Scan" instead of "Lookup". It takes a little longer than usual, but it will more than often find a match. There were a few cases when, despite proper pre-existing tags, "Lookup" failed to properly find a match, but "Scan" did. 

That wasn't so bad

With my 1000+ album music library, Picard was unable to find proper tag information for about a dozen of them. One of the downsides is that if the album isn't in Picard's database, then you can't use the LastFMPlus plugin to at least get proper genre information. Even with this limitation, a 1.2% failure rate is something that I'm willing to live with. Not to mention it even found some rarer bootlegs that I wasn't expecting it to find. I also had some bizarre matches with a few albums, specifically in cases when it finds matches across multiple releases of the same album (like deluxe editions), so I had to manually move around the matched tracks so that they made up a single complete matched album. You also might have problems finding albums if you're searching for them on (or before) their release date. This is because Picard uses a user-contributed database, so if nobody else has added that album before you, it's not going to pull any matches. This is a good opportunity for you to contribute!

So it's not perfect, but it's damn good. It has satisfied my need for perfect tags the most out of any solution I've tried, and it allows a wide range of customization. Now we can all create incredibly specific playlists depending on any mood or occasion. 

Comments

Yeah, this is another post about managing my digital music collection. It's a doozy.

I have been an iTunes user for years, but it was only recently that I decided to force myself to switch to another music library application. I've tried a few over the years, including Winamp and more recently Songbird, but I felt they all seemed to lack some pretty basic functionalty that a picky user like myself just needs. Winamp was alright, but its lack of drag-and-drop always bothered me. I liked how iTunes let me drag a song directly from my playlist window to an MSN contact so I could easily initiate a file transfer. Songbird is open source and seemed to have an abundance of features, but it ended up using even more RAM on my computer than iTunes did. A music library application does not need to use more than 150-200 MB of RAM when it would be better off spent by another application that is better suited for it. I could go on about why I like to have a buffer of free RAM versus the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" argument, but I won't.

So although I have been fairly pleased by iTunes over the years, I was starting to get a little annoyed by the sluggish interface, especially when scrolling through a library of 8000+ songs. Add album art into the mix, and your RAM usage skyrockets while the interface gets even more sluggish. So I decided to finally make the switch to a little piece of software called foobar2000. Foobar2000 is an application that you can tell was made by programmers. The interface is ugly, menu items are hard to find, and there are no handy "getting started" wizards when you first launch it. The appeal of it, though, is its blazing speed (launches in about 2 seconds), low RAM usage (15-25 MB with over 9000 [har har] songs) and most importantly, the fact that you can customize anything in the application. The difficult part is figuring out how.

Ugly as sin.

Foobar has a fairly active community of programmers constantly making and updating components that add all kinds of features and tools to the application. One of the first things I did was download a custom UI component (columns UI) that let me create an interface that closely matched iTunes. There are numerous UI components available, some that can completely reskin the player. I also changed the color scheme to something that was a little easier on the eyes. It's not quite as slick as other applications but it does the job nicely.

Much better.

So now to the reasons why foobar is a complete dreamboat:

• Complete customization of the interface - Besides being able to customize where interface items are laid out, I wanted to see how many songs were inside each of my playlists, as well as how many hours, minutes, and seconds each playlist was. I made it show me. I wanted to see the codec and bitrate of the file I was playing in the status bar. I made it show me. You can pretty much do anything you want.
• File format support - Besides the standard MP3, foobar will also play pretty much anything you throw at it. If you find a format that isn't natively supported by foobar, you can be pretty sure somebody made a component that adds support for it. AC3 is one example.
• Folder monitoring library - Instead of dragging files into foobar to add them to your library (like iTunes), you can tell foobar to monitor one or many folders on your PC and it will add them to the library automatically. Delete a file from the folder, it gets removed from your library. You can also tell it to ignore certain file types.
• X to X file conversion - Want that FLAC file converted to OGG? You can do that. Though that is a little obscure of an example, I've found myself needing to convert AC3 files (ripped from a DVD) to MP3 a few times.
• Mass tag/rename/move - Pretty self explanitory. You can retag, rename, or move large amounts of songs at once. Format the target file names however you like using built in variables. Have it sort files into an organized folder structure based on artist and album tags.
• Statistics - With an optional component, you can keep track of ratings, play counts, and dates songs were last played. By default, your tags are not modified. A nice option for those (like me) that hate when applications sneakily rewrite your tags.
• Autoplaylists - These are basically the same as Smart Playlists in iTunes, except probably a little more powerful. You can literally write your own queries that are actually quite similar to SQL. If you want a list of songs from the 90s that you haven't listened to in the past week, you can achieve it with: NOT %last_played% DURING LAST 1 WEEK AND (date GREATER 1989 AND date LESS 2000).
• Album art - Displays album art embedded in files or saved externally (folder.jpg in Windows).

It even lets me drag-and-drop songs into MSN. It's pretty much perfect for me. A few other features worth mentioning are gapless playback, keyboard shortcuts, and yes, it can scrobble to Last.fm.

The only gripe I have with it, is that it doesn't have built-in searching of album art, and it can't import album art downloaded by iTunes. For this, I had to download a separate application called Album Art Downloader (accurate name), which can search an entire directory for missing artwork (if you tell it to look for folder.jpg files). Once it's figured out what you're missing, you can get it to search various online sources (Google, Amazon, Last.fm, Discogs...) for artwork and automatically save it to the appropriate directory. The awesome part is, its possible to integrate into foobar if you download the foobar COM server component.

The thing that turns people away from foobar the most is how much time and effort that needs to go into configuring it to look and function exactly how you want. Since components are all made by third party developers, the options interface for most of them are all different, adding that extra level of complexity. Luckily there are plenty of people online in forums willing to help you out.

oh my god options

I guess my point is that if you're looking for that perfect player for your music, you're probably going to have to make it yourself. Most of the work is done for you, you just need to spend a few hours customizing it to meet your needs. It'll be worth it.

Comments

Last.fm just released an experimental little application called Boffin, which scans your entire music library and creates a tag cloud based on all of the genres in your collection. It doesn't just read the genre tags for every song, though, it instead looks up every song of yours in the Last.fm database and creates a tag cloud using their own tags. So you don't have to worry about retagging all your stuff! The result is something very similar to the regular Last.fm radio, except it plays from your own collection rather than theirs.

Do I want to listen to only folk and punk? Yes please. You can read about it here or download it here for PC or Mac.

It also lets you export your tag cloud to Wordle, which I wrote about before if you remember. This is mine:

PRETTY NIFTY.

Comments

There are some problems that I encounter from time to time that make me say to myself: "Somebody must have figured out an easy way to do this by now", and most of the time I am right. There are times, though, where no matter how hard I search, the solution always evades me. Today was almost one of those times.

I found a great deal on a Acer Aspire One netbook, so I couldn't help myself from buying it with some accumulated Christmas money. The only problem was that it came with Linux and I really had no desire to figure it out. I might leave that challenge for another day. I told myself I'll just format it and install Windows XP, no problem. It doesn't have a CD drive, but you can boot the setup files from a USB disk, right?

Hours of Googling resulted in several completely over complicated guides on how to create a bootable USB disk, and I was beginning to think that I would have to buy an external CD-ROM, or at least find somebody that owned one. It wasn't until later today that somebody pointed me towards a handy little application, oddly enough, called WinSetupFromUSB. The nice folks that made it basically packaged up all the complicated steps in creating a bootable USB disk into a simple application with a GUI. By following this guide, I was able to create my bootable setup disk in just a few minutes.

Now here I am, writing to you on my fresh installation of Windows XP. On my brand new netbook. In bed.

Comments