Alternative database handling for “compilations”

[tri]

Hi

This is little something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Let’s say that originally stuff in the database is:

TITLE=”Song Title”
ALBUM=”Album Title”
ARTIST=”Artist Name”

I’d like to be able to configure mt-daapd so that in case the
compilation-flag in the song is present, it would be entered to the
database e.g. as following:

TITLE=”Artist Name: Song Title”
ALBUM=”Album Title”
ARTIST=”Various Artists”

I know that the media server is not necessarily the most logical place to
do this, but on the other hand it’s more or less the only place changes can
be made in the world of closed source players if one doesn’t want to
totally screw up the metadata in the music files.

This is something that would be quite useful for us Roku-player users. One
alternative could be that mt-daapd could be present as two daap-server
instances: one with original tags and one with alternative data.

[Anonymous]

I have the same problem, but the exact reverse. I used CDex to rip and it set the artist to Various, and put the actual artist name in the song title.

Andy

[rpedde]

I had some thoughts on that — there is a function called “make_composite_tags” that shuffles around tags for those that are orchestral in a similar way.

Likewise, there was some call to do some other things like that — massage the comment field for various purposes (like doing interesting things with applescript on the client side).

I was trying to decide if it made sense to do some kind of general purpose comment transformation thing, or if I should just special case each common case like the one you are talking about — a “concat artist and title for compilations” or a “split artist and title for compilations”

I’m not opposed to the one you are suggesting, tri.

[Anonymous]

How do the MP3 tags relate to mt-daapd and the SoundBridge? Do you have to transform the tags only for the streaming MP3 but leave the tags on the MP3 in the filesystem alone? Or do you give the artist/album/etc seperately to the Soundbridge and it doesn’t read the tags?

What would be perfect for me is to transform all MP3s in the various folder (I think you already have that implemented for the compilations flag), and use a regexp to transform the current title into a new artist and title. But not modify the tags in the MP3 stored in the filesystem.

Andy

[tri]

rpedde wrote:

I had some thoughts on that — there is a function called “make_composite_tags” that shuffles around tags for those that are orchestral in a similar way.

…

I’m not opposed to the one you are suggesting, tri.

Hahumm, maybe I’ll make some minimalistic effort to implement
the functionality. In the mean time, there seems to be a buffer
overflow bug in make_composite_tags. If a file has both orchestra and
conductor but no artist, the artist becomes “orchestra – conductor”, but
allocated buffer does not have enough space for terminating nul-char.

[rpedde]

look at cvs — your function is already there.

You’ll have to convert your config file to the .ini file config to make it work:

rather than:

key1 value1
key2 value2

you have to change your conf file to:

[general]
key1=value1
key2=value2
key3=value3

and add a section like this:

[scanning]
concat compilations=1

— Ron

[tri]

rpedde wrote:

look at cvs — your function is already there.

Great. Maybe I’ll wait for the next nightly snapshot anyways.

–tri

[rpedde]

I’m trying to cram the playlist parser and the browse/query parser into the same parser. Once I get that, I’ll add the comment-preservation into the config file reader, and add automagic-config-file-fixuping.

Probably be Sat.

— Ron

[tri]

Here is a patch against the 20060317 that is doing the compilation
concat in a way I meant. Some constants in the beginning of the
make_composite_tags fuction could possibly be made configurable,
but maybe it’s not necessary. I also refactored the function a bit.

The only change outside the make_composite_tags function
is that I moved compilation detection of the compilation path
a couple lines up in the code. However, it seems to be no-op
anyways in the current code, but anyways, it’s the correct place.

The patch is in:
http://www.iki.fi/tri/mt-daapd/patch/mt-daapd-cvs-20060317-composite-tags.patch

The patched mp3-scanner.c is in:

http://www.iki.fi/tri/mt-daapd/patch/mp3-scanner.c-20060317-patched

Of course it only concatenates the compilations.

Regards,
–tri

[rpedde]

there were some cut and paste errors in there, but I merged it substantially unchanged. I’ll work to get compdirs working again, fix a minor playlist problem and drop that tomorrow.

— Ron

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