Remotely tagging songs

[ToF]

Hi!
first post here, so to begin with: thanks for the great work.

I may be wrong but there is no way currently to remotely tag a track via mt-daap.
All my music is on a remote server and I don’t want to use an incoming/production directory organisation so well-tagged and badly-tagged songs are all in same place on the server. Therefore I often find the mistagged songs while I’m listening/searching for them and it would be much less pain if I could edit the tags right in my client application (in my case Rhythmbox on a linux box)

I guess it would be possible to do this with plugins equivalent to the existing metadata parsers system, and expose the feature via a server extension (like those for adding playlists)

I think it could be a great alternative to something like a web based solution, particularly for smoother integration in client applications (of course those would have to be hacked a little to support the extensions).

What do you think ?

[rpedde]

@ToF wrote:

Hi!
first post here, so to begin with: thanks for the great work.

I may be wrong but there is no way currently to remotely tag a track via mt-daap.
All my music is on a remote server and I don’t want to use an incoming/production directory organisation so well-tagged and badly-tagged songs are all in same place on the server. Therefore I often find the mistagged songs while I’m listening/searching for them and it would be much less pain if I could edit the tags right in my client application (in my case Rhythmbox on a linux box)

I guess it would be possible to do this with plugins equivalent to the existing metadata parsers system, and expose the feature via a server extension (like those for adding playlists)

I think it could be a great alternative to something like a web based solution, particularly for smoother integration in client applications (of course those would have to be hacked a little to support the extensions).

What do you think ?

Yup, that’s something that on the milestone list for 1.1, but we’ll see where it gets. Doing tag writing for a whole range of different file types might be hard. Might end up consolidating to a single tag reader/writer like taglib or something.

It’s something actively under consideration, though.

— Ron

[grommet]

Not only hard, but dangerous… due to the lack of “true” standards and creative usage of overly flexible formats. It’s an absolute nightmare to maintain compatibility and interoperability between various other media products, especially when you support a large list of formats like Firefly does today.

IMHO, I’d make it very low on the target list. It opens up a huge can of worms…

[rpedde]

@grommet wrote:

Not only hard, but dangerous… due to the lack of “true” standards and creative usage of overly flexible formats. It’s an absolute nightmare to maintain compatibility and interoperability between various other media products, especially when you support a large list of formats like Firefly does today.

IMHO, I’d make it very low on the target list. It opens up a huge can of worms…

As a first-pass, I was actually thinking of saving new metainfo to the “side” of the file, and writing contrib scripts to merge saved metainfo back into the file. So it might be stored in a “.tag” file (or whatever) with the same name as the song.

Would be non-destructive, although messy.

[ToF]

maybe I’m totally wrong as i don’t know firefly’s internals but I figure it can be pretty safely implemented.

If you have a server extension that says change the (say artist) tag of this song then if there is a tag writter installed that supports this tag for this particular song format then tag writting is done else nothing is changed.

Moreover it’s really an “extra” functionnality and those who don’t trust it can choose not to use it. But maybe again it changes the server’s internals too drastically.

The only thing where I see a difficulty is how to get the user feedback of what happened. I don’t know if the songs listing of a daap share can be “refreshed” without disconnecting/reconnecting. Maybe it’s a client issue.

[rpedde]

Doing it for mp3 files would probably be fairly easy. But for anything else, there is a problem of mapping types. WMA supports multiple artist tags, for example. Just plain READING tags turns out to be a harder problem than it seems, so writing them would be worse. I think that’s what the objection was, generally.

[slu125]

Thank you for this great program, Ron!

Remote tagging capabilities would be really nice. Especially since my favorite music player Amarok is about to support daap (basic functionality is already implemented).

[jjh]

For me, being able to remotely tag my songs is a key feature to using firefly. Considering the last post in this thread was in July:

What is the project’s current status concerning this feature?
Is the remote tagging thing being worked on?
Is it part of an upcoming milestone?

I think I could maybe set apart some time to help build this feature, but I would certainly need some help and guidance, because I am totally new to the firefly project. What programming language was used to write firefly? If I were to implement the remote tagging feature, could I use a well-defined API to write a small plugin, or would I have to mess around with the server’s source?

EDIT:
oh, and yes, I am using OSX. On the website, it says “Support for Mac OSX (coming soon!)”. Do the nightlies work with OSX already?

[fizze]

yes, they do. 🙂

[rpedde]

@jjh wrote:

What is the project’s current status concerning this feature?

Not impelemented

Is the remote tagging thing being worked on?

No, not currently.

Is it part of an upcoming milestone?

Only in the sense that everything that hasn’t been added is destined to be added some time in the future. 🙂

But no, not formally.

I think I could maybe set apart some time to help build this feature, but I would certainly need some help and guidance, because I am totally new to the firefly project. What programming language was used to write firefly?

It’s in C.

If I were to implement the remote tagging feature, could I use a well-defined API to write a small plugin, or would I have to mess around with the server’s source?

Right now there are only ill-defined apis. Only recently has the source been modularized into plugins, and more needs to be done. The database in particuarly still needs to be abstracted and moved to a plugin infrastructure.

I think it would best be implemented first pass as a plugin, but there will be both server side and plugin side code to impelment — the server right now has no notion of a “write-back tag”, so the plumbing on the server side to route to a plugin would have to be written.

oh, and yes, I am using OSX. On the website, it says “Support for Mac OSX (coming soon!)”. Do the nightlies work with OSX already?

It’s always worked on osx as a posix app — I’ve developed it from day one on a mac. Recently there is a prefs pane and menu bar dingus for it, but it’s always worked from the terminal.

I have some specified ideas about how I think this might be implemented. If you are seriously interested on working on it, you can contact me at [email protected].

— Ron

[Author]

Posts