Remotely tagging songs

[jjh]

a question to those of you who are already using firefly: how do you keep your music library up-to-date?
e.g. if you find that you mispelled an artist, how do you change that? I am asking this because to me, being able to remotely tag songs seems almost necessary – I don’t know how I would do without. But maybe the remote-tagging-thing is not so much necessary? is there a workaround that you are using?

so the question to those of you who are firefly already:
do you edit your song tags? how?

[Iris]

There is so many media management programs out there that, in my opinion, I lot of development would have to go into Firefly to even come close to matching the features they have. I use MediaMonkey – in large part due to the ability to integrate scripts with the program. For instance, once I converted my music collection over to a NAS I found out that for playlists to be recognized by Firefly that the paths to the playlists tracks needed to be modified to be picked-up. This was a simple process under MediaMonkey. Another example, is playcounts. Firefly stores these in it’s own database. It’s on my to do list to have these populate back to MediaMonkey.

That said, I do like Firefly’s smart playlist feature. This too is available within MediaMonkey but I’ve ended up using Firefly’s for certain instances and MediaMonkey’s for others. I guess it all depends on one’s listening habits.

Hope this helps some.

Iris

[kenzo]

@jjh wrote:

a question to those of you who are already using firefly: how do you keep your music library up-to-date?
…
so the question to those of you who are firefly already:
do you edit your song tags? how?

I use iTunes.

[jjh]

That’s interesting to hear, thank you for your feedback!

@kenzo: Is your setup as follows: Many clients can listen via firefly, while only one can listen and edit by directly opening the library (because of iTunes’ library-locking behaviour)?

@Iris: I went to check out mediamonkey, looks interesting to me, sad to see it is a win-only solution (we have macintosh computers at home)

While thinking the discussion over, it came to me that there are (at least) two different usage scenarios – one does not need the remote editing thing, the other one does:

1.) One PC for Listening&Importing&Editing and many Listen-only clients
Server: This would be one computer in the home network where all music is stored – this computer would be used for importing new music into the library and for tag editing e.g. by directly opening the music library in iTunes. Clients: All other clients connect via firefly, but they are only used like a RokuSoundbridge kind of thing: Great for listening, but no importing/tagediting etc. In this scenario, there is no need for firefly to support tag editing.

2.) One storage place and many computers to Listen&Import&Edit songs
Server: This could be a NAS device running firefly to serve a music library for concurrent read/write access to a bunch of PCs/laptops. The NAS does not offer any user interface to import&edit music. Clients: Rather, importing&editing has to be done using the clients. In this scenario, it is crucial for firefly to support importing and editing of information.

I hope I could crystallize two different scenarios of using firefly. When I became interested in firefly, I had scenario2 in mind. Has firefly been built with rather scenario1 in mind?

My refined question to those of you already using firefly is:
What is your usage scenario, what is your setup? Can you identify with scenario1 or 2?

[CCRDude]

I somehow don’t seem to get the problem here 😉

I do have a SMB (CIFS) share on my NAS (using standard Samba), so I can use any ID3-Tagger (or Vorbis-Tagger or whatever) to change every file I like. Granted, I have to tell Firefly to rescan, or wait until it does this automatically, but with so many tagger applications out there, and every NAS having a way of accessing the files through the filesystem, isn’t some interface for “remote tagging” directly through Firefly a bit of overkill? Samba is a specialist in file networking, and there are a multitude of specialists in tagging, so why re-invent all that (unless iTunes would directly support remote tagging, which it doesn’t)?

Speed may be the only reason – rewriting a file over a network connection may be slow through a NAS. But if you use an intelligent tagger that creates tags with a bit of padding, it’s much faster.

I have just re-tagged my whole collection (nearly 20.000 songs) through a Samba share and ID3-TagIT and TagsRevisited, adding album art, artist URLs and fixing Genres, without any problems arising. Can’t put this into one of your scenarios though – who can edit and who not is not just “one” or “all”, but exactly those I give write access to the Samba share, making it possible for one person to add songs and update tags, and for others only to listen, just as I want.

[jjh]

Good point, that would work for me as well! Maybe I should have a look at those specialized tag editors. I have so far mostly used iTunes, and I have to admit that during the discussion, i had iTunes as player and tag editor in mind. The problem with iTunes is that it locks the library so only one person can edit tags at a time. So I thought: A bunch of people (using iTunes, connected via firefly) could play and tag songs at the same time if only firefly supported tag editing. Anyway, this is how I was thinking. As for now, it is interesting for me to see how others are using firefly, so thank you CCRDude for your feedback!

[neu242]

I have really been missing remote tag editing as well. I run into tags with errors every day when I stream music to my work place, it’s quite annoying.

Has there been any progress on this issue?

[fizze]

Well CCRDude, the issue is that with a large library ratings become more and more useful.
And ratings aren’t really a static thing. If there would be a nice program that I can use to listen to my music and also rate it, I’m happy. (Many tools do this)
But I haven’t found a single one that also stores the ratings in the track’s metadata yet.

Banshee 1.6 is said to have this feature. A previous patch sadly doesn’t work anymore.

[Author]

Posts