New Music Tag Reader -- Testers needed (2 Viewers)

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zombiepig

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orencha - i don't know a lot about dts files, but wouldn't it be possible to convert them to a multichannel-lossless file format? i'm pretty sure flac supports multichannel... (although correct playback might be hard to setup)
 

zag2me

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One question/suggestion/request:

Some audio files currently do not support APE/ID3 or other tags. Two examples that I have are DTS and AC3 files. It is true that those files are mostly used as part of a video, but I have more & more Audio-only titles in DTS and AC3 (multi-channel remastered albums are now very common... Depeche Mode, for example, re-master now all back-catalog - 11 albums - in AC3/DTS formats and SACD. I already bought 3 of them and have some dozens of DTS files - one song per file).

Although AC3/DTS files are playable in MP (if you have the correct DirectShow filters), the only available information for them is the file name.

Is it possible to put tags in an external file? e.g. songfilename.xml file, which contains tags for songfilename.dts? or perhaps a folder.xml file which contains tags for many files in it?

If not - can this feature please be added? It will be good for all file formats which do not support tags (I can also think of WAV files and maybe other future formats).

I would like to read your opinions!

The standard for keeping DTS and AC3 Rips in lossless format has always been FLAC files. Convert them to this format and you should have no problems reading any of the tags.

http://flac.sourceforge.net/
 

orencha

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The standard for keeping DTS and AC3 Rips in lossless format has always been FLAC files. Convert them to this format and you should have no problems reading any of the tags.

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

The only way for me to play AC3/DTS losslessly is SPDIF pass-thru (this is what I do in MP). This also gives the best possible quality, if other options were available.

I don't understand the Idea of storing this data in FLAC, because:

1. The multi-channel FLAC file will be bigger in size (lossless FLAC vs lossy AC3/DTS).
2. The only way to listen to multichannel FLAC later will be (for me) to re-encode (possibly, on-the-fly with ffdshow) to AC3. This LOSSY-->LOSSLESS-->LOSSY procedure doesn't make any sense for me...
3. My AC3/DTS files are already working AS-IS. I don't see any reason converting them, just for tags support...

The only conversion that does make sense, Is to encapsulate (not convert or recompress) the original DTS/AC3 streams into some kind of container format that supports both DTS/AC3 and tags.

The only container format I'm aware of at the moment, is WAV. However, tags support in WAV is very limited, and not supported by MP at all at the moment.

If anyone knows a different container format that can hold AC3/DTS streams, can hold tags, and supported by MP - please let me know ;-)

If not - I return to the point where I began - there should be an option to store tags in a separate file.
 

zombiepig

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1. The multi-channel FLAC file will be bigger in size (lossless FLAC vs lossy AC3/DTS).
2. The only way to listen to multichannel FLAC later will be (for me) to re-encode (possibly, on-the-fly with ffdshow) to AC3. This LOSSY-->LOSSLESS-->LOSSY procedure doesn't make any sense for me...

good points - i forgot dts was lossy :oops:

what about matroska as a container? mka supports dts compression, but i have no idea if mp can read tags from mka files.
 

orencha

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good points - i forgot dts was lossy :oops:

what about matroska as a container? mka supports dts compression, but i have no idea if mp can read tags from mka files.

The documentation says that mka DOES support both DTS and Tags; However, from my experience, MKA tags are complex, and not (yet) supported by MP.

Most people use AC3/DTS formats just as part of a Video+Audio container, so I beleive those formats will keep being "the black sheep" when it comes to Music.

One additional idea that just came up: Technically, do you think it's possible to just append a 128-byte file (with ID3v1 information) to the end of a DTS file? Can the grabber have an option to look for such tags in DTS/AC3 files? I know it would produce a non-standard file, but I think it can work. Those additional 128 bytes should not harm the receiver, I think...

Anyway, I still think that XML or other text-based formats holding Tags, is not a bad idea after all. Even for file formats that DO support tags! XML is so powerful and so easy to use...
 

zombiepig

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Anyway, I still think that XML or other text-based formats holding Tags, is not a bad idea after all. Even for file formats that DO support tags! XML is so powerful and so easy to use...

i don't disagree with that... just trying to see if there's a way of doing it now without waiting for code changes :p
 

piranha

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  • September 17, 2005
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    Just ran the tests with .29 version and yes, the speed on regular files is quite good, but if files are bigger in size (have lots of files around 100 mb and so), that slows it down.
    Also having some error reading tag messages and there were several problems with covers detected.
    Overall good job!

    Smaller files:
    9/12/2006 9:05:43 PM Retrieved 2367 tags in 00:02:34.734 (0.065 seconds per track)
    Bigger files:
    9/12/2006 7:07:05 PM Retrieved 199 tags in 00:00:43.296 (0.218 seconds per track)

    Not sure what the yellow exclamation mark means. Had plenty of them.
     

    orencha

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    Just tested 0.29 with 2000+ MP3, FLAC and DTS files.
    All tags are detected OK... Only tagless files produce errors (Perhaps the filename can then be used as fallback?)

    P.S: many of the tested files (MP3 and FLAC) had Hebrew name tags, and I saw no problem with the new tag reader (which is one great improvement over the existing tag reader, which doesn't like non-English tags).
     

    SteveV

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  • October 13, 2005
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    Just ran the tests with .29 version and yes, the speed on regular files is quite good, but if files are bigger in size (have lots of files around 100 mb and so), that slows it down.
    Also having some error reading tag messages and there were several problems with covers detected.
    Overall good job!

    Smaller files:
    9/12/2006 9:05:43 PM Retrieved 2367 tags in 00:02:34.734 (0.065 seconds per track)
    Bigger files:
    9/12/2006 7:07:05 PM Retrieved 199 tags in 00:00:43.296 (0.218 seconds per track)

    Not sure what the yellow exclamation mark means. Had plenty of them.

    Hmm, that is considerably slower. What kind of files (mp3, wma, ogg, ape, etc) are they?

    Regarding the yellow exclamation; it means that some of the basic fields (artist, album, track, duration, etc) were missing. I'ts not a critical error but I thought it would be nice to be able to flag files that were missing what I'd consider the minimum requied info.
     
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