Slaad's Programming Stuff

So it seems Zombie has aroused (So many undead puns, so little time) some interest. Nifty. Now if you want me to continue development, send me money. I kid, I kid. (Unless you do wish to send me money, in which case...)

Two things of note to report... The first is that the issue of writing metadata to file specific places will be resolved. As we speak I'm working on a plugin architecture. Plugins, which are the new black, will be able to tell Zombie a list of MIME types they can read / write metadata to. So at this stage I have a plugin which handles the "audio/" MIME super type and writes meta data to the Audio:* attributes. At some stage a plugin that writes ID3 tags or Vorbis/FLAC comments may pop up.

The second is that updating the MusicBrainz database isn't really possible from the RDF interface. All one can do is say "This fingerprint is also a match to this pre existing track in the database". This is teh suck and hopefully something that'll be rectified at some stage

You may have noticed I've been playing a game: see how many Zombie puns I can make in a news post and then try to break that record.

So, as is my style, I've found a new toy - MusicBrainz. As a result I've ported (read: Compiled) their core library, libmusicbrainz, and written a client around it. My client, Zombie, has some cool features such as supporting any media file that the Media Kit supports. However it does not write the tagged information to file specific meta information (ie. ID3 tags or Ogg Tags, etc) - it only writes them to the Audio:* BFS attributes. If you want to move them into file specific tags you'll need an external application to do so. I recommend Army Knife.

There's some features I still need to add - updating information stored in the MusicBrainz database, optional meta information extraction (Eg. Only write title and year tags, etc). I'm not sure if I'll include file renaming.

Oh, yeah, a screenshot. Braaaaaaains.

In the above screenshot you'll notice that the file I've dragged on has absolutely no local meta information - it's a fresh rip from a CD I own. MusicBrainz works by generating an accoustic fingerprint of the track (Called a TRM) and uses that to look up results. If you have meta information associated with the file (Eg. Audio:* tags) it'll use that as well and get a much closer match. But even so, you can see here that out of nearly four million tracks it narrowed it down to two possible tracks (Being the same track, but on different albums).