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Year: 2006

Intelligent browsing in foobar

Collecting my thoughts here…

foobarSo, ironically, music is becoming increasingly difficult for me to listen to. As though worrying about an extensive gauntlet of tagging procedures isn’t enough, I just have too much damn music. Browsing alphabetically through upwards of 500 artists is not the best way to go looking for something when you have no idea what you want to hear.

I’ve auditioned various methods of tweaking foobar to ‘deliver’ music to me more or less automatically, and I’m close to having something ideal. The playlist tree component allows for dynamic tree structures (which, unfortunately, can only be rebuilt manually or every time a new song begins); using the titleformatting language, I’ve generated five queries whose purpose it is to ‘coax’ certain albums to starker visibility from the featureless and indifferent music library, to greater or lesser success.

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Setting up a BitTorrent Tracker

So I’ve spent the last couple days trying frantically to get a BitTorrent tracker installed, mostly for the use of my internet acquaintances, their friends, and my friends. Really just a dedicated alternative to YouSendIt and all those other bullshit file sending sites that always have one catch or another.

So, just as a test, I installed OpenTracker, a bare-bones tracker that has no interface, just an announce url. It worked, to my amazement, with minimal effort, but the fact that anybody with the announce url could use it bothered me, and the idea of having searches and invites and requests and all the other bells and whistles of ‘real’ torrent trackers was too tempting and, I felt, within my reach.

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Slightly Streamlined mp3 Tagging Flowchart

I used to require four programs for getting all my tags exactly how I want them: The GodFather (with AllMusicGuide patch), the MusicBrainz Tagger, Mp3tag, and foobar2000. The GodFather was always the first and worst part of my tagging procedures, being slow, refusing to write APE tags, and relying on the Internet Explorer engine.

Now I’ve eliminated both The GodFather and MusicBrainz from the whole grueling process, boiling it down to just Mp3tag and foobar2000, thanks to an AMG-scraping script and a MusicBrainz-scraping script for Mp3tag. The only drawback is that the AMG script doesn’t retrieve album descriptions (which I truthfully won’t miss a bit), and that the scripts use different tag field names (MOOD instead of TONES) to store some of the more frivolous metadata.

However there is some promise in the relative simplicity of Mp3tag’s scripting language, which, with enough knowledge of regular expressions, seems to be capable of parsing anything out of an http request.

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AllMusic’s Tone Intersections

In a previous post about A Flat Hierarchy for Subjective mp3 Tags, I described the arduous and marginally rewarding task of tagging my entire library with as many ‘tones’ tags as AllMusic was able to provide. With foobar2000 0.9 final now less than a week away, these tags may prove useful soon enough. But a few weeks ago, impatient and curious, I decided to put them to another use:

tones intersection chart

By creating a tones/tones tree structure in foobar, I was able to count how often each ‘tone’ intersects with every other ‘tone.’ What you see above is the beginning of that data collection, which I ultimately planned to analyze in…some way.

After Googling around for ideas on tag clustering, I came across gCLUTO, a free piece of software that would, miraculously, do exactly what I needed — namely, magically figure out how best to cluster each tag with related tags. I figured four clusters would be a comfortable number, based on earlier reading I had done on a two-axis theory of musical emotion (intense/relaxed and positive/negative).

topographical cluster visualization

Unfortunately, my computer simply couldn’t handle even constructing and deconstructing the foobar tree without freezing up for about 45 minutes each time. Plus, collecting all this data would have meant hours and hours of work, for a goal whose benefits weren’t very clear to me at all, as well as a halt in incorporating new downloads into my library. It was a pretty exciting couple days while it lasted though.

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City of Daughters tracklist & album art

"City of Daughters" (rear)Last summer I spent a lot of time listening to Destroyer’s City of Daughters. I only had it on vinyl and it lived exclusively on my turntable for the better part of two or three months. I would listen to it on repeat for hours, drinking beer at my tiny kitchen table, soaking in the humidity of a Saturday afternoon in Little Italy.

I refused to listen to it in any other format, because the record had become so personal to me, I needed that tactility of flipping over the record and the intimacy of only listening to it alone in my apartment.

Finally I moved to Cambridge last December, marking the end of that strange, lonely period of my life, and decided I could move on, that the quality of the album demanded that I have it available on my iPod if I needed it on the subway. I was listening to it digitally for the first time, and I was startled when I heard “The Space Race” immediately after “No Cease Fires!” I had been trained through countless listens to know that “The Space Race” begins side B of the album, with that abrupt opening. I thought for sure my iPod was just fucking up again, but when I came home I realized “The Space Race” was actually tagged as track 3.

I wondered how this could have happened, so I looked up tracklists online. As it turns out, both MusicBrainz’ entry and even Merge Records’ own Destroyer catalog list “The Space Race” as track 3. Which means there are two possibilities: either the Merge site was used as a reference for poorly-tagged mp3s, or the CD release actually sports a different track order. My money’s on the former, so re-tag your files and hear it the way it was supposed to be heard.

  1. Comments on the World as Will
  2. No Cease Fires! (Crimes Against the State of Our Love, Baby)
  3. Dark Purposes
  4. Emax I
  5. I Want This Cyclops
  6. Loves of a Gnostic
  7. Emax II
  8. State of the Union
  9. School, and the Girls Who Go There
  10. The Space Race
  11. Melanie and Jennifer and Melanie
  12. War on Jazz II or How I Learned to Love the War on Jazz
  13. Emax III
  14. You Were So Cruel
  15. Signs
  16. Rereading the Marble Faun
  17. Son of the Earth

And here‘s a hi-res picture of the cover art, a slightly out-of-focus one, but, as far as I can tell, the only decent one available online.

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