February 2004 Archives

The way that music files are tagged is all wrong. There must be a better solution.

Like (I suppose) most people reading this I have a large (and growing) collection of music files that I've (legally, of course) ripped from my CDs. The ripping software that I use writes various information about the track into data "tags" that are stored in the file. It does this by querying an online database to find out the track name, artist, album, track number and (least usefully, in my opinion) genre of the track. There are many pieces of software for manipulating these tags and I've recently been working on series of modules that manipulate this data in a format independent manner (so it doesn't matter if you have an Ogg Vorbis file or an MP3 file).

But I'm becoming more and more convinced that this approach needs some work. I store all of my music files in a directory structure on a (large) hard disk that I bought expressly for that purpose. I have a directory for each artist and within that a subdirectory for each album. The album subdirectory contains the actual music files and in the artist directory I also have a number of playlist files (.m3u) which represent the albums. An m3u file is pretty unintelligent. It simply contains the names of the files that make up the album in the correct order. Most people I've spoken to have a similar set-up with minor variations.

This setup can create a number of problems. Most of them stem from the fact that the same track can appear on a number of different albums. And under my current system I need to store each track once for each album that it appears on. And that wastes space.

Of course, I don't actually need to store a track multiple times. If a track appears on more than one album, I could just store it once and and reference that version of the file in the m3u files for each of the other albums that contain that track. In fact I could lose the different directories for different albums and just have a big directory containing all the tracks by each artist and just use m3u files to reconstruct each album.

The problem with that comes down to the data tags that I mentioned earlier. When I rip a track from one album, it is tagged with the name of that album and its track number on that album. When I try to link that same track to a different album there's no way that I can include the new album information in the data tags. So when I'm playing the new album, my music player will display the wrong information for tracks that were previously ripped from other albums. You might not see that as a huge problem, but it niggles me.

The core of the problem is that the data has been modelled incorrectly. It makes no sense to try and store all of this data in a file representing the track. You actually need to push some of the data into the file that represents the album. So you need to store the album name and the list of tracks in the m3u file for that album and remove the album name and the track number from the track file.

When you think about it, that's a much better way of doing it. In the general case, a track isn't associated with a particular album so storing that data in the track file really doesn't make much sense. It's as tho' the format was designed by someone who didn't understand data modelling[1]. I'm going to think about this a bit more over the next few days and see how easy it would be to implement it. Of course, the current standard is implemented in huge amounts of existing software, so getting a new standard implemented anywhere might be a bit of a bugger. We can try tho.

[1] Something I've seen a few examples of recently - but that's a rant for another day.

I'm not entirely sure what the connection is, but on Tom Robinson's web site I've just found the complete text of the KLF's The Manual (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way).

I'm sure that the general principles they talk about still hold true, but it's interesting how much the music industry has changed in the fifteen years (!) since it was fisrt published. Rather than finding a cheap recording studio, I bet that most first singles are now recorded on a Mac in someone's bedroom. And I'm sure that Radio 1 no longer holds the power that it used to. These days you need to get a video on MTV a month before the record is released rather than making one to be shown on TOTP in the week your record enters the charts.

Still, an interesting historical document and a fascinating read. And, most importantly, it's galvanised me into digging out my old KLF records and ripping them.

Now Playing: Whitney Joins the JAMs

Yesterday I went to see the new Roy Lichtenstein exhibition (warning - Flash and sound) at the Hayward Gallery.

As an avid comics fan, my earliest memories of "proper art" are of Lichtenstein works like Whaam! or Image Duplicator. This exhibition has lots of that stuff, but also a lot of newer[1] works that I hadn't seen before. My favourites of these were a number of paintings from Landscapes in the Chinese Style (which I can't find pictures of anywhere on the web[2]).

All in all, it's an interesting retrospective on one of the best artists of the last century. I recommend that you see it.

[1] I say "newer" but Lichtenstein died in 1997.
[2] The biggest respository of Lichtenstein's paintings on the web seems to be the Image Duplicator - but it can be a bit hard to search.

Had a very pleasant trip to Brussels this weekend. I'd been invited to speak at FOSDEM and at the last minute my wife and step-daughter decided that they would come too. This turned out to be an excellent plan as it meant that they could wander off together when I was off doing geek stuff and when I was over-geeked I could go and spend time with them.

Brussels was as wonderful as ever. The only downside was that Mini Europe was closed (for expansion, I expect) so we went up the Atomium instead. I did, however, get to spend some time in my favourite Brussels bar, Toone. I even drank beer for the first time for almost two years (it somehow seems rude to go to Brussels and not drink beer).

At about 2pm this afternoon I'm walking along the eastern part of Pall Mall towards Trafalger Square. I happen to glance up a side street and I see a small group of people milling about and some flashes going off. Being a nosey bugger I decide to investigate further.

It seems from the excited group of fans, the flash of red hair that I saw and the fact that I found I was at the stage door of the Haymarket Theatre, that I'd just missed Alyson Hannigan arriving for today's matinee of When Harry Met Sally.

So that's Suffolk St at about 2pm if anyone wants to play the sad fanboy (or girl).

When did "rum" change its meaning? Apparently it now means "bacardi".

I was in my local pub last night and asked for a "rum and coke". The barmaid tried to give me a bacardi and coke. It seems that you now need to specifically ask for "dark rum" if you want rum.

Yesterday I got a couple of comments from Zoo Weekly fans who objected to my previous entry about their sad little comic.

I wondered how they'd found me, but it turns out that a google search for Zoo Weekly lists my page first - before even the official web page.

Which turns out to be a bit of a mixed blessing :)

Update: Well, it was true at 8:00 this morning. Now I'm second and the official website is first.

It is my considered opinion that no-one will ever write a love song as wonderful as Billy Bragg's The Saturday Boy. How can you possibly compete with lyrics like these:

She danced with me and I still hold that memory
Soft and sweet
And I stare up at her window
As I walk down her street
But I never made the first team,
I just made the first team laugh
And she never came to the phone
She was always in the bath
In the end it took me a dictionary
To find out the meaning of unrequited
While she was giving herself for free
At a party to which I was never invited

I'm stunned. You have to watch this.

http://blugg.com/stuff/foxs_view_of_the_bbc_player.htm

The transcript is here.

Update: I've just been shown a link to John Gibson's reply to the large number of complaints he got about this piece (thanks to rozallin for the link).

I seems that WB have announced that they are cancelling Angel at the end of this season.

To be honest I can't say I'm that bothered. From what I've seen of season 5 on Sky, the "big changes" to the show don't seem to be working at all.

But there are, of course, a huge number of Buffy and Angel fans who are extremely upset about this. They're so upset that they've started a petition.

I wonder if Sarah Michelle Gellar will now consider a guest appearance during this season. Previously she has said that she didn't want to do it as it was "too close" to the end of Buffy.

Animals on the Underground is very cool :)

In the UK we're used to seeing politicians doing all they can to avoid answering a tricky question when being interviewed. I'm sure it's the same all over the world.

But I don't think I've ever seen it on the scale of yesterday's White House press conference about Dubya's military record. There aren't actually any politicians present (I assume they all knew this was all far too dodgy to get involved with) but White House spokesman Scott McClellan does his best to avoid giving a straight answer to any of the questions.

There's a transcript available, but for the full effect you might want to look at the real video version.

And here's the Guardian's take on the story.

This weekend we're being thrown out of our house. Oh, don't worry. It's just for one night.

Sixteen Year Old Stepdaughter is about to become Seventeen Year Old Stepdaughter and we're not invited to the party.

What do you think would be a suitable time to return on Sunday in order to avoid most of the chaos?

I'm amazed by the amount of uproar in the US over Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake's little escapade at the Superbowl. It's a real indication of the difference in attitude between the US and the UK. Over there they're having all sorts of inquiries into how such "obscene" material could appear on prime time TV. Over here we'd have all had a bit of a laugh and the photos would have been on the front pages of the tabloids for weeks. Incidently, if you haven't seen it, the BBC has a photo of the offending item.

I saw another good example of America's weird morals when watching the first episode of Nip/Tuck recently. The show includes some of the most graphic images of surgery that I've ever seen on TV, but despite there being a number of topless scenes, not a single nipple was in evidence. That would corrupt people.