Neither foo_tradersfriend nor I have any supernatural powers, so it would be extremely helpful if you gave some more information, so that I can fix the problem. In this case, it would help me a lot, if you could post the name of at least two or three files (or at least one) from each show.

I don't know if it's related to the problem, but the two shows that worked were encoded with shorten, while the others were flacs.

Show #1 (works)

• FNM19900513dntNN.shn
• n is either 1 or 2 (two disc show), NN goes from 01 to 11 on both discs
• example: FNM19900513d2t08.shn

Show #2 (works)

• nirvana.1990.08.17.TNN.shn
• example: nirvana.1990.08.17.T11.shn

Show #3 (doesn't work)

• TrackNN.flac
• example: Track07.flac
• there's also scheme like this on one show, but it has a space before the number part

Show #4 (doesn't work)

• Nirvana - 1990-02-09 - NN - %title%.flac
• example: Nirvana - 1990-02-09 - 04 - Spank Thru.flac

Show #5 (doesn't work)

• Nirvana - 8-23-91 AUD3 - TrackNN.flac
• example: Nirvana - 8-23-91 AUD3 - Track04.flac

Show #6 (doesn't work)

• nirvana1992-01-25NN.flac
• example: nirvana1992-01-2507.flac

I think that covers most of the filename schemes.

Also, foo_tradersfriend DID show the setlist on all of the shows.

File format is completely irrelevant.

To work properly, trfr needs the disc and track numbers of each track. If DISC and TRACKNUMBER fields are not present, it will try to derive the numbers from the file names.

Generally, at this point only naming schemes that are loosely based on the "etree-style" can be interpreted properly.

Guess that'd explain most of your problems.


foosion: maybe a tagz-based guess values from filename-like action as an alternative to trfr's guessing would be viable?

Proper handling of ./Disc1/Track01 and the likes would be excellent too.



Wow, that's a rather stupid scheme

That's what I thought.


I think that's a good idea. Or at least guessing files named like TrackNN.ext properly would be nice


My thoughts exactly

Is there any way to add custom tags from the text file? I would like to add a tag called Source that prints the source info from the normal etree text file.

Thanks.

No, that is currently not supported.

Any chance of getting it in the next version (which by the way looks pretty cool from the post you made about it a few weeks ago).

i have foobar 0.8.3 and loaded traders friend 0.4.4. It shows up in the components list, but i do not get a "Guess values from text file" action when i left click a group of selected files. i do get an option to "Show text file" (and of course the normal masstagger options to "Edit tags" and "move rename or copy files" and a grayed out "copy tags").

Any help?

Ok, forget i asked. i found it. Works great (at least from my one use of it so far!).

Please help with something basic

I got the "guess from text file" to work, but I would like to change both the file name itself and the name as it appears in foobar so they are identical, if possible.

i.e. if I have the following files:
ph1990-11-04d1t01.mp3
ph1990-11-04d1t02.mp3
etc

is there a way to convert these to
ph1990-11-04d1t01 Carolina.mp3
ph1990-11-04d1t02 AC/DC Bag.mp3

I just want to append the song title to the existing file name, and to have the file name appear the same way when placed in foobar.

It must be a two step process to change both but I can't figure it out and the right syntax to use.

thanks.

edit:
figured it out
this is a great plugin
too bad song titles aren't appended to file names in the first place though.

There may be a way to do this within foobar and/or traders friend, but I could not figure it out.

I have several cases where the filenames are not in the correct format to allow tradersfriend read from text file and rename them. For example,

D1 Track 1
D2 Track 2
etc (where "Track" is spelled out)

I used this program mp3bookhelper to rename file name batches to

D1 t1
D2 t2
etc

I was using mp3tag to batch rename files to append the group's name and date before the disc and track numbers in the file (if only DxTy were present), but I could not get it to "find and replace" text in filenames in situations where track was spelled out as "Track" and not t. I don't think tradersfriend will work without a group name and date present in the file name, is that correct?

Can tradersfriend also rename files themselves, or is Masstagger required for this extra step?

You have to use Masstagger to rename files, I do not wish to duplicate this functionality in Trader's Friend. You also have to/can use Masstagger to set disc and tracknumber tags, if Trader's Friend cannot detect those values from the filename.

The latest internal version can directly invoke Masstagger actions; I may upload it soon.

That sounds great.

I am just amazed at how well Trader's Friend correctly guesses all the different text files I run across.

I am converting a lot of shn/flac files for my mp3 player and have come across too many txt files with the format

1. song name
2. "
3. "

I believe Trader's Friend does not like the period after the track number. Is there any way to have it ignore this?

Also many txt files put the time of the track in brackets after the song title

1. song [2:35]
2. song [3:56]
etc

It would be nice to have an option to ignore anything in brackets after the song title since it doesn't parse well.

I end up deleting a lot of brackets and periods before Trader's Friend can handle those txt files.

I should maybe post this elsewhere, but in masstagger if I want it to append the song length to the filename, is there a way to have the song length appear as
2m 35s, rather than 2_35 which the %_length% option creates?

you could try using %_length_seconds% to format it to your liking.

Thanks for the reply Hunted.

Could you please help me a little more with this because I'm not familiar with the syntax.

For example if I am trying to create a filename "songtitle 3m 34s" , what other options besides %_length_seconds% would I have to use to have it output that way?

%_length% yields the filename in windows as "songtitle _3_34 ".
I would like to remove both underscores _ , replace them with spaces and append "m" and "s" after the numbers (since windows can't handle 3:34).

%_length_seconds% makes the same filename output as "songtitle_214"

should work.

Thanks Anza I will give that a try. Much appreciated.


The period after the track number in this example was parsed, no problem.

Disc 1 / Set I 01:16:37
01. Intro/Crowd 00:45
02. Divided Sky 16:50
03. Suzy Greenberg 05:52
04. Taste 06:50
05. Fee > 05:20
06. Uncle Pen 04:17
07. Julius 09:35
08. Lawn Boy 02:43
09. The Curtain -> 06:08
10. Stash 17:27
11. Set Break Music 00:50


I did not have to edit the txt file at all, so my previous post was wrong unless Trader's Friend needs a leading zero in front of the number.

Since the song duration was not in brackets it was automatically appended to the file name in masstagger with the _ underscore between min and sec.
The _underscore only appears prior to the duration when the filename has something like ->.

Tracknumbers should work without leading zero and with a period after them. The component does however expect a space or tab character between the tracknumber (+ separator) and the title.

I just noticed that my page still lists 0.4 as stable version, while it should be 0.5. The more experimental 0.6 isn't listed there at all; it is quite usable but still lacks some features to be complete. That being said, have you tried viewing your previous, failing text file with 0.6? For your convenience, here is the download link again.

All current versions of Trader's friend only remove the track length from the title, if it is enclosed in parentheses; I'll consider checking for brackets in a future release.

I'll give .6 a whirl.

Thank you everyone for your help !

this plugin is great!

i just noticed theres a newer version [.6]
looking forward to testing that out.

0.6 is brilliant.
Being able to preview whether the text file works in advance is a big time saver. No more having to edit files again to remove all fields before correcting the text file.
Some txt files use # as a footnote in the filename. Does trader's friend have trouble reading "#"?
Would there be a way for it to handle
"1.song title" without having a space between the . and the song title?

There should be no problem. Trader's friend currently recognizes the following characters as footnote markers: ^ # @ * ! + $ & § ~ %. Footnote markers are only detected at the end of a song title. A track title may contain multiple song titles, if they are separated by a segue marker (>, -> or some variation thereof).

I'll consider that (perhaps for 0.6 preview 2).

I can't get this to work at all. I'm not that familiar with foobar at all, but I thought I could stumble through this with the info on the first page. But nothing ever seems to show up. Should I see the info in file>properties? I'm using this text file:
Day By the River
08-28-2004
VENUE Sun Ray Music Festival - Athens, GA

SRC: SBD > PC > wav > shn
Taped By: Jens Brewer
Transferred By: Jens Brewer
Notes:
Jason didn't play this show. Steve Cunningham and Buck Pryor filled in on guitar.
Disc 1: 78:57
1 Bus (7:02)
2 Japanese Motel (5:26)
3 -> Bathroom Window (2:28)
4 411 (7:58)
5 Move (3:46)
6 > Summer (10:49)
7 Fly (13:47)
8 Naked* (6:08)
9 Puddin' (11:51)
10 Taking Over (9:36)

* With "Take the Money and Run" outtake

And the files are named like this:

dbr2004-08-28t01.flac

I had to edit the .txt file to make the header correct ( I think).

Can anybody help me get a clue?

-kp

Trader's friend does not automatically read information from text files, you have to tell it to do so, either through the "Guess values from text file" action in masstagger, or (in the latest versions) the stand-alone "Live show tagger" window.

+make sure you've tagged the files with tracknumber before you use it... it took me a while to work that out.

Manually adding tracknumber tags is only necessary, if the component cannot extract them from the filename. It should be able to do this with the filename format kpeters59 gave above.

foosion, I get a 404 when I try to download the plugin (0.5.0) through this link found on your new page.

I also failed in trying to download the 0.6.0pre version from the server you moved away from, however I managed to scrape up this link and it worked.

Could you please fix this?

Thanks.

The links should be fixed now. At least the W3C link checker didn't complain about anything important anymore. (It doesn't understand the javascript: link for the Mycroft script.)

This plugin is brilliant. Thanks. Just tried it on one show and I had to massage it a bit (pre auto tracknumber before using the live show option), then it worked perfectly. It might be nice to add in a file rename option, but it was easy to do it afterwards. I'll go home and try it on all my other shows.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

Thanks, you're welcome.

File renaming is already available as part of masstagger, and I don't intend to duplicate that feature.

Okay, I tried it on 20-30 other shows. For the most part it was fairly robust. However, I did have a couple issues.

I can't figure out how it picks the text file to use. (I just read that it tries the file with the most common prefix...so I'll try that) but when I try to pick a different text file to load, it doesn't update the trackinfo on the left so it's not useable. I have to rename the file to the file it originally selected and then pull it up again. (again I'll try the most common prefix thing)

The exclude text files feature didn't seem to work, it still picked ffp.txt and fingers.txt over info.txt (I think I should have renamed info.txt to something matching the filenames)

Parsing:

It can't parse tracknames without a space between the number and the track.(easily hand fixable)

It's good at removing tracktimes after the titles that are enclosed in parens but not so good with brackets.

Adding tracknumbers and discnumbers beforehand definitely helps in case it gets confused.

Thanks again....back to tagging more shows.

This is admittedly one of the not-so-obvious things in the current UI. If you manually assign some files to a new text file, it will not switch to the new text file.

Hm, is this with the default filter string? I'm surprised it would pick up ffp.txt; fingers.txt on the other hand is not excluded by the default filter.

Known, and as I don't like leaving out spaces there, it probably won't be "fixed".

Right, I'll note that for a future version.

That's certainly a good idea, if it cannot figure things out all by itself, and I think it has been mentioned in this thread at least once.


All of the above pertains to the 0.9 version. Sorry if you are still on 0.8.3, I haven't used that version in a while.

This would be a great feature for a great component. I hope you consider adding it at some point.

Thanks

DELETED

hi there!

just gave this plugin a try (this is heaven once it works!!) but i have the "every track is track 01" problem, too. i'm using fb09 and the latest? foo_tradersfriend 0.6.1. i've tried different naming schemes for my files but it just won't work...

here's what i tried already:

- bff1999-10-10d01t01

- bff1999-10-10d01t02

- bff19991010t03

- bff1999-10-10t04

- bff19991010d1t5

- bff1999-10-10#06

any suggestions? i don't see what i'm doing wrong here

thanx, pano

I'm not sure but I think that the live show tagger requires an additional text file containing the information for tagging. If you don't have this text file, I think you could try using "guess values from filenames" in the Masstagger ("Edit tags" in the right click menu) though you probably have to add some missing values manually.

thanx, but that's not the problem: the txt is analyzed fine, the tracks and date and band and all is there, but every file is taken for track 1 so that every tag will become like track one...

but i did come up with a workaround: i applied a tracknumber tag first with the masstagger, then it worked just fine. is this a bug or the standard procedure that i didn't get at first??

I've marked whether a format should work:

Note that an existing tracknumber or discnumber tag will override detection from filename.

Yeah, I've added autotracknumber as a tagging script. I've also added discnumber=2 as a script. If it ever gets confused, I apply these 2 scripts and usually that fixes things.

foosion - I would like to thank you for your efforts in writing and maintaining this great tool. I have a large number of shows in flac format that I need to archive, and hardly any are tagged. Tags are not only very "nice" for playing flacs in foobar, but can also be helpful in keeping track of show lineage. If I construct my info files to match the specifications, everything has worked fine, with a couple of exceptions. The biggest problem I have had so far is trying to isolate the song title from information that follows. For example, there are many artists (i.e. Bob Dylan, Neil Young) that will play a number of songs with their respective bands, and also play some songs solo, acoustic, or both. If it is mainly an electric show, for example, it is customary to mark the solo or acoustic tracks with parenthesis:
[...]
d1t04. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
d1t05. Silvio
d1t06. Mr. Tambourine Man (acoustic w-band)
d1t07. Tangled Up In Blue (acoustic w-band)
[...]
also, if a "cover" is performed, it is nice to be able to note the original songwriter in parenthesis:
[...]
d1t08. Baby Let Me Follow You Down (Eric von Schmidt)
d1t09. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
[...]

In addition, I like to use square brackets to include the timings from shntool LEN output in my infofile, so I can end up with something like this:
[...]
d1t08. Baby Let Me Follow You Down (Eric von Schmidt) [2:56.21]
d1t09. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue [5:53.05]
[...]
I've found that the parenthesis gets included in the song title, and the square brackets seem to prevent the song titles from being correctly read.
I've tried using the ";" delimiter to separate the song title from what follows, but the delimiter gets included in the song title:
[...]
d1t08. Baby Let Me Follow You Down; (Eric von Schmidt) [2:56.21]
d1t09. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue; [5:53.05]
[...]

Am I missing something? Maybe I just haven't tried enough permutations, but is there a delimiter that would work in separating the song title from information that follows (or could one be provided)? Alternately, would it be difficult to have Trader's Friend ignore anything in any kind of parenthesis/bracket after the song title?

Thanks for any help you can provide!

On the shows I have here, additional information about a track is stored in text files using footnotes (see below for more information).

I have Information about original songwriters in brackets here, though parentheses shoudn't be a problem unless the name of original songwriter can be confused with a track length (unlikely).

The component currently only detects and removes track lengths in parentheses but not in brackets.
It also removes unenclosed track lengths at the end of the line (a following segue marker is still recognized). A hyphen surrounded by whitespace preceding the track lengths is also removed.
In both cases it stops scanning the title after finding a track length.

There is no delimiter character that makes the component stop reading a title (but see remark about track length above), though it does remove/modify some patterns:

• Zero or more hyphens followed by a greater-than sign (examples: > -> ------>)
  These are recognized as segue markers and are replaced by a single greater-than sign; spaces are added on either side if necessary.
• ^ # @ * ! + $ & § ~ %
  One or more consecutive occurences of one of these characters are recognized as a footnote marker, if they occur at the end of the title or before a segue marker. For example, + and ++ would be recognized as (different) footnote markers. All of those characters were added to the footnote marker list after I encountered them in existing text files.
  A footnote marker is removed from the title, and the next definition of that footnote is added as a comment on that track. A footnote definition is a line starting with a footnote marker followed by the footnote text. Footnote markers are sometimes re-used in shows with multiple sets, the definition of the footnote for a particular set will be found after the track list of that set.

Examples:

• um2005-02-25.txt: Features footnotes, freestanding track lengths, ">" segue markers with preceding whitespace
• sts9_2003-02-18.txt: "->" segue markers without preceding whitespace
• sts9-2002-07-04.txt: a case where at least I wouldn't want information in parentheses to be removed

Some of the parsing rules may seem obscure, but all of them were inspired by text files found in the wild (i.e. on etree or archive.org for the most part). While the examples above seem rather clean and easy to handle, my original test corpus (provided by ssamadhi97) was much more diversified and... uhm... interesting.
(Historical sidenote: ssamadhi97 is also to blame for infecting me with live shows. Without him, foo_shn and foo_tradersfriend would probably not exist today. Not to forget that he also introduced me to foobar2000 in the first place...)

Thank you foosion, your reply clarifies my options considerably when I need to write my own info files. I remember when etree started in reaction to widespread mp3 pollution on the internet in parallel with increasing availability of broadband. I admire the results they obtained in creating standards for working their way towards widely circulating "best available sources" for many live shows, but in the wild west-world of bittorrent there seems to be no standards on most lossless sites, and even otherwise fine and generous tapers will fight to the internet-equivalent of death for the "right" to name their folders "MySeed(2)" and other such nonsense (and don't even dare mildly inquire about show lineage on some sites: you will be called ungrateful, branded as a pariah, and be cast out of "polite" bittorrent society ). Thus I often find that I must reluctantly rename folders and filenames, and create new info files in order to maintain and back up proper digital archives. This process is so time-consuming that I am always in arrears, so that is why I appreciate foo_tradersfriend so much: anything that helps me automate the process is very useful.

If I am correctly following your examples above, then a properly-formatted track timing itself will serve as a delimiter; information before the track timing will be included, and information after the track timing is ignored. I can also make use of footnotes to help solve my problem, with the added benefit of having the footnotes included as comments. Cool.

At risk of sounding "greedy", I would add my voice to those above in requesting that a capability for adding Taper/Source/Lineage info to the tag comments field be included in some future version of foo_tradersfriend. That would make my "foo_tradersfriend experience" complete.

P.S. I also blame ssamadhi97 for spreading infections, in my case, a completely unnatural interest in detecting the effects of psychoacoustic algorithms and analog artifacts in audio spectral analysis...just where does that guy get off?

I have been using the tradersfriend on one of my computers and I really like it - most of my music is live music I downloaded so this plug in is great and one of the main reasons I use foobar. I tried setting it up on another computer with a fresh install of foobar and for some reason the tradersfriend is not working. When I go to live tagger it says the text file is unresolved - when I select the txt file it reads it but doesn't tag. When I go to the drop down menu tagging>view text fiel it says "not yet implemented". The txt file is in the folder and formatted so it shoud read them. My other computer works fine with the same files,

Thanks for any help and I do really lke this plug in.

You need to select the tracks from the "[unresolved]" and use the "Assign Text File" command from the context menu. There are a few things in the user interface of the live show tagger that I would like to change, if I ever get around to do it.

Hi, i dont understand how to use this great sounding plugin....
How would i go about this, here is an example.
Artist: Bob Dylan
Song: Like A Rolling Stone
Album: Royal Albert Hall

Because i write that in notepad and save it but it dont load right, could some one please help me understand

GREAT PLUGIN .......

really saving me some time with regards to naming files.

A couple of Suggestions:

Since it is aimed at tagging LIVE shows, how about adding these fields / features:

1. The ability to read / detect the source of the live recording: (this information is 99.9% always included in text files of shows people post for download

EX: Schoeps > Lunatec > DAP-1 OR Soundboard Recording

2. Ability to list special notes:

sometimes live shows have a first time or only time played song, a special guest come out or something and is usually noted with a * in the text file

just some ideas ......... keep up the good work


PS ......

with the date tab, it doesn't seem to read this format

YYYY/MM/DD which is the best way to sort shows of a single artist by date

EX: 2008/10/31

http://foosion.foobar2000.org/foo_tradersf....1-20070125.zip
does not work 404, please make it up

Oops. The components page now has the correct link.

thanks for quickness

I have used this plugin before, but for some reason simply cannot get it to work with my current install of Foobar 9.5.2. I'll select a show, click Live Show Tagger, it will pop up and show "all tracks match", but when I click "update files" it appears to update them but the tags are not changed in the file. I confess this has gotten utterly maddening.

Thanks for any suggestions anyone can offer. I'm using WinXp.