Small suggestion - make it work with files that have 2 digits in the track number in the filename. Right now it only does this when the disc number is present. With etree files I don't think this is an issue, but the Further standard allows two-digit track numbers, and such files don't work.

Good to know there's actually somebody who uses this plugin.

Thanks for finding this bug. It's fixed now.

Perhaps I should say something about how the plugin guesses things:

Date: the plugin looks for YYYY-MM-DD or YY-MM-DD in the filename, where Y, M, and D are digits. I found this to work better than extracting the date from the text files, as dates occur in text files in a wide variety of formats.

Tracknumber and discnumber: taken from the filename. The filename must be in one of the following formats for this to work:
{artist}{date}{sth}d{discnumber}t{tracknumber}{sth else}
{artist}{date}{sth}d{discnumber}{tracknumber}{sth else}
{artist}{date}{sth}t{tracknumber}{sth else}
The discnumber is always only one digit, the tracknumber must be at least one digit. {artist} may be arbitrary text that does not contain a digit. {date} should be in YYYY-MM-DD or YY-MM-DD format. {sth} may be anything not looking like a discnumber or tracknumber. {sth else} may be arbitrary text.

The rest of the information is extracted from a text file as follows:

Artist and venue: These are extracted from the header, which should be in one of the following forms:

1)
artist: 1 line
date: 1 line
venue: 1 or more lines

2)
artist: 1 line
venue: 1 or more lines
date: 1 line

The plugin uses heuristics to recognize the line containing the date (the plugin can detect purely numerical formats as well as semi-textual formats like June 1, 2003). The first empty line terminates the header.

Title: Track titles are found by looking at all lines following the header. Lines describing tracks are have to start with X, tX, dytX, dYX, where X is the tracknumber and Y is the discnumber. This may be followed by '.', ')', '.)', ':', ' - ', or just whitespace.
If Y is not given, it is deduced as follows: If this is the first track found, Y is 1. If X is greater than the previously found tracknumber, Y is the same as there. Otherwise, Y is one more than the previous discnumber.

I hope this helps in case you run into problems with the plugin.

Could you add the option to change where it looks for a text file? It would like it to look in the same directory, not one level up.

It should actually look in both directories. It then chooses the text file that shares the longest common prefix with your music file.
If the plugin uses the wrong text file, please tell me the name of (one of) the music files and of all text files in the same and in the parent directory.

I probably got the use of this plugin wrong. Is it for albums that has a text file for every track or albums that has a text file for the whole album? I guess the first, but I was hoping the second. It would be a nice addition when using the masstagger and you have a text file with all the correct info. Making copy and paste easier.

It is intended for albums/concerts with one text file for the whole album/concert. If you want to use it for single tracks with one text file each, you could set tracknumber (and discnumber, if present) to 1 before applying "guess values from text file". If the plugin can find the correct text file using the "longest common prefix" rule, then this should work as well.

Sorry, don't know what I did before, but it works now.

I have a problem when I try to edit a text file though.
A "\.\" directory is added like this:
D:\Music\Fugazi - 13 Songs\.\13 Songs.txt
When it should have been:
D:\Music\Fugazi - 13 Songs\13 Songs.txt

That's the same actually, so it shouldn't be a problem.

I suppose you're using Win2k/XP? ssamadhi97 already mentioned this to me. Strangely enough, it works on Win98 with either Notepad or SciTE as default editor.

..note though that it seems to break direct file opening in programs - while using this kind of directory name works nicely in Windows' Common Dialogs..

Yes I use WinXP.

I have a feature request that I could make use of, but I guess it's not really in the scope of this plugin in the first place:
An option in preferences, to set the file types to look for. A custom line like the one for "Album list" and "Core".

I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you propose to have a format string that evaluates to the name of the text file to be used? Or restrict the effects of "guess values from text file" to certain types of music files?

I'll try to explain it better.
For foobar's database you have the option to define the file types you want it to remember.
Restrict incoming file types to e.g. *.MPC;*.MP3;*.OGG;*.WMA

If you could add a feature like this, I would be able to open files like: *.log;*.nfo;*.m3u from within foobar to use with masstagger when renaming and fixing tags.

If you think this is way off target, just forget it. I like the foosion_pack anyway

Ah, now I see whart you mean. Unfortunately, this plugin is geared towards text files describing concerts like on etree.org, which are in a semiformal format. So the parsing would fail for m3u files. I don't even know about the format used by the nfo and log files you mentioned.
Perhaps this would be a nice addition, but it is not what the plugin was intended for. So I won't add this, unless I get really, really bored. But don't count on that.

Important bug fix!

Please redownload the plugin! Previously, the data read from the text file was not translated to utf8 (I somehow missed that ).
Most of those text files use only ASCII chars, so this wasn't a problem. But then again, someone might use ASCII 150 instead of - (ASCII 45). The two look identical with monospaced fonts.
Non-utf8 values in tags make your playlist look jerky, and opening Album List will block foobar (at least it does on my Win98SE).

foo_tradersfriend 0.4.0

Update for SDK 0.7.1. The plugin now integrates into the official masstagger rather than replacing it. The direct access to single masstagger actions is missing from this version. I'll put that functionality into a separate plugin.

download link: plugin, source code

THANKS! This greatly improves my Foobar2000 experience. Some requests: give me a preview of what tradersfriend will parse from the file, and let me browse for the text file, if tradersfriend picks the wrong one.

This is great stuff. I saw this morning that 0.7.1 was out, got the special installer, got the latest foo_syfm and tradersfriend, and my life is very much improved.

This plugin remind me of something.
Generally I don't do any tagging thing, simply rename files into the format like
tracknum - title

I found this nice feather in another rename tool:
For example, there're 10 files here
file1
file2
...
file10

And there's a txt file, which content is 10 lines:
name1
name2
...
name10

Then the tool renames the 10 files according to the content of txt file, one file per line. It's very handy!

Can this plugin do this?

Nice features, that I already thought about myself, so they might be implemented eventually.

@Raymond:
You can also do this with plain masstagger from 0.7.1 using the "Input data (one line per file)" tag editing action. Use "%temp%" as scheme and paste the contents of the text file in the text box titled "Input data...". After that, rename the files with masstagger; "Output filename format" should be set to "%temp%". Now you can now use masstagger again to get rid of the %temp% tag...

foo_tradersfriend can not simplify this process. In fact, it will most likely fail to parse the text files given the format you described. foo_tradersfriend relies on the presence of a header at the beginning of the file and on tracknumbers on each track's line.

emm...it's not so convenient to do it with masstagger. Then I wish masstagger can rename the files directly from txt file.

oh well, forget that idea

<edit>FLAC Fingerprint Writing would be a nice feature, but shouldn't be integrated into a Masstager component. Anyone up for foo_ffp?</edit>

dev0

I noticed this plugin doesn't write tracknumber tags. Out of curiousity, what's the reasoning behind this, and is there another easy way to do it? I thought I had way with "Guess from filename" but my newness hasn't gotten it to work.

Any info appreciated.

Despite

Easy ways to add tracknumber:

• "Auto tracknumber" for single disc shows.
• "Guess values from filename" for multi disc shows.
  For filenames like um2001-06-21dYrX.ext use the format "um%date%d%disc%t%tracknumber%". With filenames like these the plugin can also deduce disc and tracknumbers, even if it does not write the tracknumber.

I might add tracknumber writing later today. I don't really remember what was the reason for not doing it.

Ahh, that works excellently, thank you. Now I'm off to try and make the album list sort by date when there's no album tag present.

Despite

foo_tradersfriend 0.4.2

• disc and tracknumber guessed from filenames* are now written.

*: only for filenames with the following format:
xyzYYYY-MM-DDddiscnumberttracknumber

edit: some clarifications:
The used heuristics are actually laxer than what is described above. t%tracknumber% instead of d%disc%t%tracknumber% works. YY-MM-DD works as well, but there is no century guessing.

Can you please process YY-MM-DD as well, maybe even with some cheap heuristics to auto-complete YY to YYYY format?

And please add support for artist%date%t%tracknumber% as well..

Looks like some people still haven't realized that one day there might be more than one century of music history.. </sarcasm>

Sneaky.

@ foosion,

I have foobar 7.3 and loaded traders friends into the components folder, but nothing happens! Did I miss something or do I need annother component to run traders friends?



antares

This is a masstagger extension. It adds the masstagger action "Guess values from text file".

What a nice program, I'm getting the hang of it! However.. Is there a way to remove the tags? Where does it write the tags? Directly to the SHN's? Regardless of me having "do not write tags to files" checked in F2k?

NM: Got how to remove the names. However where does F2k store those variables? must be in the SHN header.

foobar2000 stores tags in its database (if you have it enabled), otherwise there still stored in your FPL playlist files. So even if you have database disabled and "Do not write modified tags to files" checked, you will not lose your tags as long as you have the files in one of your playlists.

How tags are stored depends on the file format. In case of SHN files, writing tags to the files themselves would likely break those files (in addition to corrupting MD5 hashes), which is why foo_shn stores tags in an external .tag file (in APEv2 format).

Hmm curious. I've never seen a .tag file. In my SHN dirs, but then again I have f2k database turned on.

As far as playlists go, I don't really "playlist" my shns. I just open the folder up and grab all the shn's I want.

I recently got a Dead show, that's full of SKT? files? What's that about?

Tags are not written to SHNs if you have "do not write.." checked.

To remove tags you can either use the corresponding functions in foobar / masstagger, or delete the .tag files (which are placed in the same folder as the .shn files by default - check your foo_shn config)


(on a side note: I know those external tags aren't pretty, but like foosion said, they were designed with preserving the typical existing file hashes in mind - this ensures persistent tagging if desired, while retaining compatibility with md5 hashes, BitTorrent's .torrent metafiles, SFV, basically any application that relies on hashes or checksums to identify files.)

Of course those tag files won't be written if you have tag writing disabled (which you do, I suspect?)


.skt files are "seektables", files that enable instantaneous seeking in Shorten files. Sometimes they're appended to Shorten files upon creation, sometimes they are added afterwards and stored externally in a .skt file - again, so as to not break .md5 hashes etc.


Welcome to the ugly world of Shorten with all its hacks needed to provide various standard features..

I was talking about the FPL files that fb2k uses to store the playlists you have in the UI.

Well FPL is still a playlist, so unless it stores it temporarily until I close that PL.

I seek through SHN files just fine in Foobar without the SKT files? I know I couldn't in winamp.

If Furthur would ever support flac, I think I'd just grab those.. but alas no support yet.

Well, there are three scenarios for seeking in shn files:

1) seektables are appended to the Shorten file. Seeking is possible in WinAmp and foobar.
2) seektables are stored in external skt files. Seeking is possible in WinAmp and foobar.
3) there are no seektables. Seeking is not possible in WinAmp. foobar can still seek in this case, but it is much slower (since it has to decode the entire file until it reaches the point you want to seek to - if you seek ahead. Seeking backwards is no problem)

Problem:
The plugin does not write date tags to files when using "Guess values from text file".

Solution:
Check that the plugin really is set to write to the "DATE" tag. A previous version contained an error that caused script settings to be not restored properly. As a result the default setting for the name of the date tag ("DATE" in the initial configuration) could be set to the same name as the title tag ("TITLE" in the initial configuration).

just wanted to say that the idea for this plugin simply ROCKS.
havent used it yet, but thats gonna change in about 5 mins

thanks foosion!

First of all, let me say that this plugin is great. It makes organizing all my live shows so much easier!

Anyway, I was wondering if there was any way to customize the way tradersfriend tags? For example, I would like to date to just show the year (rather than the exact date) and also I want to be able to write a comination of fields in the title (like date - venue - Disc #). Is there anyway customize any of this information?

Thanks for your help!

You can easily do that with a few post-processing steps in masstagger. Use "Format values from other fields" to extract the year from the date (however this relies on a known date format), and "Format values from other fields" to combine whatever tags you want into one. The there's "Remove field..." to get rid of the tags you no longer want. It's propably best to save this as a preset, once you have set it up correctly.

*cough* still waiting for a text file picker if multiple candidates are detected.. I'm growing tired of having to work around tradersfriend's vain attempts to make sense of flac fingerprint files etc

That did it... thanks!

I would really like to see this as well.

Also, even when I leave the Discnumber field in the 'Guess values from text file' window empty, the plugin still insists on putting the DISC tag into each file, which I don't want. How can I stop it from doing this?

foo_tradersfriend 0.6.0 preview
This is just to let you people get a peek at things to come. Some features still need to be (re)implemented. Changelog and description of supported filename and text formats is to be included with the final version.

Merry christmas and a happy new year to everyone.

Links:
plugin
screenshot (a bit outdated already, "Update files" actually works in this preview)

Looking really great, thanks

edit: Well actually it worked well only on two of the 16 shows it tried On the 14 others it recognized every track as track number one.

I had that problem with version 0.4.4 on most of the shows I tried. Can't wait until the new version's finished, it looks a lot better already