Messer,

Thanks for a great plugin. It works like a charm.. well most of the time anyway. I have noticed that when getting tags for compilation cds, if the freedb listing has the title and artist info on separte lines, the plugin correctly places the artist and title data into the appropriate fields.

If however, the artist and title are in one line separated by a "-" or a "/" the plugin does not parse the data to separate the artist and title data and instead places the data into the title field.

I'm not saying that this is wrong or a bug. It would be nice to have the plugin "recognize" that a title with a "-" or a "/" needs to be parsed and the data placed correctly.

I wish I knew how to insert images into posts here. Would make things so much easier.

Oh well,

Regards,

K. Wise

Well, I do the parsing.

According to freedb specs, compilations are supposed to have "Various" entered as an artist, and each track should be then entitled according to the following scheme: "Track Artist / Track title" (slash with space on each side separates artist from title).

I already loosened these requirements a bit (artist can also be "Various Artists") but I think that pushing that further will do more harm than good...

We can only blame lousy freedb specs, poorly written apps that do the submitions and stupid loosers that puts badly formatted trash into public databases.

This is example of correct submition for V/A album:
genre: folk, id: 34121d16

And this is example of bad one:
genre: misc, id: 34121d16

If you still think that something should be parsed other way, say so, and post examples (genre taken from "select freedb result" dropdown list + discid is sufficient).

No kidding, everything in there ranges from absolutely terrible to semi-decent... if it's a popular album there there will be no less than half a dozen entries for the same disc, all of which are either incomplete, misspelled, or (almost always) not capitalized properly.

Oh yeah, and musicbrainz support would be very cool, if someone could get around the 30sec fingerprint stuff... perhaps there's a way to do a simple exact length check kind of thing? I really think their database is infinitely better than the POS that freedb is

Messer,

Thanks for your reply.

Please look at the following pics.

Screen shots

Notice that it is a compilation CD, but the artist and title are on one line, separated by a "/"? Well, it would be nice if the plugin would take the data in front of the separator ("/") and plug it into the artist field. That data after the separator would go into the title field.

I think that this is the proper way to do this, IMO of course.

The result of the tagging operation is below. Sorry about the dark hard to make out image.


screen shot 2


Also, one other request: Some of the submissions to freedb have the artist and title data reversed. Is there a way to switch the data without going to extremes?

Thanks again, for your help.



Regards,

K. Wise

Images are password protected or something - can't view them.

Better post genre + discid. Open foobar's console and find lines beggining with "INFO (foo_freedb) : Getting data for category...", and copy-paste them here - I'll be able to query freedb myself...

For more advanced tag manipulation use masstagger component. You can swap title-artist using "format value form other fields" command: first copy %title% to some %temp% field, then copy %artist% to %title% and finally %temp% to %artist% and remove %temp% ("remove field" command).

Some amount of clicking required, but since you can save your operation as "preset" in masstagger, you have to do it only once.

Messer,

Here are two such CDs:

DiscId: 24118214
Ministry of Sound - Ibiza Chillout Session CD2

&

DiscId: 960ccb0a
George Harrision & Friends - Concert for Bangladesh CD1

The first has the data in "artist - title" format. The second in "artist / title".

Thanks for your time and attention. Much appreciated.

Regards,


K. Wise

OK, this one is marked as "Various" and I parse it as VA album, but " - " isn't correct separator for track artist and title (it's supposed to be " / ").



And this one simply isn't VA album (disc title field should be: "Various / George Harrision & Friends - Concert for Bangladesh CD1").

Sigh, another two broken freedb entries... If you have original CDs you can do everyone a favour and open them in CDex or EAC, fix the titles and resubmit fixed info to freedb.