Are there any alternative options for programs such as Mr. Question Man for OSX? Whats the best way to analyze my MP3 library using a Mac Book?

Thanks.

Moderation: Edited topic title; "MAC alternatives" is too vague.

Not sure about Mac alternatives but Mr Q man works under WINE. Try DarWine:

http://darwine.sourceforge.net/

You didn't say what the program did.

According to an old post here:



You could see much of that information in iTunes. On the "view" menu look under "View Options...". Again, highlight a track and select "Get Info" off the context menu: on the summary panel, you'll see the encoder listed.

Alternatively, you could try Media Rage--it's got a trial period--and see if you like it:

http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MediaRage.html

I've been doing this, but on some of my iTunes tracks the encoder is unknown. Do any of these programs show the encoder if iTunes couldn't.

Let me rephrase all this. I've been working on my MP3 library for years. But up until now, I really never focused on quality. I mainly just wanted to make copies of CD and really never thought you could hear a difference between one mp3 to the other. Now that I have some knowledge of how to get the best quality (i'm currently using iTunes-Lame to rip all my cd's), I want to see what MP3's weren't used with Lame and re-rip them. In the past, I've used iTunes and other various software to rip my MP3's and I want to start re-riping those CD's with Lame. So is there any software (preferably Mac) that let's you sort MP3's by encoder?


Any Help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

You need Max:

I actually have MAX but i find iTunes-Lame to be faster and more user friendly. Is there a quality difference? Also, MAX still doesn't help me see what some of my previously ripped MP3's were encoded with.

First of all: Of course it would be best - for archival purposes - to re-rip your collection losslessy with either iTunes or with a 'secure' ripper like Max* [sbooth.org] or xACT [macupdate.com] and i'm bumping a six week old topic here. But let me add a two tools here which might come in handy even if you use a PowerPC processor powered Mac (which can't use DarWINE, VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion to execute Windows programs)**:

• dnuos [tweek.us] is a command line utility to generate a text list of your digital audio collection. It also interprets the lame tag and tries to guess the encoder used. It works everywhere python is installed (this includes every os x installl). Unfortunately its encoder detection routines are not as sophisticated as those found in mr. questionman or encspot (pro) under windows (yet?) but its fast, nevertheless. ***
  Enter dnuos --help for usage and help.

• You should also scan your collection for file corruption (It happens more often than one would hope). One comprehensive utility to do this is mpck (checkmate) [linuxonly.net]. Unfortunately again it's command line only and, furthermore needs to be compiled first. The good news is it's as simple as...
  CODE
  curl -C - -O http://checkmate.linuxonly.nl/checkmate-0.18.tar.gz &&  && tar -xzf checkmate-0.18.tar.gz && cd checkmate-0.18 && ./configure && make && sudo make install
  (You can copy & paste that line into your terminal to download, compile and install mpck if you dare. Note that you need to enter your administration password when asked.)****
  Enter man mpck or mpck --help for usage and help.

• I have never seen or even heard of an OS X port of the command line version of Encspot.

Notes:
* I am not a Leopard user myself but i read it got issues with 10.5 - so please take my advise with a grain of salt if you are one of those.
** Also theese native command line solutions are much more lightweight, both in cost and performance ratio.
*** There is a graphical frontend (for Mac) for dnuos (and its precursor OIDUA) called QtOIDUA but version 0.8 of qtoidua, the latest released version of this writing, is incompatible with dnuos versions above 0.94. This has been fixed in CVS but you would need to compile it from source [sourceforge.net] at the time of this writing. It's not as straight forward as seen with mpck (see below) thus i suggest it is hardly worth the hassle in this case.
**** You could also install it via Fink [finkproject.org] but the version there is ridiculously outdated. It's not in MacPorts [macports.org] either, as far as i know.

I apologize for my sloppy english, am not a native speaker. Now have fun, please. (edit1: typo; edit2: i forgot to uncompress the downloaded source in the 'code'. fixed now.)

I've written (about 80% anyway) a tool to read the LAME tag and present the information in a somewhat friendly fashion. The UI was ugly and I didn't have a real use for it so I haven't touched it in a few months. If there is enough interest I could polish it up and post it.

I'm interested.

BTW Thank You for the hard work on Play, Max and Tag!

Why do say its encoder detection is less sophisticated? As far as I know, the only major difference is that Dnuos doesn't print the full LAME encoder version. There's no standard place for that full encoder string, but it is used as padding data in MP3s that need padding. I think scanning for that information would greatly slow down the process, since it would have to just keep reading through the file until it found padding, though I might be wrong about that, maybe there's a faster way.

As far as LAME preset detection goes, I think Dnuos is the most accurate in that regard. If you were referring to something else, or another aspect of detection entirely, I'd love to hear your comments, and I'd be happy to fix any deficiencies the application might have.

it's slightly off-topic, but...


exactly. from my experience - haven't done a series of tests, just used it on a bunch of self-ripped material - dnuos misses out on a lot of old files. does it do anything more than to parse some parts of the lame tag?

Misses out on what on old files? Old LAME MP3s? Is it not getting information correctly from those files? What version of LAME did you use to make the MP3s?

If you can send me an example audio file that it doesn't scan correctly, and tell me what output you expected, I should be able to fix whatever the problem is.