Ever since I got my mac I've had endless problems with tagging (man, that word really is getting overloaded these days) my music collection. Not only did iTunes forget most of the tags I had lovely created in QuodLibet (a far superior tagger/music library/player), but also it did not support multiple values for a single tag (for instance a song by Miles Davis AND John Coltrane?).
Back then I was sort of saved by some applescript hacking, some patience, many hours of trying to face the fact that there were no good music players for MacOSX, and finally some effort to forget that I had previously lived in a perfect world… NOW, fast forward to earlier this week, I was reading about the British Recording Industry suing AllOfMP3, and a Norwegian newspaper writing that it was safe and sound for norwegians to buy music there still, (and maybe also the recent german crusade against illegal downloading…) So I decided to see what the fuzz was about and after I saw that they had several Ars Nova albums, which I have been unable to get hold of anywhere else in the world, I created an allofmp3 account and spent $10 to top up my balance… Shortly after I was the proud owner of "The Goddess of Darkness" and "The Book of the Dead", all for less than $3… Amazing. Unfortunately you have to download each song individually, which takes long if you get a bit shopping happy, downloading a zip of a whole album would make much more sense… I'm sure I could script the process though. (In doing this I found that each time I right-clicked and did save-as in firefox the whole application would freeze for 5s, googling a bit found that clearing the download list fixes this, because the list is kept in a file called "downloads.rdf", which is slow to update, *ahem*)
Now to the technical interesting bit: The MP3s I downloaded were 192kbps, with ID3 tag containing the Artist and song name, with filenames like this: 03-morgan_192_lame_cbr.mp3. Now the genre of all the songs I downloaded was set to "Blues", for no apparent reason, this held for Ars Nova, Bruce Springsteen and Røyksopp, but iTunes makes it easy to set the genre for a bunch of song. Worse, the ID3 tags did not contain track-numbers, and although this information is in the filename, iTunes has no easy way to extract this. QuodLibet/ExFalse of course does this very well indeed, but I've been unable to run them on MacOSX… BUT they are written in python, and the tag-handling is a separate library called Mutagen, and this runs nicely on MacOSX, so with 15 minutes I had my new MP3s tagged correctly! Hurrah.
The script is at http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~grimnes/2006 … knumber.py if anyone cares! If I feel inspired some day I might write a more general regexp based one, indeed I could probably steal most of it from QuodLibet…
(A side note, I need to stop reading Hunter S. Thompson to get rid of these looong rambling sentences with no point, OR maybe I have to read more… )