3 ms·

WinAmp, FooBar2000 (Plugins) and Windows Media Player (Win7) store the music metadata in the mp3 files itself (IDv2 format). Using the Windows search advanced s

by frik 12y ago

WinAmp, FooBar2000 (Plugins) and Windows Media Player (Win7) store the music metadata in the mp3 files itself (IDv2 format). Using the Windows search advanced syntax I can find all songs that I rated with >=4 stars. One can also add various metadata columns to Explorer details view (like album name, stars-rating, etc.). As playlist format use M3U or its unicode sibling - a format that every music player supports; avoid WPL or other lesser known/supported formats. It would be great if more music players like car entertainment systems, iTunes, iOS Music would show the stats rating that is stored in the mp3 files itself (metadata). Monolithic databased based music management systems may be convenient for some users. I personally prefer to copy the mp3 files (with embedded metadata) to my other devices. My wish list: More intelligent playlist playback that e.g. recognises song skipping as down-voting and manual replaying a song as up-voting and plays similar songs based on the music fingerprint like iTunes Genius but as completely offline feature. Casual people nowadays listen music on streaming platforms like Youtube, Spotify or old-school radio stations. So it's unfortunate but we saw no new exiting new features in music players for some years.

akx 12y ago
Storing "post-fact" metadata such as ratings, etc. in the files themselves is a big no-no in my book, since the hashes, etc. of those files will now be changing. For the first ingestion of the data, be it from a CD or from the artist/label themselves, sure, that metadata can, and should, be stored in the files, but not your own.
- quacker 12y ago
  > since the hashes, etc. of those files will now be changing. I'm having a hard time seeing hashes[1] being very valuable for much of anything regarding music library management. Hashes won't be any good for comparisons of music files containing the same song across different recording sessions, bit rates, or file formats. I would rather all of my music playing programs respect standard metadata formats (like ID3) - which is usually included in most digital downloads and which is supported across all the popular audio file formats - and leverage that metadata for organization. Off-hand, I can't think of a music organization system that relies on hashes that is not brittle. 1: I'm talking about "dumb" hashes like SHA-1. Fingerprinting can work well for this, but is more complicated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint
- frik 12y ago
  What music player do you use on your PC? How do you share/sync your ratings with your phone/car-audio/mp3-player/tablet/other device? Do you use ReiserFS4/ZFS - or what's the fetish with file hashes about? Mac/iOS or music streaming (Spotify, etc.) service walled garden eco-system? There are several metadata formats for mp3, flac, mp4, etc. formats. Windows Media Player e.g. stores the music star rating per user name and adheres to the metadata standard. Most media player apps adhere to the metadata standards. Some players only read, but write to an internal database with no export option - I burnt myself with iTunes back in 2004. Some apps write older metadata formats like IDv1 instead of v1 and v2. If you mean CRC32/MD5/SHA1-hash, than you do something wrong. There are special hashes for music data like qhash and minhash that Google and other similar services use. The media formats like mp3 have seperate sections for the audio data and the metadata payload, so you should use a hash of only the audio data anyway, the metadata is meant to be edited (parts of it as described in the standards). Only with mp3 files that contain proper metadata one can sync his audio with various devices from different manufacturers.

by frik 12y ago

akx 12y ago

Storing "post-fact" metadata such as ratings, etc. in the files themselves is a big no-no in my book, since the hashes, etc. of those files will now be changing. For the first ingestion of the data, be it from a CD or from the artist/label themselves, sure, that metadata can, and should, be stored in the files, but not your own.

quacker 12y ago
> since the hashes, etc. of those files will now be changing. I'm having a hard time seeing hashes[1] being very valuable for much of anything regarding music library management. Hashes won't be any good for comparisons of music files containing the same song across different recording sessions, bit rates, or file formats. I would rather all of my music playing programs respect standard metadata formats (like ID3) - which is usually included in most digital downloads and which is supported across all the popular audio file formats - and leverage that metadata for organization. Off-hand, I can't think of a music organization system that relies on hashes that is not brittle. 1: I'm talking about "dumb" hashes like SHA-1. Fingerprinting can work well for this, but is more complicated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint
frik 12y ago
What music player do you use on your PC? How do you share/sync your ratings with your phone/car-audio/mp3-player/tablet/other device? Do you use ReiserFS4/ZFS - or what's the fetish with file hashes about? Mac/iOS or music streaming (Spotify, etc.) service walled garden eco-system? There are several metadata formats for mp3, flac, mp4, etc. formats. Windows Media Player e.g. stores the music star rating per user name and adheres to the metadata standard. Most media player apps adhere to the metadata standards. Some players only read, but write to an internal database with no export option - I burnt myself with iTunes back in 2004. Some apps write older metadata formats like IDv1 instead of v1 and v2. If you mean CRC32/MD5/SHA1-hash, than you do something wrong. There are special hashes for music data like qhash and minhash that Google and other similar services use. The media formats like mp3 have seperate sections for the audio data and the metadata payload, so you should use a hash of only the audio data anyway, the metadata is meant to be edited (parts of it as described in the standards). Only with mp3 files that contain proper metadata one can sync his audio with various devices from different manufacturers.