[compcentral]

Good news. I'm big fan of this project and can't wait to see it's release. Sample's were a feature I hadn't even thought about. It seems like the first release will be fully featured.

I wouldn't say full-featured... more like lots of mostly-working features

at least that will be the case for the limited alpha release due at the end of the month.

[Abe Froman]

Nevermind.

[compcentral]

Last night I began working on revising my discography gathering methods. Discogs and AllMusic are now working beautifully and now store all gathered data in the database. In the next few days, I will attempt to create the iTunes version and, sooner or later, add the musicbrainz piece.

So when it's all finished, each artist will have a "discography" list from all four "providers" (discogs.com, allmusic.com, iTunes, and musicbrainz.org). This will contain information about the artist, all albums they released, and the track listings of each album.

Here is my dilemma....

How do I handle inconsistencies among discography listings? Also, should I only list "Albums" or count "Singles" and other types of releases. There are also often multiple versions of some albums depending on where/when it was released that may contain different tracks. Plus, when AM initiates a download, it has no way of knowing which version it may find until after it has already been downloaded.

Once an album is downloaded though, I could analyze the contents (number/length/name of tracks) to determine which provider listing it matches best.

What are your thoughts?

[thezoggy]

Last night I began working on revising my discography gathering methods. Discogs and AllMusic are now working beautifully and now store all gathered data in the database. In the next few days, I will attempt to create the iTunes version and, sooner or later, add the musicbrainz piece.

So when it's all finished, each artist will have a "discography" list from all four "providers" (discogs.com, allmusic.com, iTunes, and musicbrainz.org). This will contain information about the artist, all albums they released, and the track listings of each album.

Here is my dilemma....

How do I handle inconsistencies among discography listings? Also, should I only list "Albums" or count "Singles" and other types of releases. There are also often multiple versions of some albums depending on where/when it was released that may contain different tracks. Plus, when AM initiates a download, it has no way of knowing which version it may find until after it has already been downloaded.

Once an album is downloaded though, I could analyze the contents (number/length/name of tracks) to determine which provider listing it matches best.

What are your thoughts?

take each provider.. put them in a list (look at sickbeard search providers) and set each one as priority.. so that way you can use the top most as the main source to compare.. then trickle down to fill in/use in logic. then you can also uncheck ones you care to use or not.. again like sb

[compcentral]

I was thinking of doing something like that... and then just using the album with the most tracks if there are multiple versions of it for one provider.

By the way, I just finished the iTunes discography provider code!

I think I'll leave it at 3 discog providers for the alpha release. I need to start focusing on other more important areas.

[cosmicr]

Will I be able to use this to just download individual songs only and manage them with other software?

[compcentral]

Currently only downloading entire albums is supported. Since most of the time individual songs are not posted to newsgroups or torrent sites, this would be difficult to accomplish without partial NZB downloads or being able to interface with your torrent client to select only the songs you want.

Since most albums are small downloads (50-150 MB is typical), it's actually easier to just download the entire album. Downloading individual songs is better suited for p2p software (not that I'd recommend using it).

I suppose I could automatically delete unwanted songs after the download finishes as an option, but not sure if anyone else would find that useful. Anyone else have any thoughts on the concept of downloading individual songs?

[jbalicki10]

Question on SoundTracks and Multi-Artists Albums

Okay I have a couple of ways I store my music... One is the typical:

Pearl Jam
|----Ten
|----Vs
|----Vitalogy
|----etc...

However, what do you do for Soundtracks with multiple artists IE OST?

I set mine like:
c:\SountTracks
|---ET
|---Raiders of the Lost Ark
|---Labamba
|---etc...

Or compilations:

c:\Various Artists
|--Ramones Tribute
|--Now Thats What I call Crappy Music
-------- |-Vol1
--------- |-Vol2
--------- |-Vol69
|-Benefit Album for Rabies


What is the way I should be doing for your program?

[compcentral]

Great question... I've been asking myself the same thing for a while now.

Currently, soundtracks and compilations are somewhat of an afterthought... By that I mean I haven't fully decided how to handle them yet. I will have to see how the discography sites list them and work from there but I think your folder structure will be fine no matter what I do end up doing.

One of my goals is to allow Audio-Matic to work with just about any folder structure.

[compcentral]

Hmm.. while testing the new iTunes discog provider code, I came across an interesting situation.

When I did a search for the artist, "Blue Stahli", two results with 100% matches were found and both referred to the same artist. Way to go Apple!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/blue-s...69610?uo=4

http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/blue-s...20314?ou=4

Hopefully this doesn't happen often.

[bncceo]

To comment on folder organization, I have all of my music stored by "Album Artist" instead of "Artist". This works out similar to this:

<Album Artist>
-- <Year> - <Album Name>
---- <Track#> - <Artist Name if Different> - <Track Name>

Pearl Jam
> 1991 - Ten
>> 01 - Once
>> 02 - Even flow
and so forth for artist studio albums (Artist and Album Artist are the same)

Paul Oakenfold
> 2005 - The Club
>> 01 - Perfecto Allstarz - Psycho
>> 02 - Aultline - The Colossal Gray Sunshine
and so on for Artist - Mixed Compilations (Album Artist is "Paul Oakenfold" and Artist for Track 2 would be "Aultline")

Various Artists
> 2006 - Curb Your Enthusiasm OST
>> 01 - Mylo - Frolic
>> 02 - Robby Poitevin - Bubba Dub Bossa
Similar to artist compliations, except that the "Album Artist" field would be "Various Artists"


Now the only downside to this is that different media players handle the tags differently. When you stream to XBOX from TVersity, for example, it only sends the Album ARtist tags and not the Artist tags. MediaMonkey looks at both of them simultaneously so in essence you can find a song by artist or album artist.

[hreid999]

this is brilliant. can't wait until its up and running and made mac compatible.

would it be possible to make a web browser extension that would allow you to add artists/albums to audio-matic que from amazon.com?

on that note. i think the holly grail would be integration with itunes store. doubt it's possible though.

thoughts?

[bnevets27]

Hmm.. while testing the new iTunes discog provider code, I came across an interesting situation.

When I did a search for the artist, "Blue Stahli", two results with 100% matches were found and both referred to the same artist. Way to go Apple!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/blue-s...69610?uo=4

http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/blue-s...20314?ou=4

Hopefully this doesn't happen often.

I personally like to stay away from itunes.

I suppose I could automatically delete unwanted songs after the download finishes as an option, but not sure if anyone else would find that useful. Anyone else have any thoughts on the concept of downloading individual songs?

Kind of depends on each individuals preference. There's a couple ways you could at least give the perception of individual songs. I personally like to keep anything I download so I would not like to have the songs deleted. But a playlist based only on the songs you requested audio-matic to download would be good.

Or some people may like say a folder with shortcuts to the the individual songs that were requested, don't think this is a great idea though.

Or as long as people are ok with using up more hard drive space (ok with me) you could place the album that was downloaded in the correct location and then copy the requested song to a folder of individual songs.

Still I'm sure there is some people that may just want that individual song and consider everything else as garbage/clutter.

Going to have to mark 05/01/2011 on my calender now
Is testing sign up going to open up on that day or before?

[compcentral]

To comment on folder organization, I have all of my music stored by "Album Artist" instead of "Artist".

Thanks for sharing this. I hadn't really thought much about this and you bring up some very good points. Currently I've been treating the Album and Track artists as the same, but now I see how that could be a problem. I will have to think about how I can best handle this and get back to you.

would it be possible to make a web browser extension that would allow you to add artists/albums to audio-matic que from amazon.com?

I would love for that to happen, but that will be pretty far in the future at this point.

on that note. i think the holly grail would be integration with itunes store. doubt it's possible though.

This is easily possible. I already have the code in place to pull the iTunes link and cost using the API. LOL... I could even try to join the affiliate program but somehow I don't think Apple would like my app too much.

Edit: Oh... wait I think I misinterpreted that. I could create links to buy the content easy enough, but not sure how difficult it would be to create a userscript to download iTunes content in Audio-Matic. I've never tried my hand at UserScripts before.

I personally like to keep anything I download so I would not like to have the songs deleted. But a playlist based only on the songs you requested audio-matic to download would be good.

I already have a rating system in mind that will allow you to rating individual tracks and create playlists from this. I think this is the solution I will use at least for now. I will also plan on adding an option to delete unwanted songs later on.

Going to have to mark 05/01/2011 on my calender now Is testing sign up going to open up on that day or before?

Yes. I will try to whip up a quick signup page sometime this weekend.

[thezoggy]

To comment on folder organization,

here is a screen shot of how i stored my music on my drobo before the company went public..



just so you get an idea. i relied heavily on folder structure rather than id3 tags (although I tried to keep those correct as well...)