i'm mostly dinking around on Spotify tbf
― maf you one two (maffew12), Tuesday, 7 March 2023 13:25 (one year ago) link
Anyone else have their little metadata file curation obsessions or does nothing matter except the quality of the sound?
i've been rating every song i have on itunes. helps me when i forget which are the good tracks and which ones suck. also helps when i want to make a smart playlist by year or genre etc, I can just tell it to not include any track that is below a 3. one of the reasons i have never made spotify my go-to music player. also for that reason i've been keeping the years accurate and fixing the "various" bs. i've also ben trying to keep album artwork accurate lately. mainly because i'm a visual thinker and seeing what an album "looks" like will help me remember things about it (if that makes sense).
― FRAUDULENT STEAKS (The Cursed Return of the Dastardly Thermo Thinwall), Tuesday, 7 March 2023 14:51 (one year ago) link
I wrote (and use a small part of) a very basic extended metadata standard for use in the comments field of itunes to enable more complexity in creating smart playlists. I also obsessively make sure year of release data and cover art are correct. I blame this on my librarianship backgroundAlso mp3tag is great because it supports FLAC, mp4 and other standards beyond mp3. Having played with it a little the combination of regular expressions with it's various functions can be scary useful - if you can get your head around the slightly non-standard implementation
― treefell, Tuesday, 7 March 2023 18:29 (one year ago) link
I feel like album art and tagging digital music files is something ChatGPT is going to make very simple once somebody figures out the right prompts.
― the absence of bikes (f. hazel), Tuesday, 7 March 2023 18:35 (one year ago) link
I will never trust AI, not even for album cover art
― calstars, Tuesday, 7 March 2023 19:41 (one year ago) link
I used to be a lot more rigorous about metadata, since I used to make a lot of very specific smart playlists. I'd use the iTunes "grouping" field for the record label and the comment field for the exact date (or at least year and month) something was released, in case I felt in the mood to listen to a playlist of, I dunno, summer 1968. Or I wanted to listen to band's work chronologically, with live shows or singles mixed in; I'd turn on the "comment" field so I can sort by YYYY-MM-DD. I'd even go to a compilation like Super Hits Of The '70s: Have A Nice Day and switch the year of each track to when the original single came out, rather than the year of the compilation.
These days I don't have that many actual FLAC files (unless something I want isn't in Apple Music, or I want the mono version and it only has stereo) so there's not much to tag. I also realized I didn't generate those playlists as much anymore to justify the research/work.
― blatherskite, Tuesday, 7 March 2023 19:53 (one year ago) link
― Siegbran, Wednesday, 8 March 2023 11:56 (one year ago) link
Could go for batch tagging every track with AI art like Moka's track poll rollout. That seems to have taken a lot of input on her part for each though.
― maf you one two (maffew12), Wednesday, 8 March 2023 12:33 (one year ago) link
logged on today and had the dreaded crash that makes you lose your queued files and chat history :(
― boxedjoy, Friday, 10 March 2023 07:24 (one year ago) link
honestly i can't imagine spending a lot of time on metadata for music you've downloaded. you don't know the provenance, don't know if it was ripped using EAC with error correction on or off a scratched disc with some windows spyware program.
music you've ripped yourself, however, i can see why you'd get obsessive, identifying the exact release on discogs... maybe you'd even go as far as scanning the album art yourself!
― 龜, Friday, 10 March 2023 12:59 (one year ago) link
Hmm struggling to understand your hang up about the provenance. If the sound quality is good it's indistinguishable from any other digital album in my library whether I ripped it myself or not.
― Evan, Friday, 10 March 2023 14:12 (one year ago) link
You mean distinguishing remaster from original - that kind of thing?
― Evan, Friday, 10 March 2023 14:13 (one year ago) link
the basic fear is that the FLAC you downloaded is actually just transcoded from an mp3, or if it's mp3s you download, that it was ripped from a scratched up disc without error correction, which maybe led to it having artifacts etc. that you don't even know about until you compare it to a pristine, original copy. if you download a vinyl rip, are you really downloading the vinyl rip or is it a youtube-dl rip somebody did of somebody else's vinyl rip? itunes era gets even worse with itunes exclusive content - if you're downloading an album in FLAC that has the itunes exclusive content, it's probably been transcoded as for a certain time itunes songs were only available in 256kbps AAC. ever notice when soulseeking that every user's version of a track or album will be a different filesize? probably 95% of the time it's from different metadata, but maybe there is something different about how they sound?
sort of reminds me of how pirate groups used to include an actual photo of the CD they used for the release, maybe along with the encoder settings (LAME or die), to show it was a good rip.
even if you have a pristine source, there are certain albums that won't sound right when ripped unless the right settings are applied - see this discussion about CDs with pre-emphasis flags https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Pre-emphasis i believe there was discussion in the CDs thread about this too. or maybe it's a gapless CD but the gapless nature wasn't encoded right.
look, it all gets a bit neurotic and you sound like you're already pretty neurotic about the metadata, so sorry for introducing something else to get neurotic about, speaking as one neurotic to another. if it helps you can try to become a member of a group like redacted or something, where somebody else has done all the obsessing about the quality of the files before they make their way onto the platform.
(and yes, that's not even getting into the original vs. remaster, and whether the person who ripped it bothered to even doublecheck the musicbrainz or w/e ID3 tags their software automatically appended to the rip. but maybe if you're only into obscure indie releases for which there was only ever One Good Version then that doesn't matter as much.)
― 龜, Friday, 10 March 2023 15:31 (one year ago) link
i search for flacs with logs/cues (although i rarely keep them in that format because lame v0 sounds perfectly fine to me and i'm running out of space). check the flacs with audiochecker; if for some reason it hates the flacs i'll check the log settings. but honestly if someone knows how to create and save an eac or xld log, they probably know what they're doing in general
also i grew up taping shit off the radio. i mean i'll try to get the best quality but i'm not too bothered if the stuff i'm stealing wasn't ripped with the correct drive offset
― mookieproof, Friday, 10 March 2023 16:49 (one year ago) link
yeah i always download from users with logs/cues too
― 龜, Friday, 10 March 2023 17:01 (one year ago) link
I can’t be bothered at all wrt providence, quality assurance, unless it turns out to be something that I get obsessed with and seriously can’t find any way elseok actually I am more scrutinizing when it comes to finding rips of ultra specific cd pressings of albums I definitely definitely already own
― not too strange just bad audio (brimstead), Friday, 10 March 2023 17:29 (one year ago) link
“unless it turns out to be something that I get obsessed with and seriously can’t find any way else”by “seriously can’t find any way else” I mean in a physical not-terribly-mastered/pressed format
― not too strange just bad audio (brimstead), Friday, 10 March 2023 18:39 (one year ago) link
yeah, see, I just can’t understand this way of thinking or caring about digital music files. seems like a massive time investment for what, to me, is pretty minimal scale of difference.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Saturday, 11 March 2023 13:24 (one year ago) link
you should bump all the other threads involving things you don’t care about too, just so we know
― mookieproof, Saturday, 11 March 2023 15:25 (one year ago) link
Guess you wouldn’t stand for my rare Audiogalaxy 64kb transcoded rips then.
― Chewshabadoo, Saturday, 11 March 2023 16:40 (one year ago) link
― calstars, Saturday, 11 March 2023 17:28 (one year ago) link
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Sunday, 12 March 2023 00:50 (one year ago) link
loool downloaded something that had an *enormous* selection of proust in the lyrics tag <3
― mookieproof, Saturday, 17 June 2023 03:57 (ten months ago) link