Posts Tagged ‘daap’
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
mp3 tagging is a minefield. Like all metadata, one has to balance obsession with detail against ease of acquisition.
Some Firefly clients are pickier than other about tagging. Regrettably, some of the music I get from emusic has bad characters in the tags, which throws the players right off. Finding the problem files is the majority of the problem - here’s a method that at least helps:
wget -O- http://host:port/rsp/db/1 | perl -pwe 's,<(?![/\?]),\n<,g;’ > firefly.xml
xmllint –noout firefly.xml
You’ll likely get a few lines like:
firefly.xml:463415: parser error : PCDATA invalid Char value 65535
<title>�Singing in the Bathtub</title>
In this case, the song title tag has some junk characters in it that you’ll need to fix. After cleaning up the tags and rebuilding the database, try this process again to see if you’ve caught all the errors.
Tags: daap, firefly, mp3
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
ffms2m3u - create playlist for all files on a Firefly Media Server.
If you run Firefly Media Server, you can run this script to create an M3U of all the tracks on your server. You can play this in most audio players; VLC likes it, as does iTunes (though big playlists take an age to load). Rhythmbox and the default Ubuntu Movie Player won’t touch my playlist of over 17,000 tracks.
To configure the script you need to edit three lines:
# where the Firefly database lives
DATABASE="/usr/var/cache/mt-daapd/songs3.db"
# server domain name or IP address
SERVER="server.example.com"
# Port to talk to server - don't leave blank
PORT="3689"
If you’re running Ubuntu, you’ll probably only need to change the SERVER line. It spits the M3U playlist, ordered by album, to stdout. Note that in the default Ubuntu install, regular users can’t read the database file.
If you’re running this from a cron job, it’s probably a good idea to fill in the real paths for sqlite3 and awk.
Tags: awk, daap, firefly, m3u, shell, sqlite, ubuntu
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
Sunday, August 17th, 2008
1626 Artists / 1124 Albums / 17082 Tracks / 39.4 Days / 70.15 GB.
That was a lot of ripping.
Tags: audio, cd, daap, mp3, rip
Posted in choons, computers suck | No Comments »
Saturday, August 16th, 2008
Tags: daap, java, soundbridge
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Saturday, August 16th, 2008
1492 Artists / 999 Albums / 15245 Tracks / 34.9 Days / 62.12 GB
(and here’s me thinking I had about 2000 CDs, too)
CDs that wouldn’t read: 0 (so far). That’s not to say that there weren’t some difficulties (copy-controlled CDs can go die, glitching and gronking in my drives) and my oldest CD (XTC’s Skylarking, my copy of which I think has just turned 20) had a ton of retries.
Lost CDs: Thomas Dolby’s Aliens Ate My Buick is somewhere in the house, but nowhere I’ve looked.
Found CDs: My long-lost promo copy of the (Portland) Decemberists’ Picaresque, which I thought had vanished in a road trip to Missouri. It was lurking in a long-forgotten portable CD player in the bottom of a storage bin.
Pleasant surprises: that freedb is generally better than it used to be.
Peeves: copy-controlled CDs (see above); flappy cardboardy cases that only have the title on one spine; oversized CD cases (Japanese imports, I’m looking straight at you), dark blue text on a black background, idjit freedb submitters who insist on Band, The syntax or worse, submit whole albums called sdfsdf;aefhsdf; bonus DVD “premium” releases (who watches these?).
Tags: audio, cd, daap, mp3, rip
Posted in choons, computers suck | 1 Comment »
Sunday, August 10th, 2008
1332 Artists / 774 Albums / 12074 Tracks / 27.1 Days / 47.34 GB
– and the sad thing is, this would barely half fill a current iPod.
Tags: count, daap, mp3
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Thursday, July 31st, 2008
m4a2mp3 - convert AAC to MP3. Uses Perl, LAME and faad. Semi-gracefully converts weird iTunes genres to ID3v2, or to “Other” if it’s something else. Uses lame’s new VBR settings, so you end up with an MP3 not massively bigger than the source M4A.
PS: broke the 8000 tunes on the Firefly server …
Tags: aac, daap, faad, itunes, lame, m4a, mp3, perl
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
Up to 7470 songs on the server last night. It’s mostly down to me importing all of my emusic tracks.
Tags: abcde, daap, emusic, mp3
Posted in choons | No Comments »
Sunday, July 27th, 2008
Now I’ve got the Soundbridge set up to share from my server, I’ve been ripping CDs like crazy. I’ve got two drives on my Ubuntu box, and hooked an external CD drive to my laptop, so I’m rocking four drives at once. After years of using Grip, I converted to Abcde this weekend. What I really like about it is that I can run multiple copies at once, and it very nearly things right (aka “my way”) out of the box.
By the end of tonight, I should have about 6700 tracks on my share, and a bunch of CDs in storage.
Tags: abcde, audio, cd, daap, mp3, rip
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
This is my work PC running Firefly Client, serving my music from home. Who needs to install and manage local music libraries now?
Tags: daap, itunes, java, mp3
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Saturday, July 19th, 2008
Tags: daap, itunes, mp3, ubuntu
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
