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[mlefebvre]

Hello,

One the best features in MC is the recently introduced "Lookup Lyrics". I used it every time I tag a new album and it works very well.

There is one type of situation when "Lookup Lyrics" doesn't work too well: When the true Name of the song has some type of addition, usually between parenthesis. Here's an example:

Artist: Curtis Mayfield
Album: The Anthology: 1961-1977
Real Name of song: Only You Babe
Name of song on album: Only You Babe (Single Edit)

When one runs "Lookup Lyrics" on this song, it does not find any lyrics. But If I temporarily delete "(Single Edit)" and run "Lookup Lyrics" again, it finds the lyrics. The extra "(Single Edit)" is preventing "Lookup Lyrics" from finding the lyrics.

I would venture that 95% of songs that have text within parentheses in the "Name" field are extra text (such as: Featuring so an so, Live version, etc...) that is preventing "Lookup Lyrics" from finding the lyrics. Would it be possible for "Lookup Lyrics" to simply ignore any text that is within parenthesis when performing a search? This should greatly improve the success rate. 

Second suggestion: "Lookup Lyrics" doesn't seem to notice when there is no connection to the Internet. If the internet is down (which unfortunately happens here briefly every couple of hours), and I perform a search, "Lookup Lyrics" doesn't complain that there is no connection to the Internet and simply leaves the "Lyrics" field empty as if it could not find anything on the net.

Would it be possible for "Lookup Lyrics" to be aware of any lack of connection to the Internet and present an error message if the network is down and prompt the user to redo the search?

Thanks

Michel. 
 

[EnglishTiger]

Michel - Hopefully you are aware that there is "No Single/Universal Standard" for what information is present in IDV3 Tags, or those held in the Vorbis Comment Block, nor is there a single/universal standard for how that info is held on the physical CD. Quite a lot of time, especially if you allow your CD-Ripping Software to "fill in the tags from an Online Database" you may end up get wrong or incomplete tag information; mainly because those Databases are not adequately curated. To give you an idea of wrong/incomplete information look at attachments 1 & 2. The 1st screenshot is a CD where the online database lookup was "switched of" so what is shown is the info from CDPlayer.ini, i.e. The data/tags that is held on the Physical CD. The 2nd Screenshot shows what happened after I pressed the "Update from Online Database" button. Not only did the "Online Database" not have the Mix/Variant information it had the wrong "Artist" for track 8.

However; regardless of which set of tags you accept, a "Lyrics Lookup" (in most media players) will find the Correct Lyrics for Track 1; because the bit in the () brackets is part of the title. but if you remove the bracketed part of the title it will probably fail. However if you were to use the data from "CDplayer.ini" to populate the tags the lyrics lookup would probably fail on most of the other tracks that have () bracketed Mix/Variant/Featured Artist info as part of the title. But there is a way, and it involves a little bit of manual effort, which will make it more likely that any "Online Lyrics Lookup" will return the lyrics for a song/track, if one or more of the sites being searched has them. It's called replace the Curved Brackets() around any Mix/Variant info with Square Brackets[] and to remove any/all references in the title that refers to a featured artist. "A Song (featuring Fred Blogs) by A Solo Artist" is not a proper title but "A Song by A Solo Artist feat Fred Bogs" is a proper title, Indeed regardless of which Online Music Site you use to obtain your info you will inevitably find that  "A Solo Artist" did nor record or release a Track Called "A Song" but "A Solo Artist feat Fred Blogs" did!. Most of the time the featured artist is added to the title for convenience, I've frequently seen incidences where on the CD the featured artist appeared in the Artist Tag but within the Track Name on the Printed Insert - The source of the info/tags which invariably gets loaded up to Online Databases if that site has no previous knowledge of that Disc/Album

However there are a pair of characters that sometimes occur in Track Titles/Names that invariably fail to result in a match when searching an on-line database that you are searching using the Track Name/Title; it's the Single And Double Quote Marks. If they are in the Vertical Style that you find on most UK/USA keyboards they will match on most sites, but if they are the Angled/Slanted Variants they will invariably fail to match. Even MC, and most other media players, will not consider two track by the same artist where the only difference in the track name is 1 has Vertical Quote Marks and the other has Angled/Slanted Quote Marks as Duplicates.

I'd love to know where you got data that led you to believe/assume -  "I would venture that 95% of songs that have text within parentheses in the "Name" field are extra text"

My Music Library contains 44137 Tracks of which
2674 tracks have part of the title contained in curved brackets
1363 tracks have the featured artist in the Artist Tag and not the Title Tag
6758 tracks have additional Mix/Variant information contained within [] brackets in the Title Tag, including over 300 track that also have part of the track name in curved brackets
But only 468 tracks have no lyrics in them at all - either because neither MC or Media Monkey did not find them on the sites they search or because I failed to find them when doing a manual internet search. Oh and less than 10% of that 468 had either () or [] brackets, or even both, in the Title.

However if MC was to adopt your "Drop everything in parenthesis suggestion" and I for some reason I lost my music library and had to start again the number of tracks that MC was unable to find lyrics for would be around 25%  of those tracks and not 95%.

If there is a single Media Player that can access every web-site that contains Lyrics for every track that has ever been recorded I'd love to know which one it is - MC does a reasonably good job of finding those lyrics which are available on the sites it searches; as does MediaMonkey which searches some sites that MC doesn't; but those searches will only "work effectively" if the "search parameters are in a format the site(s) being searched recognise"

[Matt]

Next build we'll have this change:
NEW: Slanted quotes (“”) in titles are replaced with regular quotes (") for lyrics lookup.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[Matt]

For your parenthesis idea, we do remove things in brackets:
   strName.RemoveSpan(_T("["), _T("]")); // remove things in brackets
   strName.RemoveSpan(_T("{"), _T("}")); // remove things in brackets

I suppose it could be expanded to things in parentheses, but I'm a little nervous about side effects.

What do you all think?

[JimH]

If a song has parentheses, should we trim everything beginning at the first parenthisis before doing the lookup?  Would that work?

[JimH]

Next build we'll have this change:
NEW: Slanted quotes (“”) in titles are replaced with regular quotes (") for lyrics lookup.

Thanks for the suggestion.

I think there are also two kinds of single quotes that could get the same treatment.

[Matt]

I think there are also two kinds of single quotes that could get the same treatment.

Thanks for the suggestion.  Next build:
NEW: Slanted single quotes (‘’) in titles are replaced with reqular single quotes (') for lyrics lookup.

[EnglishTiger]

If a song has parentheses, should we trim everything beginning at the first parenthisis before doing the lookup?  Would that work?

Jim - To be perfectly honest I'm not sure if there is "a hard and fast rule for where the trimming should occur" because some tracks have the "additional part of the title" at the beginning of the Title - as in "(We Want) The Same Thing" by Belinda Carlisle; whilst others it's at the back of the song as in "Love Isn’t Easy (But It Sure Is Hard Enough)" by ABBA. All I know is that for the Belinda Carlisle Track I've never got a web search match, for lyrics or anything else, using just "The Same Thing" as the Track Title or if I use "(We Want) The Same Thing (All the Right Moves Mix)" as the title but do consistently get a match using this variant "(We Want) The Same Thing [All The Right Moves Mix]". All I can assume is some search sites need the bit of the title that's in the () brackets but ignore anything in square[] brackets.

P.S. Somewhere in my music collection there is at least one incidence where two tracks, by the same artist, which have titles where one of them has a title in the "Song Name" format whilst the other track has it in the "Song Name (Something Additional)" format. If a lyrics search that stripped the (Something Additional) from the second track was used it would find the lyrics for the first variant of the "Title" but they would be be the wrong lyrics because the 2nd Track is not a variant of the 1st one its actually a totally different track.

[EnglishTiger]

Next build we'll have this change:
NEW: Slanted quotes (“”) in titles are replaced with regular quotes (") for lyrics lookup.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Matt - Thanks for doing this but it would be even nicer if that quotes replacing in a song title, and maybe also the Artist and Album Name, could be done when the track(s) are imported into MC so that MC is comparing Apples with Apples and not Pears when deciding if a Track is a duplicate of another track.

[Matt]

I don't like doing it automatically.  But I added this to the next build and you could sure tell import to do it (or just do it manually):
NEW: Added a mode 5 to the Clean(...) expression function that standardizes quotes.

[JimH]

Matt - Thanks for doing this but it would be even nicer if that quotes replacing in a song title, and maybe also the Artist and Album Name, could be done when the track(s) are imported into MC so that MC is comparing Apples with Apples and not Pears when deciding if a Track is a duplicate of another track.

I don't think we should permanently replace different styles of quotes without user intervention.  Someone wouldn't be happy. 

You can currently use Find and Replace to do that.

[mattlovell]

Assuming that MC can distinguish successful versus unsuccessful lyric lookups, would this work...

If the song name contains parenthetical or bracketed text, and the first lyric lookup was not successful, then remove the delimited text from the song name and try again.

[Edit: wording]

[mlefebvre]

Assuming that MC can distinguish successful versus unsuccessful lyric lookups, would this work...

If the song name contains parenthetical or bracketed text, and the first lyric lookup was not successful, then remove the delimited text from the song name and try again.

[Edit: wording]

That make sense to me if it can be implemented.

Michel.