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[johnnyboy]

Hiya,
Just using MC to do ALOT of tagging right now (cleaning up the tags on all my 17k worth of songs).
I just got it to write all the DB info to the files, now I'm using mp3tag to do some other changes (cover art changes so I can go through each album one by one and make sure that the cover art is stored inside the files). After it changes the image file it re-writes the tags again to the mp3.

I then am going to want MC to update it's internal information for all the tracks for the cover art only. I dont want to do a general 'update DB from tags' in case mp3tag has changed any tags or lost anything. The data as it is in MC is how I set it and how I want it to stay.


A REALLY nice addition to these two features would be if I could be presented with a list of all fields before the tool was run allowing me to customise which fields were updated or written.

Anyone else think this would be really useful?

[Matt]

You might consider just using Media Center to do all the tagging.  It does a good job.

[lalittle]

You might consider just using Media Center to do all the tagging.  It does a good job.

I agree.  MC is an excellent tagging app -- I use it for all my tagging.

However, I also think that johnnyboy's suggestion to offer the ability to customize which fields are updated when doing an "update from tags" function would be a very useful feature.  i.e:

A REALLY nice addition to these two features would be if I could be presented with a list of all fields before the tool was run allowing me to customise which fields were updated or written.

Anyone else think this would be really useful?

I would find this VERY useful.  In fact, I just came across a situation where I could use this, which was to update Audible files that were downloaded and imported into MC before MC was able to utilize the embedded art for Audible files.  These files currently do not display any art, but doing an "Update from tags" makes MC suddenly "see" the embedded art.  Unfortunately, the update erases the album field, which I use as the "book title" field.  This means that in order to get MC to see the art on these files (by running "Update from tags"), I have to re-edit the album field for EVERY one of my Audible files, which is several hundred files.  Because of this, I've never done it.

IF, however, I could tell the "Update from tags" function to ONLY update the "Image" field, I could run it on the entire batch of Audible files, and it would give me the art in one operation without requiring me to re-edit the album field.

Thanks,

Larry

PS.  On a side note, if I'm not mistaken, MC does not currently support editing the "sort" tags for Artist and Album (it only allows editing the "display" versions of these tags), which is something that JR might want to consider adding at some point.

[johnnyboy]

Larry - a quick solution for yours seeing as its just something you want to do as a one off:

Create a new temporary field that is NOT stored to the file, copy all your album names to that field, update from tags then copy back from that field to the album field.
That should do it for you.


And Matt - MC is a great general tagger but it's not nerdy enough so to speak.
I have a Cowon D2 which is very anal about tags - if they're at all off then the library in the D2 goes totally wonky so I have to make sure all my tags are spot on.

I need all my mp3's to be id3 v2.3 and also need to make sure all cover art is embedded into the songs.
AFAIK there is no way to see the id3 version number of tracks in MC whereas with mp3tag this is just one of the columns so after I let it scan all my files, I click this column header and can instantly see which tags I need to re-write.
I also do the cover art at the same time just for simplicity as I can instantly embed it while re-writing all the tags.


Just as an additional idea that I had while tagging my files yesterday, I want a large quality image for my music obviously but storing a 500kb image file in all my images resulted in a 5Mb increase in the album size. Doesn't sound like much but when you times this but 100 albums I have suddenly lost 500Mb of space on my mp3 player.

A VERY cool feature for MC would be if it's album art feature could be 'smart'.
Currently it offers to save a copy of the image into the files as well as into the folder/specific folder/etc.
It'd be GREAT if we could tell it to save a smaller sized copy into the files and a larger quality copy into the folder.
Then I could have a single 500Kb file saved with the album and then have each track just embedded with a 30kb smaller file (all thats needed for my mp3 player).

Just an idea and one thats probably way too much for alot of users but just thought I'd throw it out there

[lalittle]

Larry - a quick solution for yours seeing as its just something you want to do as a one off:

Create a new temporary field that is NOT stored to the file, copy all your album names to that field, update from tags then copy back from that field to the album field.
That should do it for you.

Thanks for the suggestion.  It's actually more than one tag that gets changed (the "Media Sub Type" and "Use Bookmarking" also need to be edited to get the files to behave correctly on my iPods), but the "Album" tag is the only one that would be difficult to change back, so I think your suggestion may indeed work quite well.  I'll just have to manually edit the other tags, but this is easy since it's simply a matter of checking the correct values.

Thanks,

Larry

[Alex B]

Just as an additional idea that I had while tagging my files yesterday, I want a large quality image for my music obviously but storing a 500kb image file in all my images resulted in a 5Mb increase in the album size. Doesn't sound like much but when you times this but 100 albums I have suddenly lost 500Mb of space on my mp3 player.

I have suggested a solution that would make possible to keep the linked image file independent from the image that is possibly stored in the file tags:

I have a suggestion. The Image File field has the usual option to store in file tags when possible. In some old version it was possible to enable it and write the cover art link to a file tag as a comment, but the option has not worked for a long time.

Would it be possible to change this tickbox to toggle between the new and the old behavior? When enabled MC would rewrite the tags and remove the embedded image if present. When disabled MC would not rewrite the tags.

By unticking the field specific option you could preserve the embedded image even when you link a different external image file.

[JimH]

500KB seems high.  Compression setting?

I've been scanning images at 200 pixels per inch.  The resulting image is about 940x940 and it's only about 200 or 250KB. 

[johnnyboy]

500KB seems high.  Compression setting?

I've been scanning images at 200 pixels per inch.  The resulting image is about 940x940 and it's only about 200 or 250KB. 

I'm getting them off google - not scanning them myself.
I'm a lazy git at the best of times

[dcwebman]

Just a small point that people need to realize. Now that more and more people are buying music online, you don't have a cover to scan so you have to rely on other places to get the images. That's why the recent improvements to the cover art downloader are great. There's more that can be done in that area to make it better, but it is a start.