The All Music Guide iTunes Tag Retriever

[Snollygoster]

Hello all,

Based on my music categorization needs I found out after a lot of research that Genres are not a detailed information for describing a particular artist. We can either have the set to the most common ones (Rock, Electronic, etc) or have many many detailed ones. Either way we can not produce smart playlists containing just the music styles we need.

If you check All Music DOT com you can see that under each artist there is a list of Styles (music styles) and a list of moods.

What I figured is that we could populate the Grouping tag with the Style information and the Comment tag with the Moods information. Imagine the possibilites for Smart Playlist creation by having you track info set like this.

This way I wrote an application called iTagProperly that gets the selected Artist from iTunes (at the moment you can select as many tracks as you like from one Artist) and then lookup the styles and moods at allmusic. After the information is retrieved you can retag all of the selected tracks with the new information.

In case there are more than one results for the query a field named URL is filled with your search query and by hitting enter in that field the possible results web page comes up. If you right click on the artist that you were looking for and copy the link in the URL field you can then successfuly retrieve the information needed and retag you tracks.

Please give it a try, its still in primitive stage but it does a lot of stuff.

I am open to suggestions and ideas, and of course bugs found.

Let me know what you think (PS: the file is of course a Universal Binary).

Link:
http://rapidshare.de/files/17777865/....1_UB.zip.html

Thank you,
Snolly

[awheewall]

This maybe the start of what I've wanted ever since having an iPod. The Genre tag is useless and will never be of any use in creating a smart playlist.

[Snollygoster]

So what did you think of this app?

Did you try it?

[LinkinJunior]

it seems to work, this takes care of never having to typing it in manually now.

[enjoilax]

I wish this was for Windows

or at least the fetcher code

[TheJosher]

Yeah... I'd also like to see this get ported to Windows. That'd be cool.

Josh

[Snollygoster]

Originally posted by enjoilax
I wish this was for Windows

or at least the fetcher code

You might get lucky. I can port the fetcher code I can not implement the get and write tags as I use Applescript to do this atm.

[varga]

Wow, this looks cool. I have lots of problems dealing with my generes, and I agree that allmusic does a great job catagorizing things. I'm downloading it now. I'll let you know how it worked out shortly!

[Humbro]

i completely agree with you, snolly. i've seen some sites (like playlistmag.com) suggest making more extensive genres (like "hip-hop, french, slow") for each song to make better playlist, but this causes a clutter when browsing in the iPod. using the description field is definitely the way to go.

if i could have downloaded allmusic's mood automatically to all my itunes-tracks, that would've been neat. couldn't quite figure out your app right away though, maybe you should make a short user instruction to go with it? it might be simple, i'll have another look at it later.

keep it up. a freeware app that could edit all itunes tracks with allmusic's styles and moods could become really popular!

[varga]

I'm having trouble getting your app to work properly. I only got the Genre, Style, and Mood fields to populate once - since then, it just hangs when I submit an artist's anem. And, when I try typing in a new artist, it continues to search for the old artist.

[Snollygoster]

Ok people, here is a brief description about how the application currently works.

All Music Guide does not provide a direct way to access its database. Imagine searching the web site for every artist in your library and copy/paste the styles and moods information in the grouping and comments tag fields. This is what iTagProperly currently automates.

What you have to do to make use of it is:

-Select all tracks from one artist in iTunes.
-Click "Get Artist" in iTagProperly and the Artist field will get filled up.
-Click "Get Info". If there is a direct match for your artist then the Styles and Moods fields will get filled and all you have to do is clicking the "Set Info" button and the information will be written to all selected tracks in iTunes.
-If there isn't a direct match the URL field in iTagProperly will be filled with the URL that will return the possible matches for the selected artist. Hitting enter in the URL field will get the embedded browser to load the possible hits. Right click on the desired match and copy the URL for that link. Then paste it in the URL field and select "URL" as your source in iTagProperly. Click the "Get Info" button to get the Styles and Moods of the selected URL.

To sum up there are two ways to lookup the info. One is with source artist where a search for the artist provides the artist's direct page. The other one is URL source where the information is retrieved from the URL that is pasted in the URL field of iTagProperly.

Unfortunately this can not be automated because a search for an artist might bring up more than one artists that match yours. You have to manually select the one that fits.

Please let me know for ways and ideas to improve this application. I hope that iTagProperly is a bit useful and it's not just wasted programming time. I have used it on my entire library (200.000+ songs). It took me around 4 hours to tag everything but let me assure you it totaly worthed it. You would not believe the quality of the smart playlists I am getting.

[Humbro]

Great app snolly! I got it to work now, and I think this could really be a big thing.

There is room for improvement though (of course). I don't know how much time you've got to put into this, but let me give you a few suggestions anyway

- First and foremost: The check boxes. As I´m sure you're aware of, they don't work. I really missed the one for genre, as I've just gone through my entire collection and tagged them with the genres I saw fit. I don't think allmusic's genre choices are all that great either (though infinitely superior to GraceNote's), and I think a lot of the people who would enjoy an app like this one have put some work into their genres, and might stay away from your app because of this.
The ideal way for this to work would be if iTagP filled all tags, and you could then uncheck the ones you didn't want before you pressed Set info.

- A lesser thing: If you could make iTagP add to what is already in the comment and grouping tags, rather than replace it, that would be a great tweak too. There's probably not too many people that have used the comment tag all that much, but I for one, have put in some stuff there, such as whether my tracks are instrumental or not. And again, the people who are likely to dig your app the most, are also the ones most likely to have done such things.

- Artists vs. albums. Most artists don't change a lot during their (usually short) recording careers, but then there are the ones who do. If you search PJ Harvey in allmusic, you will find that the moods listed for each album are quite different (from eachother and from those listed for the artist), as they should be – 'cuz the albums are very different.
Could it be an idea to get iTagP to get info for each album rather than each artist (or to have the option to do so) ?

- You say that the app can't be automated because the searches sometimes bring up more than one match. I guess you know better than me how often this happens, having spent 4 hours going through your collection, but my guess is that it doesn't happen all that often. If iTagP then automatically went through those it could, and made some kind of a list of those that returned more than one match... You get the picture.
I also think that this might work even better if you searched for album title rather than artist name, I think that would give a unique match more often. And especially if you did both. allmusic doesn't give the option to search both artist and album in its web interface, so you might not be able to do that. You could however make the app try album first, and if that returns more than one match (or if the song doesn't have an album tag) then try artist name, and see if that comes up with a single match (and then if that doesn't work, put it on the unclassified list).


More technical stuff:

- The app doesn't seem all that stable yet. Most notably I've often experienced that the window "disappears". I can go into iTunes to fix something, and when i go back to iTagProperly, the window doesn't come up, only the menu. When this happens it doesn't show in exposé either.

- It's sometimes very slow it seems, but I haven't really gotten a clear idea about how often or why this happens.

Well this became an awfully long post... I hope these suggestions are of some help, and that they don't outshine my enthusiasm for your program. This is definitely not wasted programming time! Let me say it again: Great app!

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[yinyang]

If any of you use Quicksilver, there is a little 'plugin' called TuneTag which allows you to make use of the comments field and tag tracks with whatever is relevant to you (kind of your own 'mood' tagging!)

That combined with iTagProperly could be quite useful....

[FlaminMoe]

This looks great - but is it only compatible with Tiger? I'm still on 10.3.9 and can't get it to run.

[Snollygoster]

Hello and thank you all for the support.

@Humbro : Most of the features you are describing can be implemented and will be as soon as I have the time. Probably a few at a time. Thank you for the extended feedback.

@FlaminMoe: I have no idea why it does not run on Panther. Will check what settings I used while compiling.