Seltzer

Currently, processing a new album for me involves using Tag and Rename to handle most things, Album Art Downloader to find the album art, Mp3Tag to embed it in all of the mp3s and tore's genre script to set genres. And there are misc. tasks like cleaning out bs like m3u files etc. Since this process is becoming quite tedious, I've decided I'm going to write a Foobar plugin in C++ to help out.

My original premise for the Foobar plugin was to fetch tags from Musicbrainz and apply them to albums on a batch basis. I know there are a few in existence already but this one would work exactly as I wanted; i.e. it would preview all changes to existing tag data, alert me about radical suggested changes (which could be indicative of a really badly tagged album) and above all, make the whole process highly customisable.

Then I started thinking about what else it could do and I came up with this feature set. Some of these features are already implemented in other programs I use, but it's easier to have them all in one place.

* Search for album art and embed it in files:
This is mainly a matter of finding the most reputable AA sources and perhaps using an image recognition algorithm to pick out the most common result.

* Warnings about:
Overly large album art, possibly incomplete albums and low bitrates... list goes on.

* Erase various standard/custom ID3 tags -
Some of these custom tags *are* MusicBrainz tags and so this would perhaps best be performed after trying to match music with a MusicBrainz release (as MusicBrainz ID tags help with this process). I would use this mainly to erase garbage metadata like torrent tracker URLs in comments etc.

* Check style conformance of tags:
One example of style might be punctuation - the user would be able to set up capitalisation rules such as "the first letter of 'of' should never be capitalised in a song title unless it's the first word". A rule like this should not be applied without previewing changes, as punctuation rules especially are not black and white.

* A feature to generate filenames from tags:
This has of course been done in many programs ad nauseam using masking (including Tag & Rename) but this would allow for custom mappings; i.e. colons cannot be used in Windows filenames, therefore colons in tags require a custom mapping to some other character.

* Garbage removal feature:
For removing unwanted files from albums (based on file extension)

* Copy/swap tags feature with rules:
I always copy Artist -> Album Artist unless it's a compilation for example, in which case, Album Artist should be "Various Artists"

* Genre Finder:
Same idea as tore's script except it would be based on using a data source API if possible, rather than web scraping. It would be nice to allow for rules too; e.g. if a band is "frostbitten dire wolf industrial black metal", they are also black metal, industrial and metal. And I think that "Abstract" is bollocks as a genre descriptor, but discogs.com seems to like it... so some genre exclusion rule would be handy there. I've hacked these things into that script in the past btw.

* Compilation Finder:
I dislike having single songs floating around but I hate downloading whole studio albums just to have a single song (especially when it's a one hit wonder and the rest of the album is shite). It seems that the ideal option is to delete the orphan song and download a compilation which includes that song. A useful feature would be to automatically find the compilation which maximises the coverage of single tracks.

So I'll reiterate that I know much of this has been done before. It'd just be nice to have it all encapsulated in one batch process.

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