[lug] audio questions

[dio2002 at indra.com]

> dio2002 at indra.com wrote:
> 
>> when you rip from cd with something like amarok, is it smart enough to 
>> pull the artist, album, track info from the audio file on the CD 
>> (wav?) and insert that as appropriate id3 tag info in each new MP3 
>> file?  or does one have to manually tag every song post rip?
> 
> There is no meta data stored on cd's. The ripping s/w needs to access a 
> database out on teh intarwebs. There are several and I don't know which 
> one Amarok uses.

now i'm starting to remember.  iirc, i think these services look at the 
length of the trac to determine the song, album, artist.  obviously it 
can't use only the track length since many songs have the same length, 
but i think that's a considering factor.

>> assuming you have a bunch (a crapload) of MP3 files already on disk, 
>> can tools like amrok be used in "bash script" mode to mass id3 (re)tag 
>> the existing file collection to speed up the ops?  i'm thinking if the 
>> files were organized in artist and album directories and the file 
>> names were equivalent to track names, this could be scripted to put 
>> the info in there.  does amrok make this easy?
> 
> I don't know if Amarok does this, but there are tools that do. The 
> windows based Musicmatch Jukebox (see below) is one.

are you sure musicmatch does bash like scripting ;-)..

> I've used the windows based Musicmatch Jukebox since 1980, and it's an 
> abominable piece of software, but it's the best I've found (including 
> Amarok) for ripping and maintaining large collections of mp3's (I own 
> over 1100 cd's). Sadly, it reached it's zenith with v7.5 just before 
> Yahoo bought it and turned into a Realplayer clone. Most versions, 
> including 7.5, can still be found archived on the web (or on my hard 
> drive).

i remember using musicmatch back around 2001 or 2.  recently i looked 
and was surprised that as you stated it seems like a yahoo tool and no 
longer free.  if i decide to go that route and can't find it online, 
maybe you can shoot me your old copy.  thanks.