Roots Archives Forum

Hello Roots-Archivers,

I'm currently working on a script to tag my music-collection according to the information given by Roots-Archives.
Just curious to hear if there would be interest in a thing like that.
Its currently designed to work on linux, but windows support should be possible (although I won't work on it, if there is no interest).

@RA-developers: there is no other way to access the database than to parse the html/xml source, is it?

Blessis,
DreadOperator

How does this work, how are you linking the tracks exactly?

I'm not sure, if this answers your question:
It does not actually link anything, but searches for the static links of the artist and the album (http://www.roots-archives.com/artist/57 or ../release/172 for example) and than parses their content (e.g. the tracklist). This is possible because all RA-sites are basically structured the same way.
Some information is easy to get, some isn't (for me). So, tracklist, year, genre and label are working, but alternative album versions are currently ignored. Others will follow (especialy covers and artwork), but i'll concentrate on the tag-writing-plugin for now.
@RA-Maintainers: please say something, if you don't like your site being "parsed" (traffic should not be higher, than normal page views though)
Hum,
DreadOperator

Take a number! I think Seb's on a short holiday or something. I haven't been able to contact him throught the net yet. I'm sure he will answer your questions as soon as he's back.

Yep, no problem, i probably wont have much time for it in the next two or three weeks anyway.

A great idea to me, I use Linux so it should be perfect.

Do you know Easytag, to me it's the best mp3 tagger ever and it should be interesting to make it compatible.

Yes, i know Easytag, a good tagger indeed. But i decided for exfalso (works on windows) & quodlibet, because they support custom tags. Tags are compatibel to Easytag (since they are ID3v2.4), but you wont see custom and unusual ID3 tags ("Musicans", etc.). Custom tags will be available in quodlibet and foobar (hopefully, and maybe others)(and quodlibet has a nice search function, "Show me all DJ albums from 1972-80 that were produced by Lee Perry" and things like that).
Let's see what i can do, but i'm not a good programmer and cannot promise anything.
DreadController

Since basic functionality of the tagger works now (very slow and unoptimized though), i'ld be glad to know, if i can take your absent protest as a sign of agreement?

@maintainers: I'm not a web administrator and i don't know if the additional traffic is critical, maximal number of "page views" of the tagger currently is the number of albums of the accordant artist + 2 per tagged album, but, as said, it's quite slow. This could be reduced to about 3 or 2 "page views", but with loss in comfort.

I'll have to optimize reliability and speed before adding new functionality (currently: (album, artist), tracklist, recorddate, label and style (genre)), covers, additional information and riddims are on TODO.

Give Thanks,
DreadController

I would love to tag all my music with roots archive info..

Thanks fi di feedback, you're using windows or linux? It would be great to have some testers, when it gets to an usable state (which will take quite some time).

UPDATE: I went the other way and added functionality first
all album information (except comments) is there, covers are stored to the directory of the album. An obligatary screenshot of the obove mentioned search is [here](http://myr.xwsnet.org/forum/img/gallery ... 211984.jpg) (search term would be: &(#(recordingdate >=1972), #(recordingdate <=1980), genre = dj, involved = Lee Perry) .. looks a bit complicated, but gives you great power).
Lots of TODO still, alternate album versions, unmatching track numbers, optimze search .. it currently only detects say, 60-80% of the albums on RA. I decided to do the riddims as a seperate plugin, since i want it to work with newer albums as well. None the less, testers might be needed sooner than i thought