Reliance on iTunes playlist exports

[theshillito]

I'm still running iTunes 10.7 because the new versions are very different and I'm concerned it will break the playlist export (and I also heard that it doesn't like music libraries exclusively stored on external drives, but that's another matter). Whether it does or not, I haven't tried yet.

Also fun fact, the NekoDesu music library is actually combined with my personal music library, leading to a lot of music in said library that I don't necessarily listen to. I'm wondering if there's an application out there to tag and maintain a separate music library solely for nkdsu, with exporting features that are potentially more customisable than iTunes to allow for further nkdsu enhancements (I think you can have custom ID3 tags).

[colons]

For OS X, there is nothing but a graveyard of broken promises. I look every couple of years and never find anything worth sticking with for long. I've been using mpd for years.

…But I do not believe this to be a legitimate issue. iTunes 11 is a skin for iTunes 10. It still has a modal preferences dialogue and it still does most of the same stuff it always has. I'd be surprised if the library export feature has changed any. Back up and see what happens. If it doesn't work, we can panic.

You already maintain the Inu Desu library separately, right? It might be sensible to try to tag tracks with something that indicates if they should be included and if they should be Inu Desu tracks or not, rather than having two separate XML files. Dunno.

[theshillito]

The thing with tags in iTunes though is that they're all called something. It's a bit hackyslash using the title tag for both the title and the anime attribution, and then parsing the title through a regular expression. The only way around that would be to disregard what one of the tags is called and use that instead. Composer: "Aikatsu! OP2" or whatever. There's tags I could use, but it feels wrong, ya know?

[colons]

It's a bit hacky, but it's what you were already doing and I see no reason to stop in favour of what you rightly point out is in many ways more hacky solution.

For what it's worth, it's not a regular expression; it's smart enough to get nested brackets right (at least until there's an anime with unbalanced brackets in the title), which I'm not convinced you could do in the general case with a non-infinite regular expression.

[theshillito]

Not sure if this would be a separate issue, but perhaps you could find a way to split extra long artist tags so that artist pages list tracks that include that artist in the song? (maybe split into two columns: "solo" and "collaboration"?)

[colons]

Are they formatted consistently?

[theshillito]

Generally speaking it's as follows:
"[artist 1], [artist 2], [artist 3] and [artist 4]"
So comma space between each artist, then space "and" space before the final. Ones I receive not in that format I try to format like that, but I'm just one bloke at the end of the day. I probably forget sometimes.

[colons]

I could probably catch that reasonably reliably, and it's not the end of the world if it doesn't catch all of them. Open another issue and I'll see what I can come up with.

[colons]

Cool. Now, until you discover that iTunes 11 breaks export, I'm closing this.

[theshillito]

Well, we survived the iTunes 11 update, but there's still my point about wanting to split my personal library and the nkdsu library...

[colons]

If you make sure it's included in the library export, you might be able to wrangle some comma-separated tagging format into the comments field.

[theshillito]

Reliance on iTunes is still an issue particularly in moving between computers. Despite my best efforts to synchronise iTunes persistent IDs between machines, they don't. I have a computer (iMac) that is used solely for managing the music library now and there's no real fallback if it dies (which is seeming more likely to happen soon every time I use it).

I don't know what to suggest other than a server-side database of tracks and maybe an MD5 hash or something similar to identify them uniquely, though old links that used iTunes IDs will still need to work. Problem with hashing the file is that any changes to metadata will cause the hash to change, so metadata would also need server-side management too (which is already present in the admin console, but perhaps a cleaner way of doing it as part of batch uploads would be ideal).

[theshillito]

In regards to #108 this could be handled by separating out artists with actual identifiers rather than fuzzy matching based on "and"s.

[homsar]

AIUI your requirements on iTunes are basically:

• Be able to scan a folder for audio files, or accept them via drag and drop
• Be able to extract their metadata
• Store the metadata in a database
• Allow the metadata as stored in the database to be edited interactively
• Be able to do quick searches over that database
• (Probably) Be able to play the audio files by selecting the relevant metadata
• Be able to export the database in a format that nkd.su can read, I guess including some kind of UID that matches the iTunes-style one that nkd.su uses for song request URIs

Rather than getting frustrated about the state of music management tools/players, is it worth perhaps writing our own tool that meets these requirements and doesn't try to be a full-fledged player/library manager/iTunes replacement? On the face of it (and after Googling what libraries there are to support each of these) it looks like a not unreasonable task. Could either be a local web app (Does Django work in py2app? or the PHP Hypertext Processor would be another alternative) relying on a QuickTime or HTML5 widget to play the audio, or a desktop app (PyQt seems to be the easiest to use in that case, unless someone knows more about writing Cocoa apps than I do)

Advantages:

• No longer tied down to fields that iTunes supports, field names can now explicitly refer to what their contents should be
• No longer tied to iTunes XML—could equally well use JSON or YAML
• Don't have to maintain a machine running a discontinued version of iTunes in order to support the Video description field on audio files.

Disadvantages:

• We have to build and maintain it
• Change is hard
• PyQt probably can't make something quite as in keeping with the OS X (or macOS if the library computer gets upgraded) UI as much as a native Cocoa app would