Comments on: AFT Embedded Tagging: now on FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis, Ogg/FLAC, and Ogg/Speex!

By: Matija "hook" Šuklje

Matija "hook" Šuklje — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:06:46 +0000

Hmmm, when I get my new laptop (I’m currently homeless, so to say, since the old one finally died), I’ll test your suggestions. Thanks for explaining :]

By: jefferai

jefferai — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:51:54 +0000

Well, that’s one way. (By the way, you can mix and match embedded and non-embedded files, they just have the various tracking characteristics per file.)

Alternately, you can use the helper program to implant UIDs each time you download it. As long as those files are then scanned in the same exact path as the final place they were scanned before deletion, then the database will be updated with the new unique ID value. Then you can move them wherever you like (but again, next time you download it the first scan would have to be in the same path as they were last in). Note that URL/uniqueid mappings don’t get deleted from the database, which means that even if they are first scanned somewhere else, if you then move them to the same location as the previously-deleted files were and they are scanned again, it’ll remap that particular URL to the new uniqueid value.

By: Matija "hook" Šuklje

Matija "hook" Šuklje — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:14:02 +0000

Ooops, I didn’t want to bold that line …I wanted to use asterikses as bullets. My bad :\

By: Matija "hook" Šuklje

Matija "hook" Šuklje — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:11:58 +0000

So in order for my usecase to work, I would have to:
* use the non-embedded (i.e. just use Amarok without the extra helper program)
* use the same download as before (which in the example of Jamendo, Magnatune etc. is not too hard)
* and not change the (e.g. id3) tags of the files themselves (which is a bit annoying, but not too much).

Right?

By: jefferai

jefferai — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:56:06 +0000

Yes and no.

If you don’t have an embedded identifier in the file, then it generates an identifier based on properties of the file itself. So if the file you downloaded was exactly the same (in terms of for instance metadata and file size) then it would get the same tag and statistics and such could migrate.

However, if you put an embedded identifier in such a track, it becomes tricky, because if you don’t put the same embedded identifier in the file the next time you download it, AFT won’t recognize it. In this case, the proper thing to do would be to put the file in the *exact* same location with the same filename as before. During the collection scan it will notice the file there and update the stored identifier in the database. After this, you should be able to move it around and have the tracking follow.

There isn’t really a way to automagically populate files with old AFT identifiers (after all, if it does it based purely on path, you may have purposefully moved a different file there). If there was a way to always do this correctly, you wouldn’t actually need AFT at all.

If you read the caveats on the wiki page it will probably help to explain the behavior too.

By: Matija "hook" Šuklje

Matija "hook" Šuklje — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:12:06 +0000

Does AFT cover also when tracks are deleted from any media?

E.g.:
1) I download an album from Jamendo or BlocSonic or whatever
2) retag it and listen to it
3) delete it because I need space
4) re-download the album again.

Expected results: again tagging

“Wow, this is great” results: automagically using the tags that I used before, with all the statistics etc. etc.

And if the latter is the case, I think it would make sense if Amarok asked you whether you want to tags that came with the files (e.g. id3) to overwrite your (old) custom tags or if you would like your (old) tags to overwrite the tags in the files (e.g. id3).

In any case it’s great to hear progress on AFT :]