This is [i]really[/i] useful, many thanks.

Are there any guides anywhere (to anyone's knowledge) that provide a "how to" guide to tagging techniques.

I have a few ipodmusic collections(f00-f99) that I sort by album, then auto-move complete albums manually using tag data. Remaining files require further analysis. Issues with importing existing content, with potentially [i]slightly[/i] differing naming conventions resulting in duplicated content. I'm after techniques that cats like trixmoto and other godlike MM geniuses pull out of their digital sleeves...

To my knowledge, "find duplicate functionality" (existing or through scripts) doesn't work on non-library content (on a device, for example). We're at a hostel where we share LOTS, including music, but I'm drowning in duplicate data here! Tips welcome.

Many thanks in advance. Jonny

well they protect their copyrights for the album art mostly so the artist that created it in graphic art, or the photographer that took the photos can be paid for their work. but like i said they mostly allow the use of images of them for the songs
because its a form of pr. but if you intend to sale the art or albums or single songs with the art, you are sure to get a visit from the riaa lawyers to make sure you have a contract to sale it as it is copyrighted so any money will be split up by you and them, with the most % going to them.

just like they are so dang uptight about that stuff that a few years back they forced blank cdrom makers to produce
a cdrom with the word music printed on it. and sale it as a music cdrom, so they could force the state to collect tax for that music which was going to be recorded on it when those were bought. back then it was easy to tell how much tax was going to them. because the normal disks were a sale price of 1 dollar less then the music disks. so any time you bought a pack of disks with music on the lable or on the disk you gave one dollar to the riaa to split up between each record company. does not seem like much but consider that the disk was just the same as the normal one you're not getting anything for that dollar other then ripped off.

so even though they are that protective of the music and cover art they don't really care if you put the names backwords from some other site's listing or not. just as long as the correct name and data is there. :wink:

Now if what you say about record companies being protective of their data is true, then why is there so much disagreement among these databases over album info? How is it for example that Gracenote can tag a song's title as "Battle Flag" and the artist as "Lo-Fidelity Allstars feat. Pigeonhead" and the iTunes store calls it "Battle Flag (Feat. Pigeonhead)" by "Lo Fidelity Allstars" yet MusicBrainz claims the song's title is "Battle Flag (feat. Pigeonhed)" and it's by "Lo Fidelity Allstars"? In addition they can't even agree whether the release year is 1998 or 1999. It's so ridiculous, genre should be the only field over which there's any question.

[url]http://www.chinesealbumart.com[/url] for Chinese album art

[url]http://www.metal-archives.com/[/url] is great for, well, metal. Obviously.
The interface is clean and consistent, people get the info for new albums up nearly instantaneously, and they almost always have lyrics and album art available.

I'd love to be able to automatically tag from this site but I have no idea where to begin.

do we need another music database? there's so many already and another one just for mediamonkey has a very small installed userbase. Musicbrainz and Discogs are moving at a glacial speed when it comes to approval of changes to the database, imagine at what speed a mediamonkey db moves.

This has been suggested in the past. A few months ago I had a prolonged email conversation with [b]Jiri[/b] discussing how we thought this could maybe work. There are a lot of issues to consider, but it is still something I'm interested in working on. Unfortunately there just aren't enough hours in the day at the moment! Anyone with ideas, please come forward with them. :)

Here's a thought that has been nagging me for some time.

I would say that taken as a whole, Mediamonkey users are probably pretty good with their tagging.
So it seems like a waste that every user has to start from scratch with his tagging, hunting and
digging for hard-to-find information when other MM users may already have done the job.

Why not set up a metadata-sharing site exclusively for MM users? Maybe a feature that's limited
to MM Gold users? It would then be possible to search for a song/artist in that database and
pick exactly the fields you want. This would be particularly useful for the "difficult" fields to
populate, such as original year and composer/lyricist - and "genre" if like me you want the
genre to be defined specifically on a song-by-song basis.

MusicBrainz attempts to do something like that, but unfortunately it can't be "parsed" to
fill in all tagging fields automatically.

I know that music companies are ridiculously protective of their data, which is why I suggest
a CLOSED community reserved for MM Gold users. For example Collectorz.com does something
very similar with their Moviecollector program.

What do you all think? Is this wishful thinking?

they more likely do trixmoto.
they made an agreement with the record companys to try and protect the copyrights of the albums they sale.
and since the album covers are made by the record companys they are also part of the copyright for the songs.

most don't mind the album covers being used because its a form of PR. but apple being who they are try to comply with their contract to the companys.

:)

I'm pretty sure Apple sources their own artwork, as they encrypt it specially and make it incredibly hard to access. If it was just from Gracenote, they wouldn't be so protective.

regarding the apple store, isn't most of it's info pulled from the gracenote database? Gracenote forbids it's clients from using other databases for lookups when they have a contract with them.

also what site does WMP (windows media player) use these days? I thought it was allmusic but i'm not sure these days.

Every time someone works out how, Apple changes the system to break it. I once wrote a script to do this but never will again because it's simply not worth my time rewriting it every few months. Sorry, blame Apple! :)

I don't know how difficult this would be but would it be possible for anyone to write a script that would allow one to auto tag using the iTunes store. There are some album titles, like soundtracks, of which none of the other sources agree with the iTunes store word for word and character for character. For example, nobody would agree with iTunes that the album's title is "Rocky IV (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)". The closest I could find would be "Rocky IV: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" courtesy of Amazon. I know this is being really obsessive but it would make things so much easier. It's unbelievable how much these servers disagree on metadata and it causes a huge mess. Thank you!

This one is for swedish music
[url]http://www.slba.se/slbaweb/index.jsp[/url]

Good site for old music ('50, '60)
[url]http://www.popmusicinfo.com/[/url]

More sites that I have been using to tag my music - here comes the motherload.
The links are (very) coarsely categorized by genre.

[b]Classical music[/b]
http://www.sonymasterworks.com/
http://www.karadar.com
http://www.classical.net/music/rep/lists/index.php
http://www.classicalarchives.com/index.html

[b]Blues, Jazz, Country[/b]
http://www.redhotjazz.com/search/
http://www.lpdiscography.com/main2.htm
http://www.perfessorbill.com/ (ragtime and piano blues)
http://www.ragtimeradio.org/ (ragtime and piano blues)
http://www.heptune.com/lyrics.html
http://blueslyrics.tripod.com/

[b]Pop / Rock[/b]
http://umdmusic.com/ "(Almost) Complete Database of the Pop Music"
http://www.oldies.com/
http://pagesperso-orange.fr/masses/ (French site with complete discographies of several dozen Pop/Rock artists)
http://www.rockhall.com/ (The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame - includes a list of "500 songs that helped shape rock and roll")
http://www.rockabilly.nl/lyrics/lyrics.htm
http://www.zonicweb.net/badalbmcvrs/ (A real gem: I give you the museum of Bad Album Covers!)

[b]Foreign language Pop/Rock[/b]
French
http://www.archambault.ca/store/default.asp (good for info on rare French stuff)
http://www.encyclopedisque.fr/
http://www.bide-et-musique.com/ ("bides" in French are songs that are commercial and/or artistic failures, but tend to get stuck in your head...)

German
http://www.jpc.de/
http://www.secondhandlps.de/index.php
http://www.lpcd.de/0/overv_de.htm
http://www.germanrock.de/

Spanish
http://www.dtodo1poco.com/musica/index.php

[b]Ethnic / World [/b]
http://worldmusic.nationalgeographic.com
http://worldmusiccentral.org/dokuwiki/doku.php
http://www.akh.se/indexa.htm (extremely complete discographies with tons of infos on each song - but limited to a few artists)

http://www.toronto-lime.com/music/index.htm
http://www.calypsoarchives.co.uk/

[b]Soundtracks / Musicals[/b]
http://theatre-musical.com
http://www.arkivsong.com
http://www.soundtrackcollector.com

One more invaluable resource are of course the fansites dedicated to a particular artist, but these would be too long to list and of limited general interest.
Google is your friend, I often add "fan or unofficial" to my query which tends to do the trick.