Well, as promised in my last entry, I've given a talk on 'Managing Digital Music Collections with Perl', after having crash-tested an earlier (not significantly different) version on London.pm at the technical meeting last Thursday.
Both times it went reasonably well, and although I get fewer laughs today I was happier with how I presented it. There was a little gentle ribbing about my choice of mp3s on IRC, it seems, but that's fine; I knew they were a little rubbish.
Afterwards, davorg mentioned that he, too, had thought about (and in his case started writing) an easier tagger that doesn't require knowledge of id3v2 tags. After I persuaded acme to write MP3::ID3Lib in January, I always meant to work on a nice wrapper, but never did get round to it (partly because I'm still having problems with compiling the library on Mac OS X). I suppose that's back on the front burner, as it were.
Also under consideration is MusicBrainz. It's showing a lot of potential (more so than my never-released FreeDB noodling) but there are still a couple of gaps. I'm not over-enamoured with the reliance on a C library, either; my old Mac OS heart beating still. I'm starting to think about how to use it directly. It doesn't look too hard. (Famous last words?)
In any case, now it's over, you can read the slides (and notes (which need work), and code (which mainly works)), and I can think about the speaker's dinner and doing a writeup of the rest of the conference tomorrow.
This was an incredibly satisfying itch to scratch -- I started with a few basic scripts, and have worked up to a Wx-based tool that recognizes the 'big' tags (artist, album, title, track number) and m3u information (csv and svf to follow). Sorts, files, and groups, and that's it. It works pretty well, and it does so for large collections that other programs didn't handle so well.
I just started adding in support for FreeDB, so it's good to hear that there's already a module for it. I'll check that out & put up a review on perlmons sometime soon.
