[mp3togo] audiotags library 0.01

[sim]

On 5/24/06, Justus Pendleton <justus at ryoohki.net> wrote:
> I've cobbled together a generic interface to several audio file formats.
> This could be a step towards using mutagen in mp3togo, while also adding
> support for aac and musepack. As should be pretty clear I didn't write
> the vast majority of this code -- it was taken from quodlibet which
> already had a nice interface for exactly this. I've hacked the QL source
> to make this a standalone library. Thus far I've only tested reading of
> tags. You'll need mutagen installed for mp3, flac, and oggvorbis
> support. Other file formats require ctypes and a specific library. If
> you don't have the library it should handle that gracefully. This
> release depends on a recent SVN version of mutagen, which added
> pure-python oggvorbis support.

The tags area certainly needs work. Flac tags are read in from
metaflac run at the end of a pipe. ID3 is obsolete.

I'm all for mutagen, it seems like a good solution. The mp3togo.Tags()
class is an abstraction for metadata tags. It is mostly a dictionary
with magic read and write methods. The whole thing should be simple to
replace as a unit.

>m['title'], m['~#length']

I especialy like these and m['~bitrate'] I had to explain to someone
how to use different options with lame and how you needed to calculate
the compression ratio for it yourself in advance. That's not really
cool, it's the program's job to do all that math, not the user.

My problem was that I'm not sure how to extract that information from
mp3s and oggs and flacs. This tagging overhaul should fix that problem
as well.


> If this seems like a decent interface and approach the next step would
> be to switch mp3togo over to using this for reading and writing tags.

This seems like the right direction to me.

I spent the weekend implementing a cluster mode for task sharing over a LAN.
It's still a little bit buggy, but it mostly works, it's very speedy
with three machines
working. No extra charge for zombie processes.

I'll try to get the code out soon.

-- 
sim