[mp3togo] mp3togo, tags, and silent adaptation

[sim]

Hi Dan,

On 8/12/07, Dan Stromberg <dstromberglists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the great software.  It enabled me to cram my music collection
> onto my 20G iAudio X5 running rockbox.  Without mp3togo, it wouldn't have
> fit.

You are welcome, thanks for writing in; I always appreciate hearing
from my users. I'm glad you have found mp3togo useful.

> I just found a moment to get tags to work on my Ubuntu system, and I wanted
> to make a suggestion to save others the difficulty.

Did you install from the Debian package or from the tarball? The deb
recommends or suggests the necessary dependencies. I've had mixed
reports from people using the deb on Ubuntu, it seems it mostly works.
I run Debian myself, but I try to keep the package working with
Ubuntu.

> It'd be useful if mp3togo could, upon finding that an optional module isn't
> avaialble, warn the user and suggest what's missing - possibly even listing
> the package names in some of the more popular distributions.  It's great
> that mp3togo is so adaptive, continuing even when key modules aren't
> available, but in a way, this makes diagnosing missing functionality harder
> when done silently.

Good suggestion. mp3togo actually will produce that message, but only
at higher than default verbosity levels. "mp3togo -v 2" will give
module load errors.

I may bump the default level and reorganize the priorities a bit.
Module load errors should probably print by default, but be easily
suppressed. Thanks for the suggestion Dan.

> I installed the python ID3, python eyeD3 and python ogg.vorbis support to
> get tags functional, but I had to study the code a little and take some
> guesses as to Ubuntu package names to get there.

Either ID3 or eyeD3 will work. eyeD3 is used preferentially as it has
better unicode support.

Some other packages that mp3togo will use:
normalize-audio   (very nice for headphones)
flac, faad, python-xmms

There are some slight differences in package names between Debian and
Ubuntu that serve to further confuse things. It doesn't help that my
package is homemade and very unofficial.

I do always try and fix problems people report, I appreciate bug reports.

I think I will make your suggested change.

> Thanks again.

My pleasure, thanks for writing in.

-- 
sim