Hi all

I just tried banshee and saw the only (!) feature it beats amarok in: writing metadata (rating, labels not only ID3 tags) to files. AFAIK amarok writes the metadata somewhere to the ~/.kde folder, which is very inconvinient if you're like me and constantly on the move and all your music and life is on a portable HD 

So is this a planned feature or something I can accomplish with a downloadable script?

Oh BTW, is amarok2 going to be backwards compatible with metadata with amarok1?


/KhaaL (who wish that media players used a common standard for metadata tagging)

KhaaL wrote:I just tried banshee and saw the only (!) feature it beats amarok in: writing metadata (rating, labels not only ID3 tags) to files. AFAIK amarok writes the metadata somewhere to the ~/.kde folder

That's simply not true. Amarok write metadata directly to the files, except for Labels, which are kept in the database.

Mark Kretschmann wrote:

KhaaL wrote:I just tried banshee and saw the only (!) feature it beats amarok in: writing metadata (rating, labels not only ID3 tags) to files. AFAIK amarok writes the metadata somewhere to the ~/.kde folder

That's simply not true. Amarok write metadata directly to the files, except for Labels, which are kept in the database.

I just installed amarok and loaded my collection, none of my rating by stars is visible...

We also don't write ratings and playback statistics.

We've always been cautious about writing stuff like that to files.

Ian, could you point me to a article/tutorial on how to save and restore labels/ratings/etc if you're on the move between diffrent computers and would like to keep that kind of data?

No I can't, I suppose it would take some SQL skills.

All that information is stored in the collection.db thats in ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok

There is a reason Amarok doesn't do this: it's not part of ID3. I surely wouldn't want to trust a program with my carefully tended music collection only to have it mangle the tags by writing metadata that doesn't fit the spec.

An easy and safe solution would be writing the labels and ratings to the comments section of the ID3 tag... Or if there is a restrictive character limitation, the ratings only at least

There is an ID3 ratings tag. I think the tag is POPM. Different programs use slightly different translations of the 0-255 value into a 5 star system, but it's broadly a standard implementation now.

I gather some people feel that writing tags into files is bad practice, but locking my music collection into a single database tied to one software package on one machine running one operating system is a deal-breaker to me. Ratings are a significant method for curating and interacting with my music collection. It's a shame amaroK doesn't at least have an option for using them, as it seems to otherwise be the best-of-breed manager, and I'm going to have to find an alternative before I can fully migrate to linux.

hughstimson wrote:There is an ID3 ratings tag. I think the tag is POPM. Different programs use slightly different translations of the 0-255 value into a 5 star system, but it's broadly a standard implementation now.

I gather some people feel that writing tags into files is bad practice, but locking my music collection into a single database tied to one software package on one machine running one operating system is a deal-breaker to me. Ratings are a significant method for curating and interacting with my music collection. It's a shame amaroK doesn't at least have an option for using them, as it seems to otherwise be the best-of-breed manager, and I'm going to have to find an alternative before I can fully migrate to linux.

As it is right now, songbird seems the only cross-platform alternative but as we all know, it's not half as powerful as amarok. I've tried to migrate to another player, but amarok 1 is too good to leave behind to be honest...

Hi all,

I'm half way with a Python script importing Amarok album art, ratings and statistics into Songbird, see intermediate results here:
  http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1866

If you like to contribute, especially on the part writing into the Songbird database, please join me at this URL. When this script is finished, also the reverse can be done, importing Songbird metadata into Amarok.

Regards,

Pander