Pat Farrell wrote:...
There are lots of potential definitions. The most obvious
is that songs are identical if a hash/checksum of the bytes
is identical.
I proposed that we only consider the music part of the file,
and skip all the metadata tags. I think that changing
one of the tags within a song, say Genre from Pop to House
does not change the essence of the music. So I proposed
that we read the whole file, ignore the tags, headers, and
assorted BS, and put the music bytes thru the hash function.
And store the resulting hash.
I kinda agree with this in theory, but the practice is not something I
imagine going well.
Someone who knows about MPC and WMA formats would have to chime in on
solving it for those cases.
WMA and AAC are great examples of why using tags is not sufficient.
The internal format of these files are proprietary. You may
be able to reverse engineer the format for any specific version,
but you will have to repeat it for each modification that Microsoft
or Apple make.
wouldn't the DRM versions of these songs have different checksums on
every device they're copied too?
From there, it's matter of DB-persisting the tags as part of the
normal scan process,
I'm convinced that for my needs, no extension of metadata tags
is sufficiently robust to describe all the data and can not
be made applicable to all file formats and versions upward and
downward.
XML will solve everything!!! Just kidding, I don't really want to see
any ML used here :)
In general database work, information retrieval work, etc.
the separation of data from metadata is well established.
For many good reasons.
I don't understand why so many folks seem to be insisting on
using extended tags. Patches are always welcome. Nothing that
I'm written about prohibits other approaches. There is no
one true way.
I'd guess because the tags are often already there, and/or already being
maintained. One could even call them the "standard" since they're the
primary way to get data about songs from one computer music player to
another (even though they all seem to make a database of their own these
days, they're all starting from the tags).
--
Jack At Monkeynoodle Dot Org: It's A Scientific Venture!
"I spent all me tin with the ladies drinking gin
so across the Western ocean I must wander" -- trad.
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