(Once again - as I don´t want to break threads and forget to press the
"Reply all" button. - sorry for the re-posting :))
Olivier Tilloy wrote:
Hi Jörg,
Thanks for your detailed feedback, it is much appreciated.
Thanks also for your kind reply :)
1) Problems with MP3s with APEv2 tags:
That's indeed a bug, APEv2 tags should be supported with GStreamer's
apetag plugin (in good,
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gst-plugins-good-plugins/html/gst-plugins-good-plugins-plugin-apetag.html).
Now for determining whether the bug is in GStreamer or Elisa... Can you
try `gst-launch -t filesrc location=myfile.mp3 ! apedemux ! fakesink` on
such a file and paste the output somewhere? Or make such a file
available to us so we can try?
I have uploaded an archive (< 1 MByte) to
http://www.zshare.net/download/9941856ff6235c. The archive contains a
directory with 3 small MP3 files as well as a Folder.jpg and an
AlbumArtSmall.jpg. The files contain ID3v1, ID3v2 and APEv2 tags with
ID3v2.3 UTF-16 charset as this is said to be most compatible next to
ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 - with the advantage of supporting foreign
characters. Furthermore, a jpeg is embedded. The tagging and embedding
of the jpeg has been done with the windows tool MP3tag as this is one of
the most advanced ones on this evil platform :) .
Nevertheless, when embedding cover jpegs you are not able to tag the
image itself (cover, back, title etc.) as it is possible e.g. with
EasyTag on linux - if you are interested I can check which image tag is
used by iTunes. EasyTag seems to be more complicated for me and in some
cases less intuitive and flexible, but the biggest problem for me is
that it does not seem to support ID3v2.3 UTF-16, and ID3v2.4 seems to be
problematic on some devices - that´s why I currently stick with MP3tag
(which also works on linux using wine)...
The MP3 files are just simple generated basic waves, and the JPEG is
just a scaled screenshot of Audacity, so you don´t get any problems with
copyright and can use it for further and/or public testing. :)
On a side note, I don't know much about APE tags but what's the point of
having the same metadata duplicated three times? ID3v1 is known to be
limited and players that don't support ID3v2 are of another era...
You are right, just saw that APE is quite exotic, but it was just an
additional checkbox click when using the windows tool MP3tag.
Nevertheless, I included them in my demo files in case that somebody
also includes APE tags incidentially - Elisa should at least ignore it
instead of displaying garbage :) .
2) No cover view from (embedded) jpegs
For getting the best "cover compatibility" on all hardware and software
players available, I stored covers in 2 ways.
- Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center look for a file called
folder.jpg oder Folder.jpg in the same directory as the MP3s. Looking
into coverindir_metadata.py, both names are not supported. Adding it to
the code in line 55 or renaming folder.jpg to cover.jpg did not work.
I haven't tried it myself, but simply adding 'folder' or 'Folder' to the
list_of_names list in coverindir_metadata.py at line 55 should work. Is
the plugin actually activated in your configuration (check for its
presence in the list of metadata_providers in ~/.elisa/elisa.conf)?
I added 'folder' as well als 'Folder' (Windows does not care about upper
or lower case) and finally activated the plug-in in the configuration (I
first did not know how to do this). Having tested it now it worked in
the 'Folder' view but not in the 'Album' or 'Artist' view. So, working?
Partly! ;)
- iTunes embeds the JPEGs directly into the MP3 file. I also did so with
MP3tag, but the covers are not being displayed.
As for embedded covers AFAIK we don't support that at the moment, but it
would be a nice-to-have feature, definitely a more reliable source than
Amazon for covers, although we need to check if the format used to embed
them is somewhat standard. Can you open a ticket in our bug tracker
(filed as an enhancement) to track the implementation? ->
https://code.fluendo.com/elisa/trac/newticket
See also my MP3 files generated with MP3tag - I could also try embedding
images with iTunes itself. Although in general I prefer separating
content and metadata, I would prefer using embedded JPEGs as they aren´t
as big nowadays compared to the space we get on media, and if you
collect single songs, the file directory might become quite cluttered
because a cover.jpg, album.jpg or folder.jpg does not help here - you
just can add a JPEG which has the same name as the corresponding MP3 file.
3) Case sensitive sort order
Could you change the sort order e.g. of the artist list to a case
insensitive sort order? Having artists like "a-ha" on a very different
position than e.g. "A*Teens" is quite strange as a lot of people also
don't ever recall the correct spelling of some artists.
Sure enough that's a bug, could you please either file a new ticket or
update ticket #810 which is somehow related? ->
https://code.fluendo.com/elisa/trac/ticket/810
5) No "working" sign when reading the database
Definitely. The best of course would be to have no latency, but in any
case Elisa should display a busy indicator... Please file a ticket for
this, thanks!
I am going to file the tickets within the next days when I have more
time, in this case I am also going to upload my database file so that
you can reproduce the bug.
With kind regards
Joerg
