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May 17, 2005

ICYG Update

I'm happy to welcome Ross to the ICYG music club. Sharing a fresh set of tunes with us, he challenged my scripts with iTunes-encoded AAC files, which I hadn't taken the opportunity to play with previously. It turns out that while FB2K handles them fine, mmpython doesn't parse their metadata. My playlist picker requires mmpython-provided metadata from all eligible songfiles, so this produced quite a gap.

In researching this, I've found that it appears that Apple hasn't formally specified their metadata implementation. Since I couldn't find any Python code to read the metadata, I took advantage of the fact that FB2K could add new tags to the AACs, as well as transfer all the tags over to transcoded Ogg Vorbis files created via its diskwriter. The resulting Oggs are well-behaved and we can now check out Ross's stuff.

Slightly related topic: Amazon's increased their thumbnail image size to 75x75 pixels for the CDs they carry.

Posted by Alex Harden on May 17, 2005 11:11 PM |

Comments

So.. Everytime I upload new AAC's, will they automatically be Oggified?

Or do I need to as you to do it?

Posted by: Ross Karchner | May 18, 2005 8:41 AM

The "Oggification" (and proper ICYG tagging) is a manual process with FB2K. If I could find a way to parse the AACs' metadata with Python (or PHP?) I might be able to make use of them natively.

Posted by: aharden | May 18, 2005 5:03 PM

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