MediaMonkey forum

Thank you very much for your detailed and greatly appreciated explanations!

CarlitoGil wrote:...In this mode there are no artworks because the metadata comes from MusicBrainz, not iTunes. The metadata in this mode is provided by users that contribute to MusicBrainz, so sometimes it's not perfect, but helps....

I'm just curious: Why not use the artwork from the linked Cover Art Archive?
Example: http://musicbrainz.org/release/e9216a3b ... /cover-art
Like in this case, they often have much bigger covers (and many more graphical informations).

MMuser2011 wrote:I'm just curious: Why not use the artwork from the linked Cover Art Archive?

Thank you for always providing good questions.


I actually made the code able to show multiple artworks for the same album because I was sure I was going to use the Cover Art Archive to get artworks for the MusicBrainz metadata. I believe their archives are going to get better and better.
I had everything ready to go, except using the actual Cover Art Archive API.

My script, in order to use the API makes http requests, which work very much like a browser without an graphic interface.
The way they set it up, the API redirects you to the image, instead of giving you a direct link.
Any modern browser handles this just fine, but old ones do not. Turns out that through VBScript, the scripting language in MediaMonkey, you cannot access http request objects that can handle this.
Redirecting triggered security measures.
And I tried very hard to come up with a way. Asked in their forums, even. Just didn't work.
Almost cried erasing code I made for it.

What I don't remember is if I researched other scripts, like the MusicBrainz NGS, because it has the cover art...

...A quick peek into MusicBrainzTaggerNGS.vbs tells me they agree with my assessment, CoverArtArchive is not very effective right now.
What they do is, if an album metadata in MusicBrainz has an ASIN number they just link to it's Amazon picture.

I don't think this is the right solution for my script. If Cover Art Archive becomes viable I may implement it, but this is iTunesMonkey, mixing that with Amazon seems out of place to me.

Next three questions:

a) If I call your script for an entire album and the result will show tracks from two (ore more) different albums, how can I select just one of this received albums and apply only the changes from this one selected album?

b) Which values do I have to adjust in the score configuration to achieve the following:
I prefer results from the original album before a 'Best of' or 'Ultimate' collection type album.
How can I control this?

c) I try to get the result for a sampler like "100 Top Classical Songs". Your result brings back dozens of different albums. I realize, this must be a 'wild' compilation. But hey, why not take the much better titles? But only the titles please.
How can I do that without DEselect every other information on all the dozens of albums?

I see you've gotten to a point where most of the mass-tagging is done and now a more detailed approach is needed,
so now you're finding the limitations of this humble script.
There are some tricks that may help you. I hope.

MMuser2011 wrote: a) If I call your script for an entire album and the result will show tracks from two (ore more) different albums, how can I select just one of this received albums and apply only the changes from this one selected album?

So, you select only tracks that are supposed to be from the same album, but in the results some show up under, lets say, compilation albums, others in singles and others in studio albums.
How to tag them all under the same album?
Well, if you want to keep the correct ones and quickly disable the ones under the wrong album just right-click each track in the results. A track in the results has a grey background, right-clicking it anywhere is going to disable its check-box on the bottom panel.
Or, if your current tags are very bad, like "Track 01", then first use the "Acoustid Fingerprint" mode or "iTunesMonkey" mode, disabling the album tag or just ignoring it for now so further searches may get better matches.
Maybe edit the properties of those tracks yourself and change the album for all of them with the one you want in the results so the script will prefer the matches that have a similar album name.
And last, or at any point, try using the "iTunes Album" mode. Use the drop-down on the top of the window to see if you're preferred album is in there. If not, use that drop-down to write the name of the artist and the name of the album, like "the doors strange days", press enter and you'll get multiple albums listed in the drop-down. The script is supposed to auto select the one which best fits all the tracks you selected.

MMuser2011 wrote: b) Which values do I have to adjust in the score configuration to achieve the following:
I prefer results from the original album before a 'Best of' or 'Ultimate' collection type album.
How can I control this?

I'm sorry to say there is not real way to control this.
If the metadata came from MusicBrainz, for example, it would come with information about the type of album, single, compilation, etc., but the iTunes API doesn't provide that.
Aside from already having correct or close to correct album tags so the script prefers a similarly named album the other way to influence results is using the "iTunes Album" mode, as explained in the previous answer.

MMuser2011 wrote: c) I try to get the result for a sampler like "100 Top Classical Songs". Your result brings back dozens of different albums. I realize, this must be a 'wild' compilation. But hey, why not take the much better titles? But only the titles please.
How can I do that without DEselect every other information on all the dozens of albums?

So, for some tracks, you only want to get titles and maybe artist names.
You can quickly access the iTunesMonkey options by clicking "options", which is on the bottom left side of the results panel.
In the options, under "Replace", select only the fields you want.



I hope those answers are helpful enough.

Your answers are very helpful, thank you!

Another question:

If I do a search in MediaMonkey and then press CTRL-L on a few of the found tracks, the sort order in the preview part of your script seems always to by 'by track title', regardless how they have been sorted before. Do you have a specific reason for re-ordering the tracks?
Can I stop this sort or choose my own one?

MMuser2011 wrote:If I do a search in MediaMonkey and then press CTRL-L on a few of the found tracks, the sort order in the preview part of your script seems always to by 'by track title', regardless how they have been sorted before.

Scripts do not have any power over that.
MediaMonkey must have thought that it was a good idea, but I think it should use the current order instead or sorting them.

A question about the information "featured artist".
If you look at this album
at iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-f ... =278846166
and the same album
at MusicBrainz: http://musicbrainz.org/release/8b5827d9 ... 96582c3794
(please ignore the difference between the 12-track US-Version and the 13-track UK-Version)

you get back two different kind of featured artist, example track 3:
iTunes Source with search option 'iTunes album': De La Soul & Yummy
-> MediaMonkey auto-tag from web preview: De La Soul & Yummy
MusicBrainz Source with search option 'Acoustid fingerprint': De La Soul feat. Yummy
-> MediaMonkey auto-tag from web preview: De La Soul; Yummy

Is it possible to get this information unchanged from the source:
"De La Soul feat. Yummy" and not with a semicolon between the two artists?
MediaMonkey and other tools interprets such fields with semicolon as "multi-value" or "multi-item" fields.

IMHO there is a difference between a the artist field content "Artist A & Artist B" and "Artist A featuring Artist B". I second the style guide from MB who says: "...applies to cases in which one or more artists are featured on a track by another artist, but not equally as they would be in a collaboration. That is, they are given credit on the cover or track listing of a release by another artist in a manner which elevates their contribution above normal liner note credits. Often, the word “featuring” or “feat.” precedes their name(s)."

Other opinions?

MMuser2011 wrote:Is it possible to get this information unchanged from the source:
"De La Soul feat. Yummy" and not with a semicolon between the two artists?

I didn't remember why I did it that way.
I mean, I like it that way, I separate the artists in my collection and the album artist usually tells me who's the main artist.
But that's just me.

So I did some tests a minute ago. As far as my tests go, turns out that the metadata from Acoustid lists every artist separately, but doesn't tell you how to join their names.
If the metadata came from MusicBrainz it would have many details like that. It tells you if they're joined by " & " or " feat. ", etc.
I was surprised (again) to find out that Acoustid didn't give that information. If I'm wrong, please inform me.

So, to answer that question, after the script gets the metadata from Acoustid it would need to do another request to MusicBrainz to refine the information.
That would make the script slower.

I may add this as an optional feature, to refine Acoustid results with MusicBrainz metadata. It would also get genre tags, which Acoustid doesn't provide because they are not in the public domain.

A naive question - What is the latest version of this script? It seems like there is a version 1.0 available, but when I try to download it, it tells me that I still got version 0.12. Are they the same?

zuilserip wrote:Are they the same?

No.
I have it installed and it says 1.0 in the Extensions window.

Maybe try uninstalling it first.

I was trying to get the iTunesMonkey or AcoustID Fingerprint modes to work for some time before I attempted it on tracks that I hadn't run through the AcoustID Generator script. At that point it finally worked. Turns out that I couldn't get this script to provide results for either of those modes when a track has already been tagged with an AcoustID. The concept for this script is great - but would it be possible to adjust so that it pulls from the existing AcoustID instead of returning no results?

mhendu wrote:...I attempted it on tracks that I hadn't run through the AcoustID Generator script.

The problem you're having, I believe, is that diferent scripts are using the same name for a SQL table to store the Acoustid fingerprints, but they don't store the data in the same order as my script.
That's going to be fixed in the next version.
In the meantime, if you can find and edit line 29 and change to another value, I think that will work for you.

Just a bug report for you, similar to one posted earlier, I THINK.

Error message (the little error box appears three times):


Confirming the location of the files and that they are not hidden or read-only.


This is on Windows 7, MM 4.0.7.1510, running as admin.

The error at line 1857 in iTunesMonkey.vbs lands on: So potentially something to do with that temporary path.

Correction to above post. Line number 1857 indeed points at "With oFSO.OpenTextFile(sTemporaryPath &"acoustid"& i &".txt")" not the "Do".