5 replies to this topic

[gamelord12]

Songbird is shaping up to be an amazing and ambitious music player, but there's one feature it doesn't have that I'd like it to have: the ability to read and write ratings meta data back to the song itself rather than a library ratings xml file. I asked if this feature was coming and they said that you can enable it by going to about:config in Songbird and changing songbird.metadata.ratings.enableWriting() to true, but that didn't work. At the very least, it didn't save the rating in the same way that Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player, and MediaMonkey do. I want to see whatever change I make in Songbird reflected in Windows Explorer when I look at all my files.

I'm an amateur programmer, and I've never contributed to open source before, so large applications are kind of overwhelming to me right now. When I tried to trace the directories in Songbird where other meta data reading took place, I essentially got lost. On top of that, I can't find anywhere through Google searches how meta data is read or stored. I even looked at my files with hex editors, and there were no readable strings in there that represented my meta data. I may be asking a lot right now, but I was wondering if anyone here could explain to me how I can extract and write meta data in song files as well as help me get on the right track with developing for a large scale project like Songbird. All my other experience with programming revolves around only one or two packages; maybe 10 class files in total for the whole thing.

[gamelord12]

Anyone?

[WingedPanther]

The problem with metadata is it is specific to the file format. You (appear to be) talking about metadata for ALL related file formats, which is a non-trivial thing to research. It gets worse since some file formats are proprietary, undocumented formats.

[gamelord12]

How about WMA lossless? MP3? Those are really the only ones I personally care about; all others will come after that. Like I said, I Googled it and came up with nothing.

[WingedPanther]

You may have to reverse-engineer the information by making various changes and seeing how the files change.

[Lukas_Skywalker]

Hi folks

Maybe you are interested in this: en.wikipedia.org --> ID3
It's a definition how tags are stored in mp3 files.
The problem is that there are various versions of ID3: ID3v1, ID3v1 extended, ID3V2, ID3V2.4

Quote

Although the different versions of ID3v2 are conceptually similar, implementing an algorithm to read and write them is difficult. There are subtle but critical differences between all the versions. Even within a version, the structure of frames differs greatly.

Maybe you want to follow this: getsatisfaction.com --> updating_metadata_in_songbird_doesnt_update_it_in_windows

Or this: bugzilla.songbirdnest.com --> Bug #9084