Last Christmas (2006) I gave my father a USB turntable so he could start ripping his hundreds upon hundreds of vinyl albums to MP3.  Of course I assumed that all was going well for most of the year, as he was using it and seemed happy with it. 

Then about 2 months ago I actually got a copy of the Simon and Garfunkel song Cecilia from him (don’t tell the RIAA) and I noticed that it didn’t show up in my Zune software or in WMP.  A little further digging and I found it down in “unknown artist, unknown album, unknown song”.  How wonderfully useful.  So I asked him why the hell it didn’t have the track info.  He replied that the software he has basically ripped the vinyl to one giant wave file, then another piece of software would divide it into MP3 tracks, but it didn’t have a good way of tagging each track efficiently.  To give it track info, he’d have to pull it into some other software like WMP and alter it there, which is a very tedious process.

Well I decided to take a look into how media playback software actually got the info about the tracks.  I assumed it was something embedded in the software so I did a little searching for a specification, and found that the info is indeed stored in what is called an ID3 header tag.  Well since I enjoy writing software from nothing but a spec (really, I do – masochistic I know) I decided that maybe I’d put together some software that makes tagging albums just a bit easier using mostly drag and drop and inferring info based on how it’s organized in the file system.

The first step, however was to create a library that allowed me to read and write the ID3 tags.  That yielded the OpenNETCF.Media.MP3 library (this library does *not* offer MP3 playback capabilities, so don’t ask).

Once I had the library mostly done (meaning coded but not heavily tested) I then started on a desktop application I called AudioTagR.  The idea behind AudioTagR is that most people organize their music on their file system.  My dad and I both have a single folder that contains a folder for each artist.  Each artist folder contains one or more folders for each album.  Each album folder contains files that are the MP3 songs, and the song filenames are in the format “NN <song name>.mp3” where NN is the track number from the album.  AudioTagR assumes that you use this hierarchy to infer a lot of the information about unknown tracks (though it allows you to turn off inferring).

So the paradigm is that on the right is a folder view of the file system, with a root being the “root” of where your music is stored.  On the left is an “organizer” that is used for nothing but tagging tracks through inference.  You drag a song from the file tree into the organizer tree and it infers artist, album, song name and track if nothing exists.  If some info exists, or you drop it onto a node in the ordanizer that already exists, it will use node info instead of inferring.  The actual algorithm is a little more complex than I feel like explaining, but it all makes logical sense when you use it, so if you really want to know how it works, try it out.

So the day before Christmas I delivered v1 to him, and less than 2 minutes later he found the first bug.  After a couple versions of deploying via FTP, I decided there had to be a better mechanism.  Since this is a desktop app (yes, sometimes I begrudgingly work on non-CE stuff – but hey, the ID3 tag library is fully CF-compatible) I decided I’d see what the whole ClickOnce deployment and publishing stuff was about.  Sure enough, it turned out to be crazy simple, so I set up a publication that allows installation from a web page and now the software auto-updates on his machine every time I make a fix.

So now  that it’s done, I guess that there may be other people out there that received these nice USB turntables and are having a similar problem, so I say Merry Christmas to you all.  I’m giving away AudioTagR, along with the full source if you want it, to everyone as another OpenNETCF shared source project (MIT X11 license).  Since it is free, you get no support, and I take no responsibility for its use or consequences.  If you screw up the titles on all of your existing music I’m sorry but it’s not my fault.  Make a backup.  If you find a bug, by all means let me know and I’ll see what I can do to fix it.  If you add a feature that you like, send me the code and I can integrate it in.
 

If you simply want to install and use AudioTagR, click here.

Download the full source (C#) here
Get the OpenNETCF.Media.MP# library source here