Music software wishlist

[gn.sn42]

In the course of a thread on the cassette tape ( http://rasikas.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=2752 ), I asked arunk:

Have you thought about designing a user interface for an MP3 player - or for online or PC-based music software? Seriously - you have spectacular software skills, and know a thing or two about music. The world needs better music software.

arunk replied with characteristic modesty, and then posed this question:

What do you find lacking in current music software? I find them ok but maybe not a easy and readymade match for carnatic music (for catalog stuff).

I will begin by listing my incoherent thoughts here. If others on the forum can jump in, I'm sure we (and arunk in particular) can identify some especially valuable features for music software.

And then we can all persuade arunk to write the code (you know he wants to... )


Here goes:


Cataloguing software:
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1. I would like many more fields/tags for music. It's not just carnatic music that is badly served by this - fans of western classical music and jazz are also frustrated by current products. In addition to a number of standard fields (ragam, talam, accompanist, etc) I would also like to create an arbitrary number of custom fields or freeform text tags ("3rd charanam sung here").

2. It would be awfully nice to have a dictionary of equivalent terms, especially while adding to the database. That way, we can use "Palghat Mani" or "PMI" and let the software keep track of the data. This could also handle variations in spelling etc.

3. I would like to associate the music file with related files - online documents about the ragam, artists' bios, concert reviews, the same song rendered by others, etc. This could simply be a bunch of links.

4. Finally, I would like to catalogue my local collection as well as other collections (what's available online, what friends have, what's on commercial albums that I don't own, etc). This way, if I'm looking for a song, I could find out quickly that what I'm looking for is (for example) available on this particular CD, and buy it. On the rasikas.org forum, thanjavur appears to have a wonderful database of this type.


Music Player software (both portable and PC-based):
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1. I would like to customize the fields I display and use on the player (ragam, talam, etc)
2. This would be particularly cool: I'd like to pause a song while I'm playing it and play another (to compare two artists’ versions, for example) - ideally, I'll be able to mark off sections of each song and play them alternately
3. Another nice to have is audio quality adjustment on the fly (noise filtering, amplification etc)
4. It will also be nice to carry out tagging on a portable player on the fly (which should be synchronized with the database later)


MP3 issues:
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1. Is it possible to add to the MP3 fields? The more we can embed in the file, the easier it will be to manage a music collection.
2. It will be nice to develop some best practices regarding naming music files, tagging them, and so on.


I cannot determine which of these features are useful, feasible, or even new (If there are products with these features, please let me know!) but I do know that the members of this forum will provide wise counsel.

Your thoughts?

[arunk]

good topic. Here are some quick thoughts.

1. I like the equivalent fields idea. This can apply to composer names, raga names, tala names etc. Helps in developing some standards/norms.

2. I like the database look up idea too sort of like the online music database that mp3 players connect to. I like the database to ideally have the following info
(i) names of ragas, talas, composers, artists
(ii) all krithis, lyrics,
(iii) concert listing

So when tagging stuff, if you can search this database incrementally - it can guarantee people use consistent info.


3. Custom tags:
i think mp3 ID3v2 allows you to define and add your own tags i.e. frames. (http://id3.org).

However I am not sure if the popular players allow you to search on any of them. IIRC thats where most of them miss the boat and have "canned" stuff intended mainly for popular western music. It may be possible for us to come with CM specific frame ids and propose them so that they are "declared". We could have say CMRG (raga), CMTL (tala), CMCP (composer), CMTY (type - varnam,tillana), CMIM (improvisation info - alapana, neraval, swaras etc.), CMEX (extra info). Note that frame tags are max 4 chars - and so having a constant prefix helps in avoiding clashes.

If this is not possible, best practice sounds good. I usually have the song name as krithi name - raga - tala - composer (e.g. vAtApi gaNapatim - hamsadhvani - muttusvAmi dIkshitar). With a player like itunes - you then can simply type part of the string and it narrows it. This allows you search for all songs by composer or raga or tala etc. (although you will have extraneous data)

Adding these kind of features as a plug-in to some popular MP3 player may be the easiest thing to look into first. Added them to a portable player would be much harder.

Arun

[gn.sn42]

arunk,

I like the way you've laid it out into a few separate projects that may be integrated later:

- "global" MP3 frame ids
- a plug-in to an MP3 player to support additional fields
- a database of CM related information
- tables of equivalent names for people, ragams, etc

The first is mostly a standards effort, the second a software project, and the last two may be a combination of software and community-contributed content.


Re the song name, your approach is a reasonable one - I've had problems involving long file names being truncated, and of course spelling variations can ruin this plan. Portable players make the problem much worse, and it might be best to ignore them for now. (Maybe we'll just need to get handheld PCs as mp3 players...)

[shripathi_g]

I can pitch in with the development. This has been on my mind for a while. Will post my ideas as soon as I find some spare time.

[Ashwin]

I think the results of this effort could also be very useful to music students who, like myself, record their lessons in MP3 format. I have about 500 lessons in which I would like to search not only by the attributes of the compositions, but also by deity, by lesson, by items containing AlApana, kalpanasvaram, neraval, etc. Perhaps this falls under "custom fields." Arun, do you know of any database software that will a) be able to quickly search a large number of very large files, b) allow me to customize my fields, and c) call up and queue an mp3 file to a particular location, or do I have to learn how to code in VB?

Ashwin

[arunk]

Some random thoughts on using a "CM aware" plugin to an existing popular player.

First of all some of the popular players (itunes, windows media player, winamp) do allow plug-ins - that is the good news. The bad news of course they all have different interfaces and thus different capabilities. So not all players' plugin interfaces can meet our needs - at worst none would.

The core capabilities we would need to be able exercise from the plug-in are:
(i) Access to player library database - probably with ability to search
(ii) ability to write tags to an mp3 file in the mp3 player's library.
(there are probably many more)

With that it may be possible to introduce your own menus that display screens, where user could do the following specify:
(i) CM specific tags (and standard tags). An enhancement would be to search an online cm music database and thus get "accepted" versions of song names, composer names, raga names etc.
(ii) Search the library based on criteria
(iii) ???

However, the basic player user interface to its library would not know these tags and so the song list it displays etc. would still show what it does today - i.e. basic info. However, almost all players allow "visualization plugins" which are really intended for these (perhaps meaningless) cool dynamic images that snake around as the music plays . I have looked into this a bit earlier, and I think you can create whatever UI (user interface) you want - if the visualization plugin is enabled, that plug-in's UI will always be shown. Thus you could display a "CM aware" library, and provide interface for user to do all the things we would want within the context of a visualization plugin, which does more than just visualization.

Atleast this is one theory

Arun

[arunk]

Arun, do you know of any database software that will a) be able to quickly search a large number of very large files, b) allow me to customize my fields, and c) call up and queue an mp3 file to a particular location, or do I have to learn how to code in VB?

There are some music catalog programs which have their own database which are pretty customizable. One example is CATraax (i have used this with some success but gave up after a while). But I think in general you have to do the ground work in customizing and with CATraxx it wasnt that easy (there was good flexibility but somewhat of a pain to exercise it)

I am at present attracted to the idea of leveraging on top of functionality provided popular mp3 players considering that most people will be using them. I dont know if this is possible yet - but it is worth some investigation.

Arun

[shripathi_g]

From a listener's perspective, here are the things I want to do.

1. Make sure I have only one copy of a concert
2. Be able to retrieve files based on composer, raga, thala, krithi, etc

So I started out eagerly with the task of parsing filenames to put them in a database and building a web interface on top of it. Here are the problems I encountered.

1. Inconsistency in naming the files
2. Inconsistency in spelling
3. Same concert/song with different quality ruling out the possibility of comparing files based on an MD5 hash or something
4. Missing information (raga, artist, etc)

Back when my music collection was in the order of 20/30 GB, I started with the ambitious task of resolving the problems mentioned above. After a month or two of effort during my leisure, all I managed was around 20 or 30 concerts of MDR and this was with the help of some scripts I wrote. I decided that this has to be a community effort. Even on sangeethapriya, there are too many copies of the same concert and very difficult to search for particular artists, raga, etc with each uploader having his own format.

The first step is to get some storage, put all this music in one place and normalize the file names. This process has to be automated as much as possible. So, the basic structures are:

1. The database containing information about artists, ragas, etc with spellings which we agree upon.
2. An interface for tagging these files (both ID3 and filenames).
3. An inteface for searching these tags.
4. An interface uploading information to the database
5. An interface for downloading music that would automatically check if a song/concert is already available.

I wrote up a spec on this a while ago. Will see if I can find it.

[Jigyaasa]

I had some queries and ideas appropriate to this thread. So I decided to revive it.
1) File naming scheme- I use only as many words as might distinguish to kritis starting with the same word. However, I select the "Details" viewing format where u can add all those fields which u would like to see. Windows Vista supports a HUGE number of tags including composer but still doesn't have the CMTY specified above. I use the Comments tag to write the rAga and tALa of the kriti and any other noteworthy details such as neraval at so and so spot etc. But the prob here is that comment lengths become unwieldy. And so the details take a little time to display.
The interesting thing here is that when u click on a particular field the files get sorted alphabetically in terms of that field (this is probably a well-known fact to a lot of rasikas members but thought there'd still be some who don't know). This manner of indexing has proved reasonably efficient for me.
2) Problems and requirements- Lyrics:
a) Is there any music player where the lyrics of the composition scroll across the screen as the song plays? It'd be even better if we could vary the speed of the marquee according to that of the kriti.
b) Say I have a pdf containing the lyrics of of all compositions of some vaggeyakara and I name whatever mp3's I have in exactly the same way as they appear in the pdf. Could a software be developed (assuming very confidently that it doesn't exist) to copy those lyrics from the pdf to the lyrics tag of the corrsponding mp3?
- Song title: A VERY simple need; for a LOT of stuff that I downloaded, when I change the file name to conform to my "system of nomenclature", it differs from the title(ID3 tag) of the song. What I want is for the title to change automatically to the same as the file name when it is changed. Can this be done?

Awaiting a response in this regard...