Mixer 1.8 Preview: Enhanced Tag Fixing
Mixer 1.8 Preview: Enhanced Tag Fixing
When MusicIP Mixer 1.7 was released, with support for MusicDNS, the only fields supported for tag fixing where artist and title. This allowed us to get some initial feedback on the feature while we worked on the MusicDNS backend.
Now, MusicDNS is chugging merrily along, absorbing millions of rows of data every day, and steadily improving. Since our big December update, we’ve been providing extra data to MusicDNS regularly using our improved data mining process, and we’ve grown the available data set significantly. For commercial users, this data is available in a single download via the MusicDNS Metadata Export.
With version 1.8, now more of this data is now available for updating the tags in your music collection. First up, there’s a new panel on the preferences dialog which lets you choose the fields you want to fix:
The Artist and Title fields are enabled by default. The other fields are all new. Here’s the scoop on the new fields.
Genre - We’ve covered this extensively in earlier posts. The MusicDNS genres are basically aggregated information on how most people classify their tracks generally. If you have used specific genres on your songs, you won’t want to overwrite those, but this can be convenient for quickly sorting all your unclassified tracks.
There are three options for using genres. Since MusicDNS provides up to two genres, sorted by how frequently they are used, you will get separate recommendations for “Rock”, “Pop”, “Rock/Pop” and “Pop/Rock” (to use one example). The options let you simplify this a bit if you don’t want so much detail:
- Use default genre - simply use the name provided by MusicDNS
- Use simplified genre - this will sort multiple genres alphabetically, so “Rock/Pop” becomes “Pop/Rock”, eliminating one extra category.
- Use only primary genre - if there are multiple genres, just use the primary one. This loses some detail, but reduces the number of genres.
As always, you can edit any genre recommendations before applying them by clicking on the recommendation table - this lets you type in next text before applying the edits.
The rest of the fields are related to albums. MusicDNS provides album information which is correlated with the MusicBrainz database. This associates fingerprints/puids with albums, so we can figure out release year, album name, and track index on album. When we download the metadata from MusicDNS, we automatically choose the album which is the best match for your tracks. This is most effective if you do Fix Tags for all tracks which are on an album at the same time - you can do more than that, but if you only provide a single track, there isn’t as much context to determine the best album match.
Once we find the best album match, we can provide the remaining fields:
Year - this recommends updates to the year field. Generally, this should correspond to when the associated album was released. There are two options:
- Use oldest year - use the oldest available year for that track. In other words, if it was on multiple albums, use the information from the album that was released first. This will get you closest to the actual recording date, as you won’t end up with the dates of, for instance, Greatest Hits collections.
- Use album year - use the year of the album which the track is assumed to be from.
Album - name of the associated album
Track - track index of the associated album
As we continue to enhance MusicDNS, we plan to keep updating our tag fixing feature. In the meantime, if you have suggestions or corrections to any of our metadata, you can contact us at support@musicip.com.