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Tuesday 17 November 2009

Discovering new album art with bad tags

Music files, like MP3s and other formats, contain 'tags' which indicate the name of the track, the album from which the track comes and so on. The quality of these tags in your music files affect the ease and accuracy of automated album art download. The ideal tags are to have the album name tag populated with just the album name and likewise for the fields that describe the artist.

In the real world, however, I encounter polluted tags all the time. Very common examples are extra characters to denote multi disc albums ("Disc one" or similar). More exotic variations exist, such as adding the year of release to the album name, or the record label.

These tagging approaches may be less than ideal, but they exist. bliss has to work with them.

bliss copes with existing 'bad' tags in two ways:
  1. It manipulates the tag to improve the likelihood of an accurate match
  2. It uses 'fallback' sources for art (such as Google) with a higher likelihood of match which are presented to you to double check
With these approaches bliss manages lots of automatic cover art installations. In addition, it works with your existing art. So, say if you have a rare recording with art not found on the Web, it will use that existing artwork to make sure your music collection follows the rules you've defined. Maybe it will embed the art in your music files, if it isn't already.

Give bliss a try by downloading and let us know how you get on!

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