Music library management

We've uploaded a new version!

The primary fixes are to support compilations and albums with many different track artists. Some users were reporting that bliss was treating each track as a different album. We've fixed this now.

We also gave the Google image search some steroids; it now returns more than four results, and we also cleared up the nasty image overflow layout problem.

Oh, and we found a problem with installing art for one specific album. But don't worry... it's hardly a common album... an album called 'Revolver' by some band called 'The Beatles'. I'm sure that one didn't affect anyone... (Sorry!)

The new release is available from from the downloads page on the blisshq.com website. Give it a try and give us some feedback.

p.s. if you are upgrading your version of bliss, then the best way is to uninstall the old version, then reinstall the new one. Don't worry: your licence information and your existing settings will be preserved.

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!

Over the past month or so our beta testers have been probing and prodding bliss to find any problems and provide feedback for new features.

I'm pleased to say I've just uploaded the first release of bliss open to the general public.

The release is available at our download page.

This version can:

• Embed album art in all your digital music
• Save a file, named as you prefer, in an album's directory
• Constrain the album art downloaded to certain size ranges
• Allows you to ask bliss to lookup new art for any existing incorrect art you have

So why use bliss?

• It's fully automatic. That means its faster than manual approaches to installing album art
• You work at a 'rule' level - you specify how you want album art installed
  
• You can install it anywhere on your home network. Some users are already installing it on their home server, where their music is located

I decided that bliss would be licensed 'per fix'. This means you pay for batches of fixes to your music collection. I chose this because it enabled us to start with a low price, shows an obvious relationship between what you pay and the value you get, and also, going forward, you would only be charged for the work bliss does to your music. For those who want more freedom, there's also an unlimited fix option.

Over the coming weeks and months I will be adding more features to bliss. In addition, we will be implementing features suggested in our UserVoice forum, so if you have an opinion, get posting/voting! I am aiming for a new release each and every month.

bliss is almost ready for release. Our intrepid beta testers and I have been throwing it all at bliss over the past few weeks. We've found some bugs and also the time to add some extra features.

I thought it was a good time to show you how bliss manages album art for my music collection

I want my music collection to contain album art. I want it all embedded in the music files, and I want it all saved in a file prefixed 'cover' (this is a Squeezebox thing). I don't care about the size of the art, but I'd rather have something.

All these requirements are defined in bliss's cover art 'rule'. Here's how it looks:
Now I click 'Apply', and away goes bliss! bliss finds existing art in the library and makes sure it is embedded. Sometimes there is no art, but it finds it automatically (by downloading it from the Web) and then embeds it...


Some it isn't sure about, because either the tag doesn't describe the album properly or it's a rare recording, so bliss asks me...

And it's done! That took a fraction of the time it used to take. No searching through Google or Amazon. No using a tag editor to embed the image I found in each file.

The best bit? If I change how I want my album art stored I just change the rule and let bliss do all the work!

Reminds me of a song...

When building a digital music library, it is important to store music files in a consistent and useful manner.

Digital music is stored in files on your computer's hard disk, just like the documents you may create in Microsoft Word or the photos you take with your digital camera. These files contain both the music and the 'tags' that describe the music. When digital music is purchased via download, or purchased via CD and ripped, it is saved in such a file in a predetermined directory structure. For instance, when purchasing from the Amazon MP3 store the files stored in a directory for the album, which is stored in a directory for the music artist. For example, look how Ludovico Einaudi's beautiful Una Mattina record is structured when purchased from Amazon:


The tracks that make up the record are stored in a directory named after the record 'Una Mattina' which in turn is stored in a directory named after the composer 'Ludovico Einaudi'. This is how Amazon organises its downloads, but other configurations are possible when, for instance, you rip your own CDs.

At first, it's best to fire up your music player of choice and allow it to work out how your music is organised. However, at some point managing a large music collection leads to working with music at a file level. Sometimes it's a music player which cannot correctly interpret tags. Sometimes you just don't like the way the files are organised.

Rule based management is the best way of automatically organising a music library.

The same rules that govern tags, saved within music files, should also be adopted in structuring the very same files on your computer's hard disk. This leads to a consistent reflection of your music library within both your music players and also your file system. The rules should be expressed in general terms, for example:

[artist]/[album]/[tracknumber]-[trackname]

Gives a similar structure as the Einaudi example above. The important thing is that the rule is automated so changing the format changes all of your music automatically. For instance, a flatter hierarchy could be achieved with the following rule:

[album]/[tracknumber]-[trackname]

Here, the artist is not recorded. In rule based music management changing the rule is all you need to do... the music is moved for you!

File structure rules give more benefits:
* Control over disallowed or undesirable characters in files (maybe you don't like spaces in filenames, for instance)
* How the structure should work in ambiguous situations (what artist directory to use for compilation records?)

Importantly, the file structure is still driven by the tags and the automatic rules governing the music library in general.

Managing music files is an important task in music library management and with large collections it is best done with automated rules.

I listen as well as code, y'know. I've actually got a theory that programmers are generally music lovers. There's plenty of evidence of the connection between music and mathematics, and many of my previous colleagues have been avid music lovers with tastes spreading across many genres.

Anyway, what's been playing on the Squeezebox the past month or two?

I've enjoyed Metronomy's Nights Out. It's intelligent, adult pop music with some fantastic, catchy melodies. Particularly catchy are "My Heart Rate Rapid" and "On The Motorway".

After the Mercury Music Prize nominations were made I took a listen to a few nominees. I like Florence and the Machine's Lungs and The Horrors' Primary Colours. The latter is like My Bloody Valentine with a pop vocal laid over the top, a little like The Jesus and Mary Chain.

A bit old this one, but I've just caught up with MGMT's Oracular Spectacular. I love the laid back hedonistic message of Time to Pretend, sung through a pursed accent. Whenever I hear it I think of the cult movie The Warriors. I think the music shares a certain gritty yet stylised New York aesthetic.

Finally, on the classical front I've been listening to Ludovico Einaudi's Una Mattina. This is a minimal piano album, delicately phrased and perfect for background contemplation music... although to be fair it deserves a lot more concentration than that!

We have just uploaded a new version of the bliss website containing more information about bliss and, importantly, how to get involved in the beta programme - http://www.blisshq.com

The beta simply downloads cover art from the Internet. When you start bliss, and after you point it to your music library, it will look for all the cover art missing in your collection and attempt to download it.

I've already posted that bliss works differently to most music organisers. As well as being rule based (not letting you interact directly with your music, yet) bliss can also be placed wherever you like and accessed via its Web based user interface. It is also designed to be run and left alone; it is capable of noticing changes to your music library and firing the rules you have configured as a result. So, for instance, if you store your music on a separate server, you could install bliss there, leave it running and access it remotely. You could upload new music to the server safe in the knowledge that bliss will notice the new music and make sure your rules are adhered to.

We are looking for two main things from our beta testers:

1. Feedback as to how well bliss is monitoring the music library and downloading cover art
   
2. Ideas as to how to improve bliss and take it to the point that it is a releasable product

In return for your time we are offering full licenses to use bliss and, once the product is released, a one year subscription to get all the new features released in that time.

You may ask why we are releasing a rather cut down version of bliss. It's a fair question. I've already blogged about some of the many, many problems that exist in music library management, so why not wait until we've solved all of them? The reason is that the simpler that bliss is initially, the quicker we'll have something validated and therefore a base on which to build, and build quickly. We also need feedback from you, music lovers and music library owners, as to the most important problems to solve first. After the beta programme, and once we have released bliss fully, we will be releasing updates once per month with new features.

Would you like to beta test bliss? If so, pop along to the signup page and enter your email address. We'll get back to you shortly with how to begin.