Music library management

A few people over the last few months have asked me "why the name 'bliss'?". Well, five months ago I had locked myself away for a day to decide on a name for this music management software I was writing.
I'll start by explaining the existing codename for the project alternated between 'AMT' (Automated Music Tagger) and 'Metadata-Sync'. As you can see, I needed something a little more catchy.

I wanted to solve my problems with managing large music libraries. My overwhelming feeling when struggling with my own collection was one of frustration and the mind boggling complexity of having to juggle and keep track of thousands of music files. For instance: how can I keep a consistent genre scheme across the library? And other similar questions. I wanted to invert the relationship: to manage my music in general rather than file by file. So as well as taking an opposite approach to music management, I wanted a name that was the opposite of frustration and struggle.

There were a few possibilities at this point under consideration. The three contenders were: Chorus, Harmony and Bliss.

What settled the argument in favour of the latter was a bit of idle Googling on the subject of classification systems. I found a pioneer of library classification systems was a fellow named Henry Evelyn Bliss. I see bliss becoming an automatic classifier and organiser, of sorts, and so that was settled. I'm afraid the relationship runs no deeper - any similarity between the way bliss works and Mr Bliss's classification system is purely co-incidental!

And that is why bliss is named as it is.

Some more bug fixes and UI improvements here...

On the 'in progress' and 'installed' screens, the list of albums is now correctly ordered alphabetically when the page is first visited.

To improve the first-time experience, I added in a splash screen and improved the system tray popups.

I also added in another query to Google to capture a few more possible cover art matches.

The new release is available at http://www.blisshq.com/download.html and existing licences apply

When it comes to album art, bigger is almost always better. Having a high quality, high resolution album cover to view on your computer or media centre is the least you want if you've spent time installing the art in the first place (but you could make it dead easy).

However, we don't always look at album art on big screens on high resolution displays. Sometimes we view album art on our portable MP3 players or mobile phones, which have much smaller screens. At best, having high resolution album art is a waste of space on mobile devices. At worst, the album art may not even display if the MP3 player cannot downscale (make smaller) the graphics.

So how to fix? Well, you could go through your hundreds of albums, extracting art, resizing it, re-embedding it......

Or you could enforce the album art size as a rule with bliss.

Use the settings screen to set your minimum and maximum sizes for art:

bliss will ensure all art in your collection conform to this rule. If art is too big, it will be resized. If it's too small, new art is looked up on the Web. All with a couple of clicks. And, of course, the same rules are applied automatically when you add new music, so you only need to configure once.

There you have it: complete album art, with more storage space for more music.

Another set of predominantly bug fixes in this week's build...

I've improved the in progress screen so that when an album goes from in progress to asking you to confirm the album art it now updates live - there's no need to refresh the web page.

I made sure any long standing HTTP connections for looking up art are automatically aborted after a period - this allows all albums to be inspected and fixed more reliably.

I also made sure existing, incorrectly sized artwork already available in your collection is used and resized, rather than new art looked up.

The release is available, as ever, at http://www.blisshq.com/download.html and existing licences apply.

Since using bliss on my music collection I've enjoyed downloading art for recordings I didn't expect to.

My music collection contains many oddities that aren't standard album releases by mainstream artists. These include:

• Cover mounted CDs
• Music by independent musicians (REAL indies!)
• Podcasts
• Bootlegs (*ahem*)

A good example is a CD given to me at an Afghan wedding I attended. The CD was by a performer at the event, a classical tabla player. The CD came in a case with cover art, but being too lazy to scan the cover I never thought I'd see the art displayed on my Squeezebox. I was wrong! bliss found the art art on a blog using its Google search capability and installed it for me.

Another common example in my music collection are cover mounted CDs. In the UK a music magazine called 'Q' often offer compilations of tracks along a given theme, mounted on the front cover of the magazine. Previous examples were Essential Chill Out and The Best Tracks From The Best Albums Of 2000. Thankfully, art for these records is stored on the online database at discogs.org, which bliss searches, so this art was found automatically too!

It's been great to get a complete set of album art for all the odds-and-ends in my music collection. If you have trouble finding art for rare recordings, give bliss a try!

In this week's build we've 'turbocharged' the sizing options. These options now operate as real rules, governing how your existing art is stored as well as what new art is downloaded.

For example, if you have a separate collection for your MP3 player, which has a maximum size for art, you can tell bliss to monitor this collection and set the maximum size appropriately. bliss will resize any existing art. Any other art it needs to locate will also be within these size constraints.

Download it at http://www.blisshq.com/download.html

Enjoy!

Recently, new ways of packaging digital music have been developed that promise to improve the all-round experience of digital music. Traditionally, digital music would be delivered in a digital music file, for instance an MP3, which is 'tagged' internally with information about the track, artist, album and so on. These tags are static, but can be changed with a tag editor.

The recent announcement of MusicDNA
shows that the music industry is thinking about how these tags are formulated and represented. MusicDNA allows tags to be updated online. This would allow for novel new applications of tags, for instance providing information about upcoming tour dates for your favourite band. This is accomplished with a new, but backwards compatible, file format.

Another new approach to music packaging is iTunesLP. Rather than a different file format, this is a different approach to packaging tracks together. A group of individual tracks, for example constituting an album, are packaged together in one file alongside other media of interest, such as album art, videos, a self contained website and so on. Some of these are really quite impressive and take the album experience in different directions, just like great album art used to.

Both of these new packaging approaches offer useful and fun features for music consumers. Further, the tagging is likely to be accurate and complete as the music has been delivered by an authoritative source. However, they don't answer some of the deeper existing problems inherent when managing digital music libraries.

How do I ensure consistency across my music library? How can I be sure purchasing a new album won't introduce another meaningless genre I have to include in my playlists? Will compilations be tagged correctly for the different music players I use? How do I know the special way my mobile phone shows album art is catered for?

One way to ensure consistency would be to purchase all music from one source. However, that's unlikely to be practical or desirable (not to mention anti-competitive), doesn't actually offer any control over how a music library is semantically organised anyway, and finally does not help manage a music lover's existing art.

I can't help but think that while the industry may have found a new way to sell concert tickets and promote their acts, they still don't care about digital music collectors and their collections.

New file formats are helpful, but issues of consistency in music libraries remain.