So, back on my recommended scanners post, I made a note that CCD sensor scanners that use LED lighting – which at this point is basically all of them – have an issue with scanning CDs. It looks like this: This is, frankly, quite awful. It’s hard to read anything with the light pattern that appears, and it doesn’t look anything like the classic highlight that you see when holding a CD under a single light source, or on a…
Here’s a quick list of currently available scanner models that I recommend for people doing album art scanning. The Criteria I’m not covering scanning 12″ vinyl in this guide. For that, you need a large format scanner, which is a completely different price category of professional equipment – or use a camera and a glare-free lighting rig instead. There are two basic kinds of scanners currently available, distinguished by the type of image sensor: CCD and CIS (Contact Image Sensor)….
MusicBrainz contributors tend to be quite… thorough sorts of folks. Lets take a look at what I’ve been up to over the course of the past few days. Day 1 I’ve worked on a few Picard patches recently, including one that allows tagger script to access metadata from loaded files, and another that saves MusicBrainz track IDs to files. In the interest of giving these a thorough workout, I loaded my entire music library into Picard and went through album-by-album,…
As an implementation of support for translating or transliterating the tracklists on foreign releases, MusicBrainz has something called “Pseudo-Releases.” They are meant to be used alongside the database entry for the original, real release to contain alternate tracklists. Unfortunately, many MusicBrainz users weren’t quite sure on when the “Pseudo-Release” status should be used, and incorrectly set it instead of the correct status like “Official”, “Bootleg”, or “Other” on some releases. And a few translated tracklists have the status set correctly—but…
I’m pleased to see that two of my MusicBrainz contributions have been merged in time for the 2012-01-26 server update, and are now live on the site! The first change isn’t exactly visible to the naked eye, but it should hopefully provide improvements in the Google Search result listings for MusicBrainz artist pages by providing a nicely formatted <meta description> tag to help Google (and other search engines, of course) list a more relevant “snippit” of the page in the…
When developing Riker, I had a bit of a choice – I could either write (from scratch) a new library to interface with the MusicBrainz XML webservice, or I could create bindings to access the existing libmusicbrainz library from within Vala. Up to today, I’ve gone a little ways down both paths, and both have problems. If I write new bindings from scratch, they’ll have some nice features like integrating into the Glib main loop, and automatically determining proxy settings from the…