[Abcde-users] Has a "ranking" for abcde.conf settings ever been considered?

[Gabriel Rosenkoetter]

On 26 Aug, 2016, at 18:58EDT, Gabriel Rosenkoetter <gr at eclipsed.net> wrote:
> I’m thinking in particular of CDDBMETHOD here, but there are probably other places where this might be handy.

Short version:

The attached patch (see also https://abcde.einval.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=42), if applied to your local abcde, will make CDDBMETHOD accept a comma-separated list of CDDB resolution methods. If you’ve only got one thing set for that in your CDDBMETHOD (that is, you have no commas there), it shouldn’t break anything. I would recommend setting “CDDBMETHOD=musicbrainz,cddb”, but that’s just me.

Please let me know if you apply this patch and have problems as a result. I don’t think i broke anything, but it’s really hard to test for unknowns.

Long version:

I’ve cc’ed a few people explicitly here (and I would encourage you to drop the explicit ccs if you’re responding to this to the list, in order to reduce everybody’s inbox noise):
* Steve, because he and I have had some off-list exchanges about this, and … I guess I just want to make his inbox catchup worse? Huh, maybe I shouldn’t actually send you two copies of this. (And now I’m not.)
* Gordon, because he responded, inadvertently dropping the list address (we discussed that, and agreed that I’d go ahead and summarize our conversation back here) to my original email about this (quoted in abbreviation above) saying, broadly, “Yeah, i want that too!”. Gordon also made some good points about how, in absence of MusicBrainz or CDDB records for a given CD, maybe just fall back to CD-TEXT? The existing code does fall through to CD-TEXT in something like that case, but I’m not convinced it works the way a theoretical new user thinks it should. The details of this get into CDTEXT_READER behavior, and that’s just not a thing I’ve looked at carefully. Gordon, please feel to expand on this.
* Laurence, because back on 7 March, you asked for something like this feature: https://lists.einval.com/pipermail/abcde-users/2016-March/000195.html — Looks like (based on https://lists.einval.com/cgi-bin/mailman/roster/abcde-users) you’re no longer subscribed to the mailing list. Maybe the attached patch does something like the thing you want? Please feel free to contact me directly if you have questions.

I’ve run a few CDs through my modified version of abcde including this change (and a couple other changes I’ve sent Steve & Andrew’s way already; one for Mac OS X-specific stuff for album art display, another for making curl(1) behave like a good citizen and actually follow HTTP redirections), and it seems to work well for me across old CDs (that have less identifying information than recent ones), just shiny, new CDs that play nicely with whatever the red book standards are these days, obscure CDs (both classical music, which MusicBrainz and FreeDB apparently don’t care about, and concert bootlegs from the early 1990s), CD-R copies of CDs (which will never match in MusicBrainz, but often do based on track length). I would very much like to know whether this is helpful to anybody else, but I’d even more like to know if you try using it and have a problem.

Here’s what I wrote in the “bug” report (included if, for no other reason, so that I can follow up to the list if/when I fix the problems that I call out here):


Rather than checking just one CDDBMETHOD and then falling through to "let the user fill all the things out", it'd be neat if we could maybe check an ordered list of CDDB sources before we gave up entirely.

The attached patch does that.

Still to come:
- handle any sort of "resume" case (I haven't tested this extensively, and I think that in the resume case, what the patched script will do isn't really what I think it should do, but it's still what's always happened in that case)
- even if all CDDB lookups fail, ask for the artist and album name before making the user fill out the whole damn CDDB entry: I haven't dug into this very far, but I have experienced cases in which a MusicBrainz lookup fails to get CDDB info, but then after I've typed all of that in, we find the album art through MB. Something smells slightly fishy here, and I think I can fix it.

--
Gabriel Rosenkoetter
gr at eclipsed.net


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