Albums and XML
Published by A side quest to improve the tagging of my music library.
What happened about 10 days ago was that I tried to use Music Assistant. It worked fine, but some things were odd and I read that it would work better if the audio tracks had more/the right metadata. From there, I discovered MusicBrainz Picard and the quest was on! (Sorry there was no Markup Monday post last week, I was distracted.)
I’ve been using XML to manage the metadata in my album collection for as long as I can remember. But MusicBrainz does a lot more than I was doing. Unfortunately, a significant minority of may albums aren’t in MusicBrainz.
I ended up reimplementing (and improving) some decades old Perl scripts for processing audio file metadata in Python. If MusicBrainz can tag the album, I can get that metadata back out. If MusicBrainz can’t, then I can use hand-authored XML to tag the tracks.
I’m still unsure that I’m going to be able to get Home Assistant, Music Assistant, and my Sonos system to play nice. But I hope that publishing the tools I’ve spent a week of free time hacking on lets me close this side quest.
We shall see.