Obscure Problems and Gotchas

Introduction

I bought a bunch of albums from Japan recently for an excellent band named Maximum The Hormone – (マキシマム ザ ホルモン) aka MTH. If you have watched Season 2 of Death Note then you have heard their music. Since I, like everyone else on the planet, do not use CDs anymore I ripped all of the songs for my personal use on my electronic devices. I ripped the songs by using an excellent program I have been using for years named “EZ CD-DA Extractor” by Poikosoft. It really is a great program, but it of course will have problems with lesser known or less popular music because the grouping of databases they use for obtaining the tags for music just doesn’t have records of the more obscure things. The good news is it named all of the albums and tracks appropriately. Therefore I got the idea to use that data to populate the ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags of my albums. It is just a bunch repetitive information.

Projects

I uploaded all of my code for review and use in my GitHub repository located here: https://github.com/dyslexicanaboko/dyslexic-code/tree/master/Id3v1Tags
This includes two projects, a unit testing project (runner) and the library with all of the code.

I named the project Id3v1Tags because at first I didn’t think I would be able to modify the ID3v2 tags, well to my surprise the library that I ended up using did the trick.

Code Example

The most important part of the code is below which is the one example that everyone is usually looking for.

//It is important that you use the version of TagLib that isn't the 
//Portable version so that you get all of the overloads provided by the 
//Create method
using TagLib;

File f = null;

var arrArtists = new string[] { artist.Name };
var arrGenres = new string[] { "Metal", "Punk Rock" };

foreach (Album a in artist.Albums)
{
 foreach (Track t in a.Tracks)
 {
  f = File.Create(t.FullPath);
  //This property is deprecated, but I don't know how else to fix this field
  f.Tag.Artists = arrArtists; 
  f.Tag.AlbumArtists = arrArtists;
  f.Tag.Year = (uint)a.Year;
  f.Tag.Album = a.Name;
  f.Tag.Track = (uint)t.TrackNumber;
  f.Tag.Title = t.Title;
  f.Tag.Genres = arrGenres;
  f.Save();
 }
}

Please note the following

• The above example is a very biased example, if you used it you would have to modify it for your needs
• I am hard coding the genres because I just needed to do a one time fix, this should obviously be a parameter or somehow configurable
• The Artists property is deprecated, but I used it anyhow because it was the only way I could figure out how to fix some of the mp3s that I had that just wouldn’t cooperate. Supposedly the AlbumArtists property is the replacement, but it didn’t work. Hence why I ignored the warning and used that property anyhow.
• When getting the TagLib# library from NuGet, make sure to avoid the Portable version because it reduces the number of overloads available for the File.Create() method.

My code’s methodology

Resources