Jay Tuley

Releases: Picard and libtunepimp: “We released the 0.6.0 version of Picard today — this release fixes many bugs and adds the much anticipated mp4, mpc and wma plugins! Also included in this release are support for generating cuesheets, M3U, PLS and XSPF playlists….”

(Via MusicBrainz Blog.)

So it looks like official MusicBrainz client has mp4 support now, unfortunately the change log doesn’t mention any of the OS X problems being resolved. These problems are GUI related though, and otherwise the application Picard (python) and backend libtunepimp (c++) should otherwise work for OS X as far as the last time I tested. A Cocoa gui via the PyObjc Bridge might be a good option for some one out there wanting a full MusicBrainz client. iEatBrainz is a bit beyond resurrecting code wise (It does still work, but changes by Apple or MusicBrainz will certainly break someday in the future), while parts of it could be harvested, I’d suggest to anyone thinking about it to strongly consider a cocoa gui for Picard as it has a lot more features and with MusicBrainz fingerprinting up in the air it’s a much safer approach.

iEatBrainz 1.07 is a small update but it’s got a solution to a major problem that has been plaguing iEatBrainz worse and worse with each new version of iTunes. It should be able figure out what songs you are trying to tag in most cases when the iTunes Music Library.xml file is out of date. It’s got some other minor improvements, but those are basically due to shared code between NicePlayer and iEatBrainz.

The reason this is the final version, isn’t quite the same as it was going to be. Originally i was working on directly writing aac/mp3 tags to try and get past that bug that this release has a slow work around for, and to perhaps write a newer version based on the framework I was writing to do this, or just release the framework giving other cocoa programers and easy way to write their own take on musicbrainz tagging.

However MusicBrainz has an issue of their own, their acoustic fingerprint server is reaching it’s limits. See the MusicBrainz blog General update: What’s up with TRM??. Their acoustic fingerprint server was donated by a company that’s no longer in business, and is proprietary, and about to crap out. Ironically MusicBrainz’s codebase is licensed under the GPL, which is designed to keep something like this from happening, however fingerprinting was all done on a separate server so it didn’t have to follow the GPL.

MusicBrainz’s current solution is to go completely to tag based searches, which hopefully will turn out okay. MusicBrainz meta data, while free and open, hasn’t been as rich as those provided by other taggers such as MPFreaker , but the fingerprint really set it apart. Not too long ago MusicBrainz added advanced relations which promises to give it much richer data, I hope this will be enough of a draw to keep people using it.

Since what i’ve been working on is pretty much deprecated by this, and my copious free time is not actually copious, I’m going to officially say this is the last version of iEatBrainz I’m releasing.

MusicBrainz was originally going to release their next generation tagger for Mac OS X / Windows / Linux which will use the new scheme of tagging anyway, unfortunately it was announced also that this was no longer going to be the case for Mac OS X Bad news: Picard on OS X. The good news is the problem with it seems to be the cross platform GUI widgets, and since you can use a cocoa gui from python, the potential for porting by someone wanting to take it on is good (However, I won’t be that person).

So I was looking through the cocoa blogs on Cocoa Dev and I found this post Apple Pie . This guy is actually implementing pie menus, and they look rather nice too. I don’t know how many MacWarriors meetings someone would someone would bring up pie menus (Robert or Mark as I recall, one or both of them are obsessed more than I). Anyway VERY COOL!!!!