Author Topic: pluto media - clean up audio attributes  (Read 3107 times)

jamo

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pluto media - clean up audio attributes
« on: October 11, 2012, 03:40:25 pm »
So my system is working really well. I'm loving being able to play my music in any number of entertainment areas... have it "follow me" between them, change the song at will from my phone.... change the volume or pause if necessary. Brilliant.

The problem now is a symptom of my disgustingly organised music collection. The files (mostly mp3 and ogg) are inconsistently named, inconsistently tagged and inconsistently located. All of that makes for a messy media database. Then, to make it worse, I've been editing some of them to clean up the above (naming, tagging, locating) and when I finish editing and stick them back in the lmce directories, the updatemedia tagger seems to create weird duplicates. I get a bunch of tags that don't point to anything to the point where when I do a "play all" by title, the player stops because it often can't find the file that the title is pointing to. And yes, I have "deleted stuff which isn't in the database".

How I've messed it up I'm not sure exactly but as I understand it the only way to clean it up properly is to either drop the pluto_media database and then recreate it with the SQL scripts which set it up initially, or to copy all my audio files off to another location and then delete missing files from database and then copy them back and let the script re index them. Not convinced that will work, though... I think the drop and recreate database is the only way at my stage of db corruption.  Problem with that, though, is that I've painstakingly picked up attributes and cover-art for my DVD collection and that part of the DB is really nicely indexed and I'd hate to have to do all that again.

So... what I want to do is try to manually clean up the audio section from mysql if possible. I'm not a mysql expert, but I'm pretty handy with SQL in general (mostly oracle pl/sql) and database structures so I should manage but I need to figure out the schema of the pluto_media database.

My question here is- does anyone have this schema documented somewhere? If so, I haven't found it yet? If not, I can try to do so myself as I explore it and hopefully that will be of help to someone else. Thom, I read in a previous post that you burnt your fingers fiddling with pluto_media before you painstakingly studied the schema... did that knowledge stay in your cranium or did you note it down anywhere?

If anyone can comment or add help here it will be welcome. If not I'll continue talking to myself and build up the knowledge as I go.... then if no-one corrects and I reach some sort of conclusion, I'll move it from forum to wiki.

Later....

jamo

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Re: pluto media - clean up audio attributes
« Reply #1 on: October 11, 2012, 04:15:42 pm »
Found this: "UpdateMedia creates an extended attribute called 'ID' for each file with the primary key of each file. That way, if you move or rename a file, pdateMedia will see the extended attribute and your attributes will not be lost--it just updates the database" in http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/How_are_media_files_organized%3F

Good to know.

Marie.O

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Re: pluto media - clean up audio attributes
« Reply #2 on: October 11, 2012, 04:44:01 pm »
I never touch the tags outside of LinuxMCE. I do all my tagging using the web admin. Tedious, but it works.

jamo

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Re: pluto media - clean up audio attributes
« Reply #3 on: October 12, 2012, 08:48:36 am »
Tedious is my middle name... but my thinking is that if I have to restore from backup or build a clean system then having the id3 tags accurate will make things smoother next time (working on the assumption that the id3 tags are used for initial attribute population)?