[PATCH] Re: atomicparsley tagging issue

[dinkypumpkin]

Jon Davies wrote:
>> On 3 April 2011 00:12, Jimmy Aitken<jimmy.aitken at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> I've actually patched my get_iplayer to use eyeD3.
>
> On 3 April 2011 11:45, Shevek<shevek at shevek.co.uk>  wrote:
>> I personally would prefer not to add any further dependencies to get_iplayer.
>
> Nor would I.  I'd prefer to move towards fewer dependencies, and
> perhaps consider adopting a perl-native tagging library.
>
> Looks like tagging is going to end up as a long conversation too...

FWIW, I echo those sentiments re: dependencies, especially when it comes 
to contemplating use of another scripting runtime.  Installing Python is 
mostly a doddle, even on Windows, but it's never quite that simple in 
all cases.  Plus, both of the Python tagging solutions have some aspects 
that make them less than ideal for distribution to a general audience of 
Windows users with get_iplayer.  eyeD3 needs a bit of hand-holding to 
get installed on Windows (the PyPI distribution is well out of date), 
and Mutagen only writes ID3v2.4, which caused problems with metadata in 
Windows Media Player the last time I checked.

I think the way to handle external taggers is to write and distribute a 
shell/batch wrapper for your tool of choice.  The wrapper would receive 
command parameters as if it were id3v2 or atomicparsley and do whatever 
argument munging is necessary before passing off to eyeD3, etc.  I've 
done a custom installer for my Windows-bound colleagues, and this is how 
I've handled tagging.  It sounds dodgy, but works well enough.  It 
occasionally croaks on character encoding glitches, but very seldom.

For the present, it would be good to maximise use of id3v2 and 
atomicparsley in the current scheme.  The amount of information written 
to files could be expanded and rationalised between MP4 and MP3.  At 
least some of the regional stations don't yet have flashaac streams, so 
MP3 tagging will be still be useful to many.  id3v2 will never write 
cover art, but that's not such an onerous thing.

The atomicparsley and id3v2 EXEs should probably be bundled in the 
Windows installer as well.  They're not going to change very much over 
time.  There is no canonical source for id3v2 Windows builds that I know 
of, and the source for atomicparsley (sourceforge) appears outfox the 
network library in the Windows installer (it doesn't seem to grok all 
the redirects and just downloads the SF download holding page), so has 
to installed manually anyway, at least for all of us here.  I've 
embedded both in our installer and they work fine.

Hopefully our collective genius can indeed produce a perl-native 
solution.  A cursory check indicates that most of the necessary tagging 
juju exists in the perl universe.  Of course that would introduce a 
small pile of additional dependencies.  For that reason, it makes sense 
to make any new tagging library work as a plugin of some kind.  No point 
in trolling CPAN if you don't need to.