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Technical issues on digitizing, cataloging, streaming/serving

Topic started by venkat (@ 66.185.85.78) on Sat Jun 28 23:42:16 EDT 2003.
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.

Hi all,

I wish to discuss some simple ideas for home music server here. Some of the good software for doing digitization/ripping. Setting up a LAN music server, etc.

Share your thoughts here.
Venkat (Toronto)

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Responses:

• Old responses
  
• From: venkat (@ 66.185.85.78) on: Mon Jun 30 22:18:01 EDT 2003
  
  isai nanban - Yes it may matter, for an audiophile, but let us be realistic, most of the original source we have are already battered and worn out tapes, you won't be spoiling it any more. And talk about the extra cost in those units. I settle for a decent gold-coated RCA/Stereo plugs, good sound card, decent software and some basic skills in noise clean-up. Anyhow, my old songs sound much better in my PC than I ever heared them in the past in Illangai Oliparappuk kUttuth thaapanam :)
  
  
• From: bb (@ 12.234.176.52) on: Mon Jun 30 22:42:24 EDT 2003
  
  Venkat, dhool database has about 3000 songs with lots of meta information. The schema has, among other fields,
  composer, lyricist, singer 1, singer 2, singer 3, actor 1, actor 2, actor 3, year.
  If people are willing, I can open this up to volunteers who can add meta information for each song.
  
  
• From: venkat (@ 66.185.85.78) on: Mon Jun 30 23:11:36 EDT 2003
  
  bb - Great! Thanks, we can start builing upon this. I hope other 'informed listeners' will also be interested. But, keep the access to edit limited to reliable lot. Having bad info. is worse than no info.
  
  
• From: sriram (@ 63.246.166.131) on: Mon Jun 30 23:36:21 EDT 2003
  
  bb,venkat - that's a great idea. I recently dumped into my PC all the mp3s that I have collected in 2 strenuous years of "dedicated" & "focused" research for my Masters ;-) the collection is full of erroneous, incompatible, incomplete, useless tag information. I even have songs like "track7.mp3". I shudder at the very thought of cataloging the whole thing.
  I can volunteer if you need.
  
  
• From: Speaker (@ 203.126.142.232) on: Tue Jul 1 00:11:06 EDT 2003
  
  adding data from users need to go into staging area rather than updating final db.anyway all the info for me is too techie. It looks like i require a "english" translation for above.
  
  
• From: vijay (@ 68.51.215.28) on: Tue Jul 1 00:26:43 EDT 2003
  
  Can someone here summarize on what needs to be done to organize all songs that I have, catalogue them and run a home server with a DB that would retrieve songs based on several different queries?
  What, finally, are the s/w recommended?
  
  
• From: venkat (@ 66.185.85.78) on: Tue Jul 1 08:42:28 EDT 2003
  
  OK-here is some "plain english" summary of the situation.
  
  There are what are called ID3 tags that can be (are) embedded into MP3 songs. Version 1 of ID3 had only few fields - Artist, Album, Track title, Year, Comment and Genre (of which there were only few). There is a CD DataBase, where such info are collected. when you rip a new CD, your MP3 ripper/tag editor can query them and get you all these info and fill this ID3 tag information for you, into the song you just ripped. (alternately, if this is not there in CDDB, your program can export, at your consent, to CDDB.
  
  Soon, it was realised that the fileds in ID3v1 tags are insufficient and additional fields were added, these include Compose, Lyricist, Copyright, WebLink... Additional categories were added into the Genre field. This is ID3v2.
  
  But as you can see, neither of these are good for a Tamil (Indian) film music. We typically look for Movie, Music Director (Composer), Singer (usually multiple), Lyricist, Year, Actor1, Actor2, Actor3, Actor4, Director and we can dump any other info. into the Comment field. So, what we need is a ground up tagging scheme.
  
  Let us imagine, someone (say, inbavaLLi dEvasagAyam, inba for short) uses ID3v2 tags. Inba plays all her songs with MusicMatch. She can pull any song by composer name and rearrange her list. But the greatest problem inba faces is that if she wants to list (SPB,SJ) songs, her ID3v2 based agent will not list (SJ,SPB) in the result. Worse still, when she pulls all SPB songs, none of the duets will come out. This is because the artist in the Artist filed is considered unique (and one person), so it does not work.
  
  Check a demo at my home server at http://venkat.homelinux.org/~venkat/netjuke/ login as and use tfmdhool as passwd. (This is not my cleaned-up collection, this is a test of my db with partial collection. You may not be able to play music) But you can play with query and check the results.
  
  If dhool puts up TfmDb (like CDDB), all of us can update our tags against standard, reliable TFM database.
  
  
  
• From: venkat (@ 66.185.85.78) on: Tue Jul 1 08:43:24 EDT 2003
  
  hi, hi :) Login as test and use...
  
  
• From: Renu (@ 195.92.67.75) on: Tue Jul 1 20:01:24 EDT 2003
  
  Great Venkat.But I can't see your Demo .
  
  
• From: sk (@ 137.132.3.12) on: Tue Jul 1 23:39:39 EDT 2003
  
  In response to an earlier question by Sriram about cleaning songs from tapes...
  
  First, it should be noted that it is impossible to do any significant quality improvements to what comes from tape. What can be done is to remove some clicks and crackles, remove hiss and, if you are lucky and there are clear silence regions in the song, use that to learn the noise spectrum and remove the noise throughout the song. One of the common errors that people tend to do while digitizing from tapes is to keep the sound level high, which causes clipping. If the clipping is heavy then the song will be in a poor quality and little can be done to correct that. If the clipping is mild then those parts can be smoothened and clips can be removed using the software so that the "kreech" sounds caused by clipping don't exist.
  
  For doing all the above I use Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 6.0. In addition, I also always use this software on all digitized songs in my collection to uniformly jack up the sound levels so that when I hear them on the player, I don't have to adjust different sound levels for different songs (which can actually be a big irritation). The sound level adjustment is not simply by peak value adjustment. The rms value needs jacking up sometimes. (In other words some parts of the song has be jacked up more than other parts.) A bit of care is needed in doing this too. If you try to jack up rms too much, clipping can occur.
  
  I believe all of the above can also be done using CoolEdit. But I have not tried that software.
  
  A friend of mine, J Sreedhar, taught me the use of Sonic Foundry Sound Forge over a 1.5 hours lesson by phone (on his own phone money from San Diego). Great fellow! I wish I had taped that session. It would have been very useful to many others.
  
  
• From: venkat (@ 128.100.148.47) on: Wed Jul 2 15:08:58 EDT 2003
  
  renu - sorry. login as test@dhool.com and use tfmdhool as passwd.
  
  
• From: Prabhudas (@ 140.251.171.216) on: Wed Jul 2 18:51:49 EDT 2003
  
  Venkat and SK,
  
  This is indeed a very good thread, thanks for all ur suggestions. It will be nice if someone with Techie knowledge like would come out some sort of screenshot based easy guide in steps, and if "bb" ( big boss) wouldn't mind putting the guide as a sticky thread in the forum.
  The TFMDB will be a great contribution to all TFM lovers worldwide, as I am not a techie guy I do not have much knowledge about this.
  Regarding home based Mp3 server, Please check out at this link, u may find lot of info especially for those who have some experience in it.
  
  http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=39
  
  Mr. Kiru is another tech wizard who can contribute to this thread on this topic I think.
  
  Right now I am trying to spend my spare time
  (when ever possible) to get the IR BGM clips
  ( a great thing which I am always fascinated with )in good qulity mp3 format, the list is growing day by day.
  
  More later
  Prabhudas
  
  
• From: venkat (@ 128.100.148.47) on: Fri Jul 4 13:13:22 EDT 2003
  
  prabhu, I was considering writing a tutorial with screenshots as suggested, but came across this page that has excellent tutorials, esp. lookout for the noise reduction tutorial.
  
  http://support.syntrillium.com/cooledit/tutorials.html
  
  So this homework should keep everyone interested in learning audio tricks busy over the weekend. I can answer if anyone has specific questions about the tutorials. Will dig out more help/info and post later.
  
  
• From: Shankar (@ 128.8.22.207) on: Fri Jul 4 14:50:11 EDT 2003
  
  Hi all,
  
  Can any of you please also put a tutorial on how to rip the BGMS from DVDs or VCDs. It would be great and of help. Thanks.
  
  Shankar
  
  
• From: prabhudas (@ 140.251.171.216) on: Fri Jul 4 19:57:11 EDT 2003
  
  Hi Venkat,
  thanks for ur response. It will be nice if u can give us a link or some screenshot based guide for
  1. cataloguing mp3 collections using the " mp3 book keeper" software and setting up the front end of the collection
  2. Using netjuke for accessing the collection anyware,
  also are u aware of accesing the database using wifi connected handheld pc or pocket PC to control the mp3 collection with in the network.
  
  Shankar, If u google search for it or go to WWW.vcdhelp.com or WWW.dvdrhelp.com, u will find some nice guides and free softwares to do the same.
  
  Or go to this link and try to contact the owner of this web page ( another IR fan) who has already uploaded "Jhony and Varusham 16" BGM clips in mp3 format http://www.ee.duke.edu/~vijay/BGM.html
  
  Any body visiting this thread happens to be a Replay TV user ( a PVR) please let me know,this is the one which has helped record so many programs in digital high quality MPEG 2 format and using a AV software ( Womble) , I have been able to record the following BGMs
  1. 16 vayadinile
  2. Vanna vanna Pookkkal ( great BGM score)
  3. Mouna raagam ( needs no words to mention)
  4. 100 vathu naal
  5. Nilave mugam kaattu
  6. Adharvam
  7. Apoorva Sahodarargal
  8. Idayam
  9. Ullasa paravaigal
  10. Kshatriyan
  11. Aavarampoo
  12. Amman kovil kizhakkale
  more being added
  
  prabhudas
  
  
  

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