Musical Holocron

Photo credit: Claudia A. De La Garza

One of the things that has always bothered me since the early days of mp3s (Napster era), I'd constantly find music files that were improperly or incompletely labeled. Sometimes the lookup service finds the wrong information at the time the CD is ripped. Sometimes a user types something by hand that is inaccurate. Sometimes the information is technically "correct" but has capitalization or situational issues. As a music collection grows and grows, it can get pretty difficult for us music fans with slightly particular preferences regarding accuracy. There have been services for this kind of thing, but I've never trusted any of them far enough to actually test them. What sounds promising is some that acoustically tag stuff in a method similar to Shazam or SoundHound, and then apply some filtering. But to my point of view, there's just no way to do this 100% heuristically (yet) and I don't want to devote huge swaths of time to organizing my music collection.

You know who should step up to get this right? Google. And lo and behold, they appear to be taking steps in that direction on Google Music. I noticed these "suggestions" started popping up recently and thought I'd verify they were widely available. See this post on an unofficial blog writing about Google: Google Play Music Offers Tag Suggestions. It is still quite time-consuming and prone to possible inaccuracies. But since a large portion of my music collection is migrating to Google Music anyhow, it is worth using.

Labels: free, music, music/artists, news

# posted by ArcoJedi : 00:51