CDpedia stuff: iTunes integration, track length, updating

[bradandbree]

After working with CDpedia for a while, I have several questions. Some may be feature requests, others may be answered by documentation I didn't come across in the Help or Forums.

1) Is there a way to retrieve track lengths (and ultimately CD length) from a barcode scan or keyword search? I've only loaded in about a dozen or so titles so far to test things, and freedb.org isn't finding most of them (and the one it did find was wrong). So I can only seem to get track lengths if I load the CD into the drive and choose "Get iTunes CD info." Using CDDB through iTunes seems to work, but that would mean I have to load every CD into my computer, and I have over 2500 CDs.

2) Speaking of iTunes, let's say I import an album from iTunes that has 10 songs on it, but I've only actually ripped tracks 4, 7, and 8. Of course, that "album" in CDpedia will only have three tracks, but they are numbered 1, 2, and 3. Can partial iTunes albums be imported by their appropriate track numbers?

3) Also with iTunes imports, I tried updating a partial album import, but none of the search sites found the rest of the tracks, although it did gather the summary and other Amazon information. Can CDpedia fill in the rest of the tracks from a partial iTunes album, or do I need to start with that album from scratch? One thing that seemed to work was to delete the track information from the partial album, and Update, but then there are no track lengths and we're back to question #1) above.

4) Again with iTunes imports, I imported a smart playlist from iTunes of 12 complete Journey albums, and 4 of the 12 came into CDpedia with the same coverart. I repeated this "bug" with a second playlist of soundtrack albums, and there were significant coverart import errors. If I have to remove coverart and update from Amazon, that would be very unfortunate, since iTunes recently has been acquiring larger, higher resolution artwork than what Amazon offers, and wouldn't require going to a web browser to get better coverart from a separate site. And since these are complete albums, there's theoretically no reason why I'd have to bring them in again if the coverart issue can be resolved.

5) Speaking of coverart, is there a way to change the default size of coverart images when you click on the thumbnail image? For my iTunes imports, some of them have very large images that fill a lot of the screen in iTunes, but are significantly smaller in CDpedia. They can be resized of course, but I'd like them to try to open as big as they can.

6) I like the "Collection" layout in the Info window styles menu, but one thing I really dislike is having the "similar items" box above the track listing. Is the positioning user-editable at all? I know that I can deselect the box for similar items and not see it in that layout at all, but I want it to be there, just in a different position.

7) DVDpedia has separate calculations at the bottom of the application window for "movies" and "discs", which is very valuable information. Does CDpedia have something similar? I only see "albums" and no calculation for "discs" but lots of my albums are 2-disc editions, box sets, etc.

8) Speaking of box sets, I've read on the forums about the desire for DVDpedia to handle multi-disc sets like the Indiana Jones movies or Star Wars movies, and I've seen the replies as well. So I will only add that if you are able to and choose to do this for DVDpedia, please do it for CDpedia as well.

9) I love the Cmd-g keyboard shortcut for IMDb and Freedb; is there one for AmazonUS? Can users set any of their own shortcuts?

10) Is there a list that shows what the little icons in the status column indicate? I think I've figured out that the double notes indicate an album imported from iTunes, and the single note indicates an album with some tracks from iTunes, but I couldn't find a legend or list like there is for the keyboard shortcuts.

Well, that's it for now. I appreciate the help with these questions.
Thanks,
-Brad

[bradandbree]

As a follow-up to item #4) in my previous message -- albums getting imported with the wrong coverart -- I haven't found a solution, but I've found the problem. It happens when an album has tracks on it with the same song names as an existing album. Using my Journey album example from before, the three "wrong" covers are all studio albums that have songs with the same name on the live album called Captured. Since Captured got imported earlier in the sequence (alphabetically) than Departure, Evolution, or Infinity, the coverart for Captured was used for all 4 of them.

Hope this helps lead to a solution!
Thanks,
-Brad

[Conor]

1) Freedb was designed for having the CD in the drive and doing the searches based on a disc id that is based of the track lengths on the CD. Of course with the CD in the computer, CDpedia can pick up the track lengths directly from the CD (command-t is the shortcut for this, but the number of tracks in the CDpedia entry have to match the number of tracks on the CD). If your going to be using a barcode scanner the best way is to actually use Amazon as the main search since they have the UPC information and then press command-g to add the information from Freedb that will include the duration.

2) A good suggestion, thank you. Will keep it mind next time we restructure the database to be able to do something like this. We also need to add copy paste which is something the tracks definitely need.

3) In order to avoid the complexity of modifying a users information, CDpedia will only add tracks if there are no tracks present. This is related to your above suggestion where CDpedia doesn't really know the track number, it just has a list of tracks, so it hard for the program to know where the additional tracks would go. If you do remove the track information try updating from Freedb instead of Amazon to get the duration.

4) Thank you for the details. The only way to search for a tracks in iTunes is via an AppleScript that works just like the search field in iTunes. I was using the artist and the song name to perform the search. Of course in your case this was not enough, I have also added the album name to limit the search even further so that the cover art will be the correct one. (You can download CDpedia already for that fix.)

5) In itunes select one of the tracks with larger art and go to the info window's artwork section and select it and press copy, then in the Preview application hit command-n. You will get a new document with the artwork, but notice the size. The given size for the picture is that which CDpedia uses. iTunes just knows they can get away with displaying it a larger size and using smoothing it to make it look decent.

6) You can change this by modifying the HTML directly that is used for the template. But simply [url=cdpedia://www.bruji.com/download?temp/CollectionBrad.zip]click here[/url] to install a changed version. If you want to modify it even more you will find it in the template in the InfoTemplates folder inside your data folder.

7) Preferences --> Other --> Status Bar View --> Discs

9) Command-Shift-A for now; this will change in a future version to be something like ctrl-1 through 9 to call them in the same order that each user has them and standardise the use (Freedb won't be something strange like command-g). So if Amazon US is your second search site in the cascade it will be ctrl-2.