Tag it Down: Tag wav files for Traktor

Aight, I'll make the reply to this a copy & paste from the crappy help file I made just after releasing the first version.

Long story short... anyone else hate tagging their wave files manually? It's enough that we get gouged up to a $1 for choosing the uncompressed format, but we also have to do manual work. Tag It down aims to lessen the workload.

This first version will help people who buy wavs from either Beatport or trackitdown.net. Juno Download is a viable candidate but that will require some more voodoo. DJDownload doesn't offer wav from what I've seen. I've not bothered with any other sites.

So, without further ado:
Tag It Down Project Page at Source Forge

I've only uploaded the source files and a compiled dmg for OSX. I will try to do a Win32 one when I get home, but I've not tested on Windows at all.

Feedback appreciated, but I will be posting this at a few sites, so probably an end-all-be-all point of support (source forge forums, for example) would work best.

EDIT: I admit... it's not fool proof, and there's a bit of a learning curve. But, it was nice to buy about 15 tracks from trackitdown.net last night, click a few buttons, and viola, have them tagged and ready to go.
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This was supposed to be in the reply, but....
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Foreword: Sorry for this crappy text file. I'll make some proper documents at
some point.

Introduction:
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Tag it Down is an application which to help tag wav files purchased from popular electronic music sites for use in Traktor Pro. It currently supports tracks bought from trackitdown.net and Beatport, although Beatport functionality is limited. It requires some type of HTML file to get a list of files, and goes from there.. For trackitdown purchases, you can save your Order History page from their website to your hard drive, or you can save a confirmation email which they send once the purchase is complete. For Beatport, only a saved email is suppported due to their site being all Flash.

What it will do: This started out as a trackitdown.net only project, but I buy tracks from Beatport as well. Due to Beatports all Flash website, slurping data is basically impossible. So, when tagging files bought from trackitdown.net, Tag it Down will find the URL of the track in question, slurpl the page, and come up with the tags from there. It will also download the album artwork and save it to a user-specified directory. The user is still responsible for importing it into Traktor at this point. When reading a Beatport email, it will simply deduce the tags from that email.

What it won't do:
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-Go through your collection and decide what needs tagging. You will need something like Trainspotter for that.
-Import artwork (it will download it only)
-Analyze Tracks, detect key, or any of that jazz.
-Embed the tags in the wav file in any way.

How it's been tested by the author thus far:
-All on an OSX 10.6.X machine, with Traktor Pro. Functionality for Track It Down (Both order confirmation & order history page) as well as Beatport Confirmation Email.
-Haven't tried on Windows at all... and there's a good chance the location of each file will be broken. Need a beta tester.

What you will need to run it:
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-Qt libraries.
-Probably a look at the instructions below.

Quick Instructions
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*** BACKUP YOUR TRAKTOR COLLECTION FILE (collection.nml) ****

After installing the dmg file (or building your own from the source), run the application. First order of business is to set the settings. On Mac, choose tagitdown->Preferences. Windows should be Edit->Preferences. In the dialog, you can (and should) set the following 5 settings.

1: Traktor Collection File. This is the file Traktor stores all that great info in. On the Mac, it is stored in /Users/yourusername/Documents/Native Instruments/Traktor/collection.nml. Windows will vary depending on your version of Windows I would assume. The program WILL make a backup for you (assuming it can). But, I can only code around bugs I can foresee... it's the ones that I can't foresee that scare me, so you might want to make a backup of your collection file manually and stick it in a nice safe place, like a remote webserver, or an email attached to yourself.

2: Music Directory: This is where you stored your wav files. It can be any number of parent directories up, but note that this will take more time as the program will examine the name of every file in the path you set. This should ultimately be the place the wav files will reside. Not a temporary directory. The full path will be added to the collection.nml

3: Artwork Directory: This is a temporary directory to download artwork into (when reading from trackitdown.net). You will later import each cover (one by one I'm afraid) from these files.

4: VOLUME: This is just bad programming on my part, but I couldn't figure out a way to get this value. If you're music collection is stored all in the same place (or similar) you can check what Traktor has used for your other files by looking at your collection.nml file. I store all my wavs on my Mac's internal drive, so VOLUME is always "disk". I'm still looking for a portable way to detect what these are. For now, manually enter them. I thought Traktor would play nice and work without them, but I was wrong. This and VOLUMEID below must be entered must be entered.

5: VOLUMEID: See statement above. Again, for me, it's "disk".

Once you've entered those, you need to select where Tag It Down will be reading your tracks from and how it will read them. You can select this behavior from the drop down menu in the bottom left-corner (above the "Dump" button).

TID Order History: Will read an Order History Page from trackitdown.net that you have saved to your hard drive.
TID Confirmation Email: Will read purchase confirmation email from trackitdown.net that you have saved to your hard drive.
Beatport Confirmation Email: Will read a purchase confirmation email that you have saved to your hard drive.

Once you've selected your method, click the "Choose File" button over on the right and locate the file that you have hopefully saved somewhere, and matches the proper description. At this point, Tag It Down will do it's magic. If you're using one of the TID methods, you'll get a nice progress bar. For Beatport, you don't (yet) so it might look like it's stuck. Just be patient.

When the program has parsed all it thinks it can parse, it will populate a table with the tags it came up with. They're not always right. Wanna fix one? Double click any cell and have at it. Note that for the File column, a double-click will prompt you to locate the file, not edit the location by hand.

When you're happy with the table, go ahed and click "Dump". This will back up collection.nml (or whatever collection file you're using) and append the changes, assuming the file exists still, and you have write permission to it (and the directory it resides in).

At this point you should be able to start Traktor and see your wav files, beautifull tagged. If not, drop me a line in the forums. I might post my email here later, but it's probably better to have all support documented out in the open.

Caveats:
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-Since Beatport's site is all Flash, it will only read information from the confirmation email they send. As such, some tags are empty: most notably, genre. These you will have to edit. Simultaneous multiple edits are possilble.
-As mentioned, when reading Beatport, there's no progress dialog, and it might appear to get stuck. Just wait.
-Traktor will assume your collection.nml file is broken if there is a bear ampersand "&" character. To actually display the ampersand, it must actually be & in the collection.nml file. Right now, Tag It Down displays "&" so don't panic if you see it. This will be changed later.
-While the Track It Down order confirmation page & confirmation email might look the same, they are in fact different. It's almost invisible, and was an annoying bastard to fix. But, just note, that if you have the behavior set to one but are reading a file from the other, you will get bad results.

 

Very cool. Thanks for the hard work and the heads up.

 

I'm hoping it works easily for everyone. It's not the most intuitive. Future versions should get better (including hints and stuff instead of having to read a text file).

It stores those settings those so you will probably just have to set them once and be done with them.

 

I wish paying premium for wav would include alll this nonsense...

 

tl;dr

just use FLAC imo.

 

Well, the sites in question don't offer FLAC, for starters...

 

So? Encoding takes like 15 sec per track and you can automatize it via the command line in Windows or the bash shell on the Mac. And with FLAC, you get full tagging abilities. Not to speak of 40-50% reduced file size for 0% loss in audio quality.

And btw, some sites offer FLACs. E.g., Junodownload.

EDIT:

For example, encoding a folder of WAVs to FLAC in Windows is as easy as

for %G in (*.wav) do C:\path\to\flac\executable\flac.exe "%G"

 

Do those encoders magically come up w/ the tags?

 

Very cool congrats, i buy all my music from Beatport, so not sure how much use it's going to be but i think it's a great idea.

What i don't get is Native Instruments is a partner with Beatport, they even had Beatport integrated into Traktor at one stage (so i'm led to believe). What i find is absolute bullshit is paying extra for quality only in the track.

I wish Traktor would integrate with Beatport and download, album art and all song info for tracks bought from beatport.

Serato has a DRM of sorts in the Whitelabel tracks, maybe when you buy a lot of tracks from Beatport you get some sort of option of downloading a seperate file with all track info and album integrated which will open up in Traktor and tag all your WAVs automatically.

It can't be that hard!

Rant rant rant

 

It's not that hard.
This tool should save you a lot of time. YOu will still be responsible for downloading your own album art . There's really no way around it. I tried some screen grabs from Beatport's site and photoshopped them. Terrible. I should've punched myself in the balls for that one.

Anyway, Beatport sends most of the pertinent tags in the email (no genre though, you'll have to set that).

Probably add Juno Download support next but I can't say that there website is intuitively laid out. :/