applescript folksonomy (genre tagger)

Yes, some of the genres are a bit strange, I'd not count "80's" as a genre, but some seem to come out like that. I'd also _generally_ expect all tracks in an album by a single artist to have the same genre, but it's not always the case.

Understood (and I've got an api btw, I grabbed it pretty quickly earlier). I shall tag up a few and experiment with smart playlists.

Hello, everybody,

I stumbled over this pretty nifty script (BTW: I admire what you've done with it, nautisch; even though you're at the TU [just kidding]) two days ago and started making a few minor modifications and some code refactoring. All worked pretty solid and the fact that AppleScript isn't the fastest scripting processor was OK, as it ensured that requests to last.fm would follow in reasonable intervals. However, at one point I realized how awfully slow everything was, especially as I started moving away from barely known songs to pop songs yielding a whopping 100 tags. And then, the loops processing the XML gave me enough time (finding the tag with the highest count alone took 4 seconds) to think about tackling the problem with yet another solution.

And then it hit me: Leopard comes bundled with PHP, all set, no hassles to configure it or whatever. So why not use that? It's fast and versatile, even though it lacks AppleScript's power to closely interact with the applications, such as iTunes. The solution: Use the best of both worlds. And that's what I did.
Basically the AppleScript component acts as a highly functional wrapper bridging PHP power to iTunes. It fetches the tracks and executes the PHP script with the required information as argument. The PHP script in turn does all the tag fetching and filtering and so on and returns just the needed information to AppleScript which concludes by writing the information back into the iTunes tracks. The performance improvement is worth it: Fetching the XML from last.fm, filtering blacklist items, renaming synonyms, and selecting whitelisted and valid tags with a minimum amount of users --- all that is done in about 160ms. (Sure, this number depends on a lot of influencing factors. However, if you think about the 4 seconds it took on my machine to parse the XML once [sic!] in AppleScript, you'll catch my drift.)

One thing that bugged me however, is the problem that nautisch already struggled with: The results from track.getTopTags didn't really reflect a numerical order. Just like the "metal-classic-rock-phenomenon" I was surprised to see that a pop song had more "electronic" tags than actual "pop" tags. Yet, the order of tags corresponded to the tag cloud on last.fm. Well, in fact, it's the global usage number of any given tag, that is, how often a tag is used in general on last.fm. This information, of course, is pretty useless to determine its importance for any given track. I'm eager to adopt v2.0 of the API but not at the cost of not having information that -to a certain extent- is provided by v1.0 of the API. In 1.0 tags are at least attributed a percentage which is calculated by dividing the tag usage by the usage of the tag with the highest usage (all in context of the given track).

As I went along, I kinda got overzealous and wrote a lot of documentation and all that.

So, here it goes:

http://www.filefactory.com/file/af51dea/n/lastfm_tagger_v132_dmg

Hope you like it and find it useful.

Sylvère.

Hi there!

I'll go one by one through your post. Thanks for the feedback!

"and i really hope we'll find some way to solve that tag number cloud u know what i mean problem... "

As far as I can tell, it seems like this will never be resolved. The topic has been discussed a few times, but there never has been an official response to it (as far as I know).

"btw, where are u from since your "mocking" munich ;-)"

Um, from Munich. The "mocking" was referring to the TUM, as I work for the LMU. ;)

"if a tag e.g. "german" is in the whitelist it appears in the tagcloud multiple times"

Yes. I admit not having tested the script thoroughly (not on many files, anyway) and found this bug out just after my release. I actually wrote the script before seriously tagging my library and I have been optimising it ever since. Yet, my job keeps me quite busy so I didn't get really far.

"just found out that there's also bugs, i.e.multiple same-tags inthe cloud for e.g. hip-hop (guess due to the synonyms..."

I simply forgot the in_array($tagName, $tagList). Or I could have simply used array_unique before assembling the tag cloud. Anyway, that problem has been fixed.

"although u test twice if a tag is in the blacklist...?)"

This was primarily for performance reasons even though it is kind of ridicule. The first check is to prevent entering the foreach-loop checking for synonyms if we have a blacklisted tag which should absolutely not be included. The second check -as the comment says- tries to prevent blacklisted items to get into the tag cloud through a synonym. This bases on the assumption that a blacklisted tag should under no circumstances be included.

Anyway, I'm posting the copy of my script that I actually work with right now. It's work-in-progress. As you can see, I have added a few synonyms and valid tags. This is to reflect my dumbed-down understanding of musical genres, as most of the genres confuse me and I just want some basic overview anyways.

A new feature I added is the genre blacklist. With a couple of songs I had the genre set to tags that I think are viable information to be kept as tags but not useful as genre. So basically the genre blacklist excludes certain tags from being set as the genre.

Then again, the main routine got quite more complex as I added some basic error checking and auto-correction. If no tag list is found (tag list found is true when 10 or more characters are found between opening and closing toptags XML tag), a little function tries to clean up common errors and retries getting a tag list. If that fails, it falls back to get the toptags of the given artist. Whether or not this is done can be defined via $fallbackToArtistTopTags and the minimum usage count (in percent) a tag must have in the artist tag cloud is set via $artistMinimumTagUsage, allowing for a higher cut-off (and thus including only tags that are very typical for the artist). If that fails as well, the script gives up. All this is logged to a HTML file (in the scripts directory) to ease manual correction and finding the errors.
Currently I have been tagging a lot of very old samplers from the early 90s and the script yields approximately a 90% success rate in tagging. (On the other side: I'm not very picky and content if it finds any genre at all.) The 10 remaining percent being mostly one-hit-wonders that nobody today can remember (having maybe 100 followers on last.fm).

Yet, there still is some room for improvements and as I tag along my library I will probably add more synonyms and such and maybe some more features that I see fit.

Hoewever, here's a "beta" that I uploaded onto my server, hoping for it being less of a pain in serving the file:

http://stoermann.info/lastfm/lastfm_tagger_v140b1.dmg

Sylvère.

Magnificant script, love it, but ... some tracks are skipped in the tagging proces, altough the last.fm player for mac can find tags for them. any solutions?

not sure if i understand you correctly but you might want to check out the option in line 42 of the lastfm_tagger_helper and set that to a lower setting.

also make sure the tags you want to use are included in the validTags (line 147 of the same script)

hope that helps...

forget my previous post, this is what i mean:

somethimes the track.gettoptags results empty .. example

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=track.gettoptags&artist=ozark%20henry&track=rainbow&api_key=b25b959554ed76058ac220b7b2e0a026

any solutions?

Looks useful... my iTunes genres are in a total mess so it'll save me hours, thanks! Now all I have to do is decipher the thread above and work out which is the latest version of the script and how to use it... :)

if you only use it to write genres to music then you only use a fraction of it's functionality ;-)

anyway glad you liked it...

You are a fabulous, amazing person. Thank you *so much* for this!

(Is there a way to disable genre changes, and keep the grouping changes?)

whatever, just

open http://stoermann.info/lastfm/lastfm_tagger_v140b1.dmg (or if you have already installed the script go to home library itunes scripts..)

open (i.e. double click, should open in the script editor) "Tag selected tracks with last.fm" ,

search for "theGenre" (exists in two lines only) and comment these by adding "--" in front of these to lines.

should work...