A view Questions

[hdradio]

to search for an artist or title:
On Find Track window you type:
a:ABBA (for artist having "ABBA") or
t:money (for title having "money" in title)
or
a:ABBA + t:money
for both.

Also you can hold CTRL and click ? button to open the simple search dialog.

Important:
Your files must have the artist and title TAG data, otherwise pf can not find related info on those fields.

[radio42]

Thanks for sending me the test files!

The .snd files are effectively MP2 (MPEG-1 Layer 2) encoded files. It is a bit strange, that your previous system (Dalet) renamed them to .snd, as that typically denotes an AU-format, which these files are not!
So if you rename the .snd files to .mp2 they perfectly play fine within ProppFrexx.

The .snd/mp2 files indeed do not contain any TAG data at all (if they theoretically could, as MP2 supports ID3 or APE tags).

So what you need is a tool, which is doing the following:
a) renaming all .snd files to .mp2
b) adding the TAG data from your onairdb (or the csv export file) to your physical .mp2 files

Regarding b): The csv export file you send me ONLY contains the 'Title' and 'Artist' name and nothing more - no cue-points, no other info, like categories, genre etc.
Is that indeed ALL the meta data you 'know' (Title and Artist) of or is there anything else kept inside your onairdb?

[radio42]

His problem is, that all his files are MP2 files containing no tag data at all.
The Dalet system keeps everything inside a database and renames all physical audio file to a certain 'funky' numbering system.
The files are called something like '1234567.snd'.

As such he can not find anything, as no tag data is available inside the files and the database doesn't linked the files properly - that's Dalet: making it most complicated to migrate to any other system!

So what needs to be done is to write a little tool, which extracts the meta data (at least the Artist and Title) out of the database and then call a command-line tool to TAG the MP2 audio files accordingly.

There are various command-line tools available which allow writing ID3v2 TAGs to an MP2 file, e.g. this one: http://sourceforge.net/projects/taggersharp/
You can then call it like e.g. this to set the Artist and Title:

Code: Select all

TaggerSharp.exe 0108304b.mp2 -a="Leela James" -i="A Change Is Gonna Come"

So if you can write that code which called the above for each renamed .mp2 you're done...

[RedPanda]

The Dalet system keeps everything inside a database and renames all physical audio file to a certain 'funky' numbering system.
The files are called something like '1234567.snd'.

As such he can not find anything, as no tag data is available inside the files and the database doesn't linked the files properly - that's Dalet: making it most complicated to migrate to any other system!

Not only that software, but many use database systems which in my opinion are nothing but trouble. Take RadioDJ for example, although free, and a really decent program, it uses mysql which is more trouble and more burden than anything imaginable. These people program these software like this to create trouble and prevent users from switching, all at the expense of the user who is brainwashed into thinking a database system is superior to a folder based system, when in fact it's not true.

That is one reason why I like ONAIR. It uses the folder system, and makes things easy, the way they should be.
Sorry for the rant.

[radiolyd]

@radio42
Is there any solution now for migrating from Dalet to ProppFrexx?

[radio42]

ProppFrexx has a small tool called "pfpbatchtag.exe" (which I can send you upon request) to read in the cue-point settings from Dalet and some other basic meta data.
That tool does read in a Datet XML export file and evaluated the following xml values (incl. it might rename the .snd files to .mp2 files):
- titleContent/title/name (title)
- titleContent/title/interpretComment (artist)
- titleContent/title/year (year)
- titleContent/title/text (comment)
- titleContent/title/albumName (album)
- titleContent/title/companyDispName (publisher)
- titleContent/title/beatsPM (bpm)
- titleContent/title/weight (rating)
- titleContent/title/category/longName (grouping)
- titleContent/title/duration (duration)
- titleContent/title/endOffset (cueout cue-point)
- titleContent/title/intro (ramp1 cue-point)
- titleContent/title/crossfade (next cue-point)
- titleContent/title/fadeOut (fadeout cue-point)

But I am not sure, what else you understand under ‚merge‘?