Examining MP3 Tags

I’ve been playing around with Niecza’s ability to handle CLR libraries. It’s actually kind of intoxicating; it’s the closest thing yet to having a CPAN for Perl 6. So I decided to see what I could do with the TagLib# library for dealing with media file tags.

Now, I’ve got an MP3 library with 23564 MP3 files in it, the majority of which were created by older ripping files that didn’t do anything with the ID tags. Most of those have been updated to include tags, but every now and then I add one of the old directories to iTunes and get a bunch of “Unknown Artist” / “Unknown Album” tracks.

So I thought a nice first project would be figuring out which of the tracks was correct. The first thing to do was to get TagLib# properly installed on my MacBook Pro. make install didn’t add the DLL to the main GAC; I ended up installing it there by hand, which was trivially easy once I knew what to do:

sudo gacutil -i taglib-sharp.dll
sudo gacutil -i policy.2.0.taglib-sharp.dll

Once I had that done, I experimented with it for a bit, and ended up with this script:

constant $TAGLIB  = "taglib-sharp,  Version=2.0.4.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=db62eba44689b5b0";
constant TagLib-File    = CLR::("TagLib.File,$TAGLIB");

for lines() -> $filename {
    try {
        my $file = TagLib-File.Create($filename);
        unless $file.Tag.JoinedPerformers ~~ m/\S/ && $file.Tag.Title ~~ m/\S/ {
            say $filename;
        }
        CATCH { say "Error reading $filename" }
    }
}

The first line specifies the exact assembly we want to use; you can get the details from gacutil -l. The next line effectively imports the TagLib::File class into Niecza. I get my filenames from stdin, as that allows me to use find to generate the list of MP3 files.

This was my first use of exception handling in Perl 6. I needed it because TagLib-File.Create throws an exception when it isn’t happy with the MP3 file. When it is happy with it, $file is an object of type CLR::TagLib::Mpeg::AudioFile. $file.Tag.JoinedPerformers gives the list of performers (AKA artists) as a single string; $file.Tag.Title gives the title as a string. Unless we find a valid non-space character in both of them, we flag the file by printing it out.

Really, the only way it could be significantly simpler than this would be if the constant TagLib-File line were unnecessary!

End result: I have a list of 3906 files it flagged, 77 of which were read errors.

My next step is to write some code which translates the filenames (which are mostly of the form /Volumes/colomon/Albums/Dervish/Live_in_Palma/04-Slow_Reels.mp3) into artist, album, and track name fields, and then set those tags. Based on my initial experiments, I think it’s is going to be incredibly easy…