[Muine] [Patch] Better album defining

[iain <iain prettypeople org>]

Two possibly fairly typical use cases that Muine seems to have problems
with:

Case #1

I have a pretty poorly tagged mp3 collection. As an example I have
tracks by KOOP, Koop and koop, from albums called "Waltz for Koop.",
"waltz for koop" and "Waltz For Koop". Its pretty clear that these are
all the same album - "Waltz For Koop" by Koop. Muine however gives me 3
albums.

Attached is a patch that makes a canonical name from album strings by
converting the name to lower case, and removing all punctuation. This
canonical name is then used as the album key.

Case #2

I really don't care about how things are laid out on the filesystem. As
a consequence of this, I have one huge mp3 directory ~/Media/Music. It
contains 500 mp3s. Then I also have another directory in it called
~/Media/Music/Unsorted. It contains about the same number of mp3s but
they've got dumb names, because they've just been copied from my friends
iTunes collection. And then when I rip a CD using Sound-Juicer, it
extracts the tracks to ~/Media/Music/album-title/

Scattered about these directories are various tracks from the same
album, I could have Music/radiohead-lurgee.mp3 and
Music/Unsorted/radiohead-you.mp3. Both of these are from the same album
- "Pablo Honey" by Radiohead. Muine however creates two separate albums
because the pathname is different, the album keys are Music/Pablo Honey
and Music/Unsorted/Pablo Honey.

Another problem with using pathname + album name is the case where two
artists have 2 different albums with the same title, and I have the
tracks in the same directory.

The patch also fixes this case by using artists, album name, and
performers as the album key, instead of pathname, album name. The only
thing I've thought of is should it use performer as these might be
different between songs?

I guess the real question in all this is "How well do we want Muine to
handle poorly organised and poorly tagged files?". I know it would be
nice to insist that people organise their files in a heirarchal
Genre/Artist/Album directory structure and have all their files
correctly tagged, but I think its really silly to believe that that
would happen for most people.

Any comments (either of my patch or the question)?

iain

Index: Song.cs
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/gnome/muine/src/Song.cs,v
retrieving revision 1.40
diff -u -p -r1.40 Song.cs
--- Song.cs	27 Apr 2004 17:25:41 -0000	1.40
+++ Song.cs	23 May 2004 18:45:09 -0000
@@ -161,7 +161,7 @@ public class Song
 				
 			string dirname = Path.GetDirectoryName (filename);
 
-			return dirname + ":" + album;
+			return StringUtils.JoinHumanReadable (artists) + ":" + album + " " + StringUtils.JoinHumanReadable (performers);
 		}
 	}
 
Index: SongDatabase.cs
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/gnome/muine/src/SongDatabase.cs,v
retrieving revision 1.37
diff -u -p -r1.37 SongDatabase.cs
--- SongDatabase.cs	8 May 2004 12:24:45 -0000	1.37
+++ SongDatabase.cs	23 May 2004 18:45:09 -0000
@@ -229,7 +229,7 @@ public class SongDatabase 
 		if (song.Album.Length == 0)
 			return;
 
-		string key = song.AlbumKey;
+		string key = StringUtils.MakeCanonical (song.AlbumKey);
 
 		bool changed = false;
 
Index: StringUtils.cs
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/gnome/muine/src/StringUtils.cs,v
retrieving revision 1.12
diff -u -p -r1.12 StringUtils.cs
--- StringUtils.cs	26 Feb 2004 10:46:10 -0000	1.12
+++ StringUtils.cs	23 May 2004 18:45:09 -0000
@@ -19,6 +19,7 @@
 
 using System;
 using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
+using System.Text;
 
 using GLibSharp;
 
@@ -70,6 +71,25 @@ public class StringUtils
 		return ret;
 	}
 
+	public static string MakeCanonical (string str)
+	{
+		string lower;
+		StringBuilder ret = new StringBuilder ();
+
+		if (str == null) 
+			return null;
+			
+		lower = str.ToLower ();
+
+		/* Remove anything that isn't a letter or a number.
+		   FIXME: Should we even use numbers in this? */
+		foreach (char c in lower)
+			if (Char.IsLetterOrDigit (c) || Char.IsWhiteSpace (c))
+				ret.Append (c);
+
+		return ret.ToString ();
+	}
+				
 	[DllImport ("libc")]
 	private static extern int strlen (string str);