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Old 05-21-2004, 10:32 AM
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Roger -Dot- Lee(Admin) Roger -Dot- Lee is offline
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Quote:
Originally posted by moses

The album name is "What Burns Never Returns." That's not real short either. Unlike their previous cd, 2, which has truncated names.

So would switching the entire library over to v2 tags solve this problem? Would it be much work? It's certainly something we can live without, just a little nicety.
Oh, it would likely solve the problem, alright. But do you know what kind of time and effort would be involved in converting 11,000+ MP3 files to the new tags? The process involves, as I recall, re-writing the entire header of the file. This means that whatever you use to convert the files would have to touch each and every song. Now I could probably write a script to do this, and even run it at a very nice priority so that it wouldn't bring the station down, but that would take time, and run the very real risk of corrupting some songs. Corruption that wouldn't be spotted until the next time the song played. Now how widespread this corruption would be couldn't be reliably predicted, and could be anywhere from, say, two GY!BE tunes (no big loss) to everything that's longer than 5 minutes (catastrophic). Also, this would only expand the size available in the fields. This would not extend the information in that field. Thus, any songs that have tags that exceed the current limit would still be truncated. The only way to fix this would be by hand. One song at a time. My fingers hurt just thinking about it, and the production sysadmin and DBA in me cringes at the thought, to be honest. So, yeah, we COULD probably fix the problem, but in my opinion it would be a LOT more effort to convert the older songs than any benefit that could be realized.

This is also assuming that the station could USE the v2 tags. I don't know if it can (I suspect that it can, however -- if not directly, than with another plugin). This is something we could probably experiment with -- given the OK from Avian and PDJ, of course. But as far as converting the songs that are already there, I personally would raise quite the stink about doing it, due to the issues with corruption, if nothing else.

Roger -Dot- Lee
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Roger -Dot- Lee
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