[mythtv-users] Mythmusic issues.

[A. F. Cano]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2023 at 06:53:03AM +0000, Timothy Witham wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Sorry for a late reply and to start this "new" thread.  I was not
> subscribed to the list on October 24 when A. F. Cano <afc54 at
> comcast.net> said about MythMusic:

Not a problem.

> >...
> > Of course, no track info showed up in any field.  Only "Track 01",
> > "Track 02", etc...  Being a total newbie with Mythmusic I left it at that
> > and imported the CD.  So far so good.  Imported another one, with the same
> > track names: "Track 01", "Track 02", etc...  Only later did I realize that
> > track names are used as the file names and the second CD overwrote the
> > first one, so now when I play what I think is the first one, the second
> > plays.
> 
> If you manually supply at least Artist and Album, then you should get
> unique directory per CD so the tracks won't overwrite.  I think your

Mmm...  Maybe my mythtv directory structure is configured strangely.
All the tracks so far have gone to <mythtv root directory>/music, no
directory-per-cd structure.

> problem was that there is only one Unknown/Unknown directory.  The
> storage path can be configured in ripper settings of music settings.

I see.  The "File storage location" field is blank.  Presumably if I put
"ALBUM" there the directory structure you talk about will be created,
but what happens to the 10 albums I've already entered and whose tracks
are all mixed up in <mythtv root directory>music?  Do they remain there
or do new album directories get created and the files moved?  Is there a
manual procedure to do this?

> > Is there a new automated way to get track/disc names?  Presumbly that
> > information is not on the CDs themselves?
> 
> CD-Text can put the metadata on the CD itself.  The code for this is
> turned off in MythMusic with a note that it is slow when the data is
> missing.  I would guess some CDs fail to store this information.
> Still, it would be nice to have an option to see this data if it
> exists.
> 
> >  Some software I remember using had the names, but it might have
> > been referring to the same public site which is no longer available.
> 
> Commercial software might pay to use Gracenote.  MythMusic might work
> with gnudb.org if we attempt to restore the cddb code that left in
> 2020.  I wrote more about these options at
> https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Freedb

Ah, ok.  Thanks.

> > The manual inputting of all artist/album/genre/year/track data is
> > extremely laborious.  I'm not looking forwared to entering hundreds of
> > CDs.
> 
> Recommend against that.  Use desktop software to rip and tag.  I
> linked a page of options to the Freedb entry on the wiki.  Then just
> scan the files with MythMusic.

Ok, I'll try that when I next import a cd.

> > Proposal 1: (unique filenames)
> 
> Not needed if you supply Artist / Album

Ok, this must be related to the lack of "File storage location" in my
setup.

> > Proposal 2: (user contributed CD database)
> 
> Not needed since at least 2 already exist.  But we need to re-teach

Yeah, nothing like being behind the times by decades...  Shortly after I
wrote the above, I found the wikipedia page for cddb which did exactly
that.  Too bad it went private/commercial.

> MythMusic how to use the free options.  Ideally you would see query
> results for MusicBrainz, gnudb, cd-text and be able to choose the best
> result or manual entry.  I don't have the skill or time to do this
> though.  Next year I might try restore of cd-text or gnudb code and
> see if either work.

That would be great! Thanks.

> > Issue 2
> > 
> > I entered the wrong "Quality" for the next CD, and could not find a way to
> > delete a whole CD, so entered it again (with the correct quality) after
> > manually deleting the *.ogg files, which is what the above manual page says to
> > do.  Predictably, there are now 2 track entries for each track, and I don't
> > know which one is the "wrong" one (linked to the deleted *.ogg files) or the
> > "right" one (linked to the new *.flac files).  Unless there is some way to
> > delete the "wrong" CD, I suspect I'll have to get into the nuts and bolts of
> > the relevant mythconverg tables and manually edit them.  Guidance about how to
> > do this would be welcome.  Since I entered the same album name/artist/genre
> > and year the second time, I only see one entry for the individual CD.
> 
> Rescan should remove no-existent files.  However, I have one track

This is what I did to solve the various problems related to this issue.
From notes I took then:

The situation is getting better.  Deleted all the files with format
"*Track xx*", which were from 2 separate CDs, and ran "Scan for new
music".  This got rid of all the duplicate track names.
There remained an extra cntry in music_albums for one of the 2 remaining
albums, which I deleted:

MariaDB [mythconverg]> delete from music_albums where album_id = 5;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.016 sec)

After making sure that the one entry that pointed to the songs in
music_songs was the other one (album_id = 4).

Also found that one of the albums had a date of 0.  I probably forgot to
set it, so:

MariaDB [mythconverg]> update music_albums set year = 2000 where album_id = 1;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.017 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0

Then found a song that had an album_id of 5 and now was showing as from an
unknown CD.  Had to change that to 4:

MariaDB [mythconverg]> update music_songs set album_id = 4 where song_id = 36;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.022 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0

The year is still 0 in mythmusic.  I need to find where that is set.
Set that from the mythmusic interface by editing each song (I think).

> whose file was renamed to fix a typo.  The misspelled duplicate will
> not go away after rescan even though the file no longer exists.  I can
> remove the whole album and all tracks go away except this non-existent
> file!  There is some sort of bug here.
> 
> > I have managed to select the tracks (out of the duplicates) that play the
> > correct song but I can't find a way to permanently delete the non-selected
> > ones.  Presumably this select music -> by album -> all tracks is just to
> > select what goes in the play list, not to remove the database entries that
> > point to the incorrect files.
> 
> Yes, that's right.  We might have to go edit the database for the
> files that won't go away, or find and fix a bug.
> 
> -Tim Witham

Thanks for replying.  As of now, I did fix all the issues discussed
above.  I will try importing with vlc in the future and see how that
goes.

Augustine