Cover Me Up

How the Pages are Generated from MP3 Files

(The following is not particularly interesting, but I felt like writing it up, so I did!)

My program, tag311 (which I was inspired to write by the Linux id3edit program), is used to list the contents of the ID3v1 tags in the MP3 files. For example, here's the output for John Cipollina's performance of "Black Magic Woman" found at the Live Music Archive:

    File:           BlackMagicWoman_JohnCipollina.mp3
    Song:           Black Magic Woman
    Artist:         John Cipollina
    Album:          1986-02-19 - Lone Star Cafe
    Year:           1986
    Comment:        #M cipollina1986-02-19.sbd.f
    Track:          7
    Genre:          Rock

#M comments indicate the Live Music Archive and the rest of the comment is part of the URL for the show (whose title is the album title). Note that the LMA show identifier in the comment is truncated because ID3v1 comments can only be so long. #C comments are used in songs found on SoundClick; likewise, there are #G comments for GarageBand, #I for iCompositions, #R for ReverbNation, #S for SoundCloud, and #Y for YouTube. Depending on the comment type, different URLs are generated for songs or albums, whichever is appropriate for the target site.

The ID3 listing is fed into an awk script, pl2db.awk, which converts the ID3 listing into a flat-file database with one line per song. For example, greeny.DB has the following entry for John Cipollina's "Black Magic Woman", generated from the above ID3v1 listing:

    BlackMagicWoman|JohnCipollina|Black Magic Woman|John Cipollina|1986-02-19 - Lone Star Cafe|7|Rock|#M cipollina1986-02-19.sbd.f

(The first two fields are extracted from the file name and used to sort the songs. The third field is the actual song title. This allows me to ignore leading "The" and "A" articles when sorting. For example, covers of Peter Green's "The World Keep On Turning" are stored in WorldKeepOnTurning_artist.mp3 files with the correct title in the ID3 tag.)

... To be continued ...