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Topic: Ethos Cataloger (Read 9425 times) previous topic - next topic
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Ethos Cataloger

I've been working for more than a year now on a cross-platform project aimed at listing huge audio collections and exporting the list in various formats such as TXT, HTML, dynamic HTML (PHP) or XML. The customization of the exported list is a very important aspect of the project, since I haven't found anything satisfying on the existing free products.

The audio reading part of the software is based on the ATL (Audio Tools Library) package, that has been translated from Pascal to C#. It is now being extended to support even more tag standards and audio formats, such as MIDI and PSF.

Ethos Cataloger is now leaving the shadows, with a first public version available on http://ethos.no-ip.com

Version 0.8 does have flaws, things to improve but also has a lot of potential. That's why I'm counting on the HA community to introduce and discuss any new idea related to metadata management, GUI design and audio cataloging in general.

Take your opportunity of guiding a newborn software, the main developer is listening 

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #1
do you support wavpack? it isnt mentioned on your website that i can see.

edit - bah i must be blind, installing now

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #2
quite nice, would it be possible to add a codec or extension column so when exporting you can filter to just mp3 or flac or whatever? also when using query mode to export is it not possible to use say "artist = kid606" and "artist = aphex twin" the export button is grayed out when i try to use multiple artist in query mode even though both are in the database.

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #3
Quote
would it be possible to add a codec or extension column so when exporting you can filter to just mp3 or flac or whatever


I've thought of something more generic that is on my to-do list, i.e. filtering by codec family (lossy, lossless or sequenced). I'll also add your proposal to the list, as it shouldn't be too hard to implement.

The button is disabled because there is no album selected. I assume you're thinking that the filter affects tracks. It actually works only on albums so far. Thus if no album has its "artist" field set to kid606 or Aphex Twin, none gets selected :/

Should I make a more precise querying that filters tracks instead of albums ?

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #4
I personally find the site hard to navigate and sort-of ugly

If you need help designing another, or would like me to make you one, it's for free (since your project is open-source, right?)

A solution do your dilemma would be to make the filtering level selectable : sometimes, people want album filtering, and other times, track filtering is best.

Just a question, though -- I'm currently scanning my collection, but what tags do you support?  Are custom tags supported?  Do you read all the tags used by foobar? (album artist -- artist (track artist) -- composer -- performer)

Supplementary comment -- Your scanner only detected the tag info on my mpc files.  No tag info on the mp3s.  At all (except for the date)

Also, the save button, if you didn't do "save as" first, does nothing -- this should be changed, probably : the first click should do "save as..."

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #5
Quote
I personally find the site hard to navigate and sort-of ugly
If you need help designing another, or would like me to make you one, it's for free


Actually I didn't want to bother to write yet another PHP website so I decided to do something fast, using Joomla CMS. I've had a mixed user feedback on it, but one thing is sure : the CMS engine allows me to add and move content very efficiently, and I really appreciate that.
If you want to contribute with a brand new PHP/MySQL website, I think you'll spend too much time on making the site as dynamic as it is now. IMO, it would be better to :
  - point out the reasons why you think it is hard to browse
  - if you have time, suggest a new layout/CSS (the current one being a tinkered default layout, d'uh  )

Quote
(since your project is open-source, right?)


Well, technically speaking, only a part of it is open-source (the ported ATL library). The whole is (and will remain) free but its code is only available to the development team. That is not definitive, though. It might evolve in the future.

Quote
Just a question, though -- I'm currently scanning my collection, but what tags do you support? Are custom tags supported? Do you read all the tags used by foobar? (album artist -- artist (track artist) -- composer -- performer)


The supported tags are ID3v1, ID3v2, APEtag and format-specific tags such as FLAC, OGG, WMA or PSF tagging. So far, custom tags are not supported. The set of readable tags is hardcoded, and each tag reader maps the values it recognizes to the generic tag slots of the application.

Quote
Supplementary comment -- Your scanner only detected the tag info on my mpc files. No tag info on the mp3s. At all (except for the date)


If your tags are all in custom tags, then they cannot be detected (explained above). But it kinda surprises me that it works for none of them... try and scan your MP3s one more time and have a look at the log window. Is there any warning or error appearing there after the scan ?

Quote
Also, the save button, if you didn't do "save as" first, does nothing -- this should be changed, probably : the first click should do "save as..."


Agreed, that's the default behaviour everywhere else... I'll fix that for next version 

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #6
would you mind explaining why  you chose 'ethos' as the name of the project?
it seems a tad unrelated to the actual functionality of the software and all..

regards,

boombaard

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #7
Ethos is a the name of a doctrine from the Greek culture. It states that music has ethical powers that can strongly affect someone's character.
This idea is in tune with what I've been thinking myself about music, and on top of that, the word Ethos is also a reference to a place from my favourite PSX game (Xenogears). Finally, it's a short word that is not too difficult to remember

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #8
currently, i cant even execute the program under my win xp pro sp2, it raises an error ('program was wrongly initiated' - freely translated from my 1sth language...)

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #9
Are you talking about the installer or Ethos itself ? I know some people have troubles with Nullsoft installers (I still don't know why) but if you have the .NET framework installed, there's no reason for Ethos not to start properly :/
If you're talking about the installer, just get the zipped archive instead of the exe, unzip it somewhere and start the app from there.

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #10
no, it doesnt work unzipped on my harddrive.

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #11
Hmm, it's the first time I've seen this  Can you tell me which version of .NET you have ? Can you get more information about that crash (call stack, console output ?)

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #12
ah, sorry, i just forget there was a system reinstallation in a meanwhile, sorry once more...
[EDIT]
and no .NET installed

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #13
Awesome!  I've had it in mind to look for a tool like this for a while.  It could have some very handy uses for me, possibly.

Does this tool also have some kind of a facility, or PHP script that allows for searching for media via a website?

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #14
sn0wman> lol, hopefully it was just that 

Supacon> When exporting the catalog in PHP format, you can activate a search feature on it. That will allow a user to look for album/tracks title or artist when browsing your catalog online. Is that what you mean ?

I'll add a PHP example to the site's showcases soon. The PHP export is undergoing many enhancements for version 0.9 at the moment...

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #15
Yeah, that's what I mean.  Sounds great, and I'm looking forward to seeing an example.  That would be wonderful.

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #16
Just FYI - The Greek character you used for your program's logo (Σ) is that of Sigma (capitalised), which would equate to the Latin letter "S." The correct letter to use (in Greek) would be that of Epsilon, which would be "E."

...But that would just be plain-looking, I know. 

 

Ethos Cataloger

Reply #17
Shade[ST]> The ID3v2 tag reading issue you have reported has been solved. My reader had been written according to the old specifications and couldn't deal with UTF-8 encoded tags. Now it works 

Supacon> I've added a PHP example to the site's showcase. Note that version 0.8 is still very buggy when it comes to exporting PHP. What I have uploaded today has been done with my own version (under development; soon called 0.9).

ozmosis82> Yeah, the Σ has been chosen more for graphical needs than for anything else