Fingerprinting ... was Re: Thanks for MusicBrainz patch

[Sergey Ivanov]

> I see that we dont understand one another. By "storing the fingerprint in the
> database" I of course meant to store some id (like the mbid with musicbrainz
> and the fingerprint id with last.fm) in the Database that would make it
> possible to identify a specific song. I don't know how the fingerprinting with
> musicbrainz works, but with last.fm you always get the same fingerprint id
> from the same song. No matter how (or with what) it was encoded or decoded.
> What matters for the fingerprint is the sounddata (and even if parts from it
> are missing because of lossfull encoding you should have the same fingerprint
> id). What that you can search for duplicates, get specific information faster
> (for the last.fm part at least) thats not stored in the database and I'm sure
> some other cool stuff I'm not thinking about at the moment.
My bad, I thought that It supposed to store fingerprint instead of ID.
It is really usefull thing, and It would be great to have it, and
doesn't matter what track ident system It will use.

> Of course I didn't mean to use liblastfm Fingerprinting with MusicBrainz
> Tagging System (even though it does for some Songs return MBIDs), but
> with the last.fm API, where you submit the Fingerprint and it returns a
> FingerprintID & XML encoded Metadata (Artist, Album, ...).
> It also knows some Songs (did see it with at least one Song today) where
> the MB Tagger doesn't return a good Result.
> But after giving all of this a second Thought, I must admit that for
> tagging Songs, having both Solutions available is probably not so bad,
> because maybe last.fm knows some Songs that MB doesn't and vice-versa
> (even though after a small tryout I must admit that last.fm found Songs
> that MB didn't find or where MB returned wrong Information, at least on
> around 5 Songs).
> But the Databse of course should only store one FingerprintID, which one
> is a thing of carefull
>
> Track Identification is available without a last.fm Subscription, try
> out the Example Application in liblastfm.
>
I'm sure that there are some tracks, known by MusicDNS but
unrecognized by LastFM, and It's Ok. Didn't know that fingerprinting
available without subscription. But the main reason to use libofa is
simplicity: generate fingerprint -> Got (or not) PUID -> Got track ID.
But thank you, I'll try lastfm as replacement to libofa.

> And libofa was last changed in September 2007 (upload Date that you can
> see here: http://code.google.com/p/musicip-libofa/downloads/list ) and
> the SVN is completly empty ... so I call that more then "not
> maintained", I would call it abandoned.
Updates list ( http://code.google.com/p/musicip-libofa/updates/list )
says that It got modified sometimes. :)

> @Sergey: Btw, a small Bugreport ... when I update the Tags via MB and
> then have the new Tags in TagDialog and then click on Save & Close, the
> Collection View doesn't update and it still shows something under e.g.
> "Unknown Artist". Is it only me having this Bug or can you confirm and
> fix it? :)
Yes, this is a bug. It happened because of changing UID after track
update. In case of sql collection there was some strange problem -
scanner loses track. I removed UID update code for sql collection, so
now It works.