External tools, scripting and more

While there are still plenty of things that should be done, some long asked-for features, as well as some other changes, got implemented in MP3 Diags Unstable 1.1.12:

It is now possible to run external tools (like audio players, taggers or whatever you want) by right-clicking on a file name in the main window. See this link for the details (the UI will quite likely change in the future, as I don't like it, but should suffice for now). The same right-click can be used to open the folder containing a file in your default file explorer.

You can apply transformations from a script, without entering the GUI mode. More about this at the bottom of this page.

If you decide that you want to delete some MP3 files, you can do so by pressing DEL in the main window.

I fiddled some more with Gnome 3, with its issue that by default it doesn't show the close buttons that MP3 Diags expects. Here's the current status: I added custom close buttons to the windows that didn't have an "OK" or "Cancel" button, but, since I hate having 2 close buttons next to each other, the custom buttons are usually hidden, and get shown by default if Gnome 3 is detected. Since this detection is far from perfect and given that some distributions show by default window decorations that include a close button, it is possible for the user to hide or show these buttons. There's a checkbox for this in the "others" tab of the Configuration dialog, in the "Misc" section.

Two new transformations have been added: an "APE remover" and a "Non-audio remover". While they are both rather obvious, the latter is described in a little more detail here. Note that they are both hidden by default and to use them you need to make them visible in this window.

One last change is that the quality thresholds for the CLI analyzer are now taken from a session (the last open session if not specified otherwise), rather than using the program's defaults.

MP3 Diags on Tiny Core Linux

I just got a note from Michael Brüning that MP3 Diags was built for Tiny Core Linux and it can be found in the "extension" repository.

Backported Discogs changes in 1.0.10

According to this Discogs page, the API used for querying the site in MP3 Diags stable up to 1.0.9 and MP3 Diags Unstable up to 1.1.08 will be turned off on January 15th. So I changed the code to use the new API. The unstable branch got the change in 1.1.09. Since it worked OK for me and I didn't receive any complaints from anybody else, I assumed it was OK and I backported the change to the stable branch, in version 1.0.10.

So anybody who wants to use the Discogs integration after January 15th 2012 should have one of these versions (or something newer, as I release them): 1.1.09 unstable or 1.0.10.

New Discogs API and various fixes in 1.1.09

The API that was used until now by MP3 Diags is supposed to be turned off, so I switched to the new one for the Unstable branch. This is just about how the program works internally; the user experience shouldn't change. Discogs queries for the Stable branch will probably stop working in the immediate future, at which point I'm going to backport the changes from the Unstable branch, if that seems to work fine. My tests went OK, but they weren't very comprehensive, so it would be a good idea for anyone who finds issues with querying Discogs in both branches to let me know about it.

Other changes:

• Copying song info from ID3V1 to ID3V2 no longer assumes Latin-1, but allows the user to specify a codepage
• I fixed a crash caused by ID3V2.4 tags with invalid flags
• A few other minor fixes

Stable branch backports

When I said that the 1.0, stable branch was going to get only crash fixes, it didn't occur to me that the program might stop working even if it didn't change. Well, along came Gnome 3.0 and a Discogs API change and now you can't easily close a window with the mouse and you no longer can query Discogs.

These issues got fixed in the unstable branch. (Well, I guess "fixed" is a strong word, as I still don't like how the program looks on Gnome 3, but at least I can use the mouse to navigate.) The fixes have been backported to 1.0.09, so with this change it is now possible again to query Discogs in the stable branch.

Discogs fixes

Getting album info from Discogs stopped working some time in the past few weeks, because Discogs changed their API. MP3 Diags 1.1.08 addresses this issue by making its own changes to match Discogs. I will quite likely backport this change to the 1.0, stable branch as well. There will be yet another, more radical change later this year.

There are 2 rather minor bug fixes as well:

• When using Discogs, track numbers for multi-volume albums are now (arguably) correct


• Shell integration on Linux now accepts file and folder names containing spaces

Another change concerns the close buttons for dialogs under Gnome 3. Now most of the dialogs have close buttons. I might go back on this, as it seems that there should be no close buttons in Gnome 3, but I'd have to revisit all dialogs, to make sure they can be closed with the mouse.

Shell integration in Linux

I just published version 1.1.07 of MP3 Diags Unstable, which brings shell integration to Linux. Unlike Windows, getting this to work on Linux is trickier, because of the diversity of desktop environments and file browsers. So I'd be really surprised if this worked for everybody, but the situation can improve over time.

The program finally gets a Close button on Gnome 3, which it didn't have thus far (at any rate, it does on my virtual installation, which uses fallback mode; I don't know if that matters). It also got minimize and maximize buttons in Gnome 2 and 3.

There are some changes which affect packaging - I renamed some files to reflect that they belong to the "unstable" branch, and I also restructured the .spec file, based on feedback that I received from an anonymous user a while ago. I didn't make everything lowercase, though, as that seemed too big of a change.

These changes are Linux-specific, so there's no reason to update if you use Windows.

At the time that I write this there are no binaries with the new version at openSUSE Build Service, whose build process seems down. I'll keep trying to get the binaries to build.