Discogs

Discogs is a database which provides more information than freedb and which is theorically less a mess than freedb. On the other hand, the database is smaller than freedb's one. It's quality versus quantity.. On top of that, while you need the complete album with the freedb, with discogs, you can have only a part of the album and then tag correctly only the songs you have. (But you have to know the name of the artist and the album instead)

Use

First, select the album and use the context menu:

Then select the correct album (you have to know the name of the album and the artist). If Auto is checked, the search will be automatic. You can use the filter to reduce the number of album available.

Then you can double click on the name of the album to see if it is the correct album and release, it will open your web browser and display a page like this one :

If it's the correct release, click on OK. A new window will appear. Here you have to align tracks with their tags with the buttons Move up, Move down and remove

If you have an incomplete album, don't forget to remove the corresponding songs:

As you will see, the number of tags entered is higher than we're used to:

Configuration

Via the contextual menu, go to Discogs, Configuration:

Tagging

Format track/discnumber and counts on two digits : will use 01 instead of 1 for example
Enable Artist Variation processing : An example is more clear:
AFX is an ANV of Aphex Twin. If you tag this release by AFX and enable the "Enable Artist Variation processing" setting, in the release dialog you'll have the option to tag %artsit% as "Aphex twin" instead of "AFX", by checking the "Replace ANVs" setting in the release dialog. Also the "display ANVs" check box shows ANVs appending a * to artist names like discogs does.
This setting is later useful for artist search using for example foo_uie_quicksearch : by entering "aphex twin" you would find all aphex twin releases + releases of all it's ANVs.
In artists name move "The" at the beginning : clear
Automatically match discogs tracks to local tracks based on track length when available : As it is said, it will match tags and songs only if the number of tracks in both lists is the same and track length is available on discogs.
It's not that accurate, so be sure to match tags even with this option checked. (if you have two songs of the same length in particular)

Album/artist art

Fetch : Get the corresponding picture
Display preview in release dialog : Will display the album art in the main window
Fetch all available arts : Will save all artist pictures and album arts, generall, for albums arts, it saves the front and the back of the album
Overwrite existing files : Explicit
File prefix : Album arts will be named like that (and then with _XX )

Network

HTTP proxy : Enter the adress of the proxy

Tag Mapping

Via the contextual menu go to edit tag mappings:

For each tag, you have a small description of the tag and you are also able to set various options:

Write tag : Will write the selected tag
Refresh tag on update : If you update information about this album, this tag will also be updated
Custom Info : The tag is stored as custom info using foo_custom_info (it need to be installed for this feature to work). Custom info Tag is later available as any other tag using %: %custom_tag%.
Map to: : Choose the name of the Tag where information will be stored.

July 14 2008 15:32:17.