iEatBrainz gets a Universal bump
Jay Tuley's original IEatBrainz apparently went defunct before it ever grew up to be a Universal build. Fortunately for us, Pierre Andrews picked up the (open) source code and made a version that works for just about everybody.
IEatBrainz uses the online acoustic fingerprint service "MusicBrainz" to fix improperly tagged files in your iTunes collection. It's simple, easy and pretty fast considering the number of web transactions it has to make. It serves as a great interface to MusicBrainz, which has to take the blame for any inaccuracies. The software allows you to select files from your library to check, and begins looking them up in the background while you're still picking files. You get a chance to review the ones that it thinks it found matches for before sending the information to iTunes.
For various and sundry reasons I have a lot of poorly tagged files in iTunes, so I spent some time seeing what it could fix. I have to tell you, it handled Black Metal and Classical quite well, scoring almost 100%. Other genres baffled MusicBrainz a little. My Dead Boys tracks were a wash and it told me that Siouxsie was actually Switchblade Symphony. Overall, about 60%, but I have some very obscure tracks. I don't even know what some of them are.
It's free, and no one will question why you have so many untagged tracks. We promise. You can grab the Universal build at 6V8.
Update from the developer's website: "Jay Tuley just contacted me to explain why a universal build had never been released. Basically, the TRM fingerprinting system provided by MusicBrainz will be switched off in the upcoming weeks/days. After that, even if you can run IEatBrainz, it won't find any result as the MusicBrainz servers won't be answering the requests."
Get a WordPress.com Blog
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Simon Arch said 12:22PM on 2-12-2008
The thing is, who gets to decide what "improperly" means? I run a pretty tight ship here, and my iTunes library is already "properly" tagged for ME. And their system is starting to infect the CDDB. Why does Music Brainz get to decide for everyone else how they should tag their music?
All I can say is, thank Dagon for Doug Adams and his Search and Replace script so I can nix the brackets in favour of parentheses.
Reply
Chroma said 12:29PM on 2-12-2008
Switchblade Symphony gets no wiki love :(
Reply
serenity said 12:55PM on 2-12-2008
So THAT's why it ran so darn slow, I didn't even know, haha. Anyway, I've had more success using MusicBrainz Picard as the client. Pretty much add tracks and click Save and you're done - if the tracks are in the database. Most album tracks are, though.
Reply
peachesNYC said 1:39PM on 2-12-2008
Hey, this reminds me of that awesome iPhone app that Erica whipped up to ID songs that you would sample through the iPhone mic. Since she had to pull the app because it queried the Gracenote database without their permission, I wonder if she could update her app to use this database or the MusicDNS database instead.
Reply
FoundInTheFlood said 1:59PM on 2-12-2008
From the page of the developer :
"pdate Jay Tuley just contacted me to explain why a universal build had never been released. Basically, the TRM fingerprinting system provided by MusicBrainz will be switched off in the upcoming weeks/days. After that, even if you can run IEatBrainz, it won’t find any result as the MusicBrainz servers won’t be answering the requests. This had been announced last october and is not the fault of the developer of IEatBrainz."
I guess this makes it worthless
Reply
Brett Terpstra said 2:04PM on 2-12-2008
Sure does. Bummer.
jonathan Stieglitz said 4:19PM on 2-12-2008
too bad
it's a great app
ZeroCorpse said 2:28PM on 2-12-2008
Yeah, uhh... No Thanks. I've seen how other people tag music, and I'll stick to doing it manually when the CDDB/Gracenote are wrong.
For example:
"Oh Sheila" is not Prince. It's Ready For The World.
PIL should be tagged "Public Image Ltd." and not "Johnny Rotten and The PIL"
It's "Led Zeppelin" and not "Led Zep" or just "Zep"
The album "Life's Too Good" is by The Sugarcubes. Not "Bjork", and not "Bjork and the Sugarcubes."
The YEAR for a song should be the year it was originally release, and not the year it was released on CD, or some number picked out of a hat.
The Song "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" is off the album "Electric Ladyland" by Jimi Hendrix. It's not called "Hulk Hogan's Theme" nor was it written or performed by Hulk Hogan or the WWE. The album name isn't "Hulk Hogan" either.
Fiona Apple's "When the Pawn..." has a much longer actual title (the whole front of the album!) and while that's cool, it's not very iTunes-friendly, nor is it easy to deal with in other contexts. Most of us in the sane world have accepted calling it "When the Pawn..." instead of that long, proper title:
"WHEN THE PAWN hits the conflicts he thinks like a king
What he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fight
And he'll win the whole thing before he enter the ring
There's nobody to batter when your mind is your might
So when you go solo you hold your own hand
And remember that depth is the greatest of heights
And if you know where you stand, then you know where to land
And if you fall it won't matter 'cause you know that you're right"
Try to fit that in the ALBUM heading, and I'll beat you up.
Reply
Simon Arch said 10:02PM on 2-12-2008
Oh, oh, Sheila...
Damn you. Damn you to hell and back.
ghostplanner said 7:47AM on 2-13-2008
So....
If we agree that MusicBrainz is a great service (haven't tried it yet, but want to), and it will close down soon...
Shouldn't we do something to try and save it? By migrating it to another server, or try to find money for the people who manage it, or whatever.
What do you guys think?
Reply
Jay said 9:29AM on 2-13-2008
There's a new server and an old server, they have different api's iEatBrainz use the old server, it's never been updated for the new server, so musicbrainz isn't ending they are just shutting down the old server and apps that haven't been updated in 3 years (aside from being compiled as a universal binary) won't work. But the new stuff will like Musicbrainz official tagger that now works on OS X.
Robb said 3:35PM on 2-13-2008
it's working great for me to fix up about 2300 mp3s that had no artist or album.
Reply
The Tuesday Night Tech Show said 5:22PM on 2-16-2008
I don't use the Brainz software, but I use something similar called MP3Freaker, which almost does the same thing. It will fill in missing album artwork, album title, year, track number, etc. It was $20, but, it does an awesome job and can do the whole library in the background.
Reply