Re: Looking for BPM tagger

At 2/25/05 10:51 AM  Friday, Stan Abeln wrote:
>I assume you're talking about MixMeister BPM Analyzer?  Odd - in my
>files it stores TBPM frames with eg. "120.85" and then ID3-TagIt
>displays "120".

Stan: who is showing you 120.85?

I just modified my little routine to show me what these tags really look like.

In the songs where I figured out (or read off the liner notes) the BPMs and
typed them in myself using Tag&Rename, the tag contains what you would
expect. So, for a song that's 103 BPM, I see (in hex)
31 30 33

For songs that MixMeister calculated, I get (also in hex)
FF FE 31 00 30 00 30 00 2E 00 30 00 33 00 00 00
and the encoding byte indicates Unicode.

On further digging, FF  FE as the first unicode character is a "byte order
mark", giving the receiver a hint as to whether the sender is sending
little-endian or big-endian character pairs.

The trailing 00 00 is an end mark in unicode.

So this encoding means: the stream is little-endian unicode, and the
numbers are:
100.03

Now all this nonsense seems pretty nonsensical, especially since the ID3
standard is pretty clear that a numeric string should be represented just
as numbers.

But I did notice that MixMeister will not bother to rescan a file it's
already scanned. So maybe this "coded in unicode" business is a flag that
MixMeister has been there already.

In any case, I find this so unappealing I am considering decoding the
damned things and writing them back in the correct cannonical form.

Michael


http://home.cogeco.ca/~michaelwagner/personal-page.htm
"All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die" Sheryl Crow