Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Sooloos - Rough guide to Ripping and Importing

Hi guys,

So we don't drift too far off topic, I've moved the discussion
on sonic merits of different FLAC encoders to FLAC encoders, what are the variables?

Regards,
Carl

Thanks for this guide. Very helpful.

I have a lot of music previously ripped to FLAC which I'm in the process of importing into Sooloos. On those albums for which the metadata isn't found, I've tried the "Import Data" approach and manual entry of the AMG ID. I've been 100% unsuccessful. I've been looking on Allmusic.com, found the correct album, looked through releases to find the correct version and searched for the AMG ID. Usually, there is nothing labelled as such. There's typically something like:

Sultans of Swing: The Very Best of Dire Straits
(CD - Warner Bros. #47130)

I've tried entering 47130, or #47130 or padding 47130 before or after with blanks or zeroes to make 10 digits. Nothing has been successful.

Suggestions as to what I'm doing wrong would be most welcome.

Can you use dBpa or XLD to "convert" FLAC to FLAC and look for better metadata?

In the past few weeks I have noticed too that the code we need is no longer visible.

Can anyone find it or has the feature been removed?

Yes, I found that yesterday on an album that was data lite. The numbers are not there for a search.
Chris

Even poking around with albums and their releases doesn't yield any database code for an album.

I wonder if this is quite a big issue brewing...

Ive just had a look at http://developer.rovicorp.com/

They seem to have quite a nice REST api for accessing their database. It took a couple of minutes to register an account, I could then have a play on their APIConsole.

Querying for "Dark Side Of The Moon" yields results along the lines of

"type": "album",
"relevance": [{
"code": "Score",
"value": 3.5337727
}],
"id": "MW0000191308",
"messages": null,
"album": {
"ids": {
"albumId": "MW0000191308",
"amgClassicalId": null,
"amgPopId": "R 2242794"
},
"title": "The Dark Side of the Moon",
"primaryArtists": [{
"id": "MN0000346336",
"name": "Pink Floyd"
}],

(This is obviously abridged !!!!)

If I get a chance I may have a play. I didn't read the fine point on licensing, so this may be a non starter, but its certainly possible to get hold of the IDs at a programmatic level, even though for some reason they have chosen to hide it on the main website.

If any one else fancies investigating further, feel free to dive in.

Cheers
Greg

If you go to the Dark Side of the Moon page on Allmusic, you can see the page name is "http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-dark-side-of-the-moon-mw0000191308".

All you need to do is copy and paste the album ID from the URL to Sooloos.

Well spotted. If you go to the Releases tab of a given album and then click on the specific variant you may be seeking, you can get the ID that way.

i.e. there are many variants of DSotM.

I wonder why AMG have chosen to make it difficult. Are they about to monetize further the database ?

I should have mentioned that I had seen that and tried entering the ID from the URL. I only tried this once, but received the same ID not found message. I'll try again to see if that time was just an anomaly.

Cheers, Ian

Just tried this with DJ Tiesto's In Search of Sunrise

I put both 0000013106 and mw0000013106 into the AMG ID box for Import Metadata. Sooloos says "Sorry, no metadata found for that ID."

Tried again last night with 3 different albums that were different genres and less obscure. Entering the AMG ID didn't work in any of the 3 cases. Does anyone have success currently with this?

Also, tried the artist / album name look up. It was with a CD that found disc 1 of 2, but not disc 2 of 2. I edited the artist and album name to match disc 1, but it wouldn't manually find it.

ISB,

I have yet to look up one manually with success. If it is not found initially, I'm stuck. I'm pretty pissed, as the the user interface for looking up the data is crap even if it worked.

I'm ready to just import the CDs it can't find without the data at this point.