Sneaky Songs
July 09, 2010 at 11:05 PM | categories: Random, Planet Ubuntu | View CommentsI'm going on vacation (OBX!) in a week, and figured I should probably update my music player (a Sansa Fuze) for the 12-hour ride there. I've had most of it sync'd for a while, but then I noticed that a few songs were missing ReplayGain tags. Oh no! (ReplayGain ensures everything plays at the same volume so your ears don't bleed when switching songs.)
So, there were a few options:
- Erase the player and re-sync 3.5 GB of songs.
- rsync the changed songs after adding ReplayGain tags
- Find which songs on the player were missing ReplayGain tags
The first option isn't very nice on the flash memory, and I figured there was a smarter way to go about things.
The second would have been viable if Banshee hadn't been updating playcount tags in the files, so almost everything had changed anyway.
So I dove into the third. Installed tagtool and started dumping some files. Those with ReplayGain had "REPLAYGAIN" in the output. Easy enough. It took some time, but I came up with the following command:
find . -name "*.ogg" -print -exec sh -c "tagtool --dump \"{}\" | grep -L REPLAYGAIN" \;
It looks through all ogg files (might work for MP3 too), sends them to tagtool, and then checks the output for a lack of "REPLAYGAIN" in which case it prints "(standard input)" after the filename.
So I ran this, sent it to a file, and scanned it for "standard input." Found about 20 songs. Deleted them off of the player, had Banshee re-sync, and things were back to being awesome.
Now I know what you're saying: "Why not just use Banshee's search bar?" Yes, Banshee's search is quite powerful, but unfortunately you cannot yet search by raw tag or replaygain.
/me scurries off to bugzilla
*Edit: Bug 624000. Nice number!*
