A capital idea
February 12, 2013 in tags by Dan Gravell
One of the top rated ideas on the bliss ideas forum is Standardize Capitalization of Tags (Album, Title, etc). I've long been looking forward to implementing this idea, not least because it is an excellent example of bliss's concentration on consistency of your music collection.
Most computer audio enthusiasts must've seen divergent capitalisation rules in their music collections. If you rip CDs and gather metadata from any of the crowd-sourced metadata providers such as FreeDB you are likely to see capitalisation in many forms. Consider some track names:
- Debaser
- Tame
- Wave of Mutilation
- I bleed
- Here Comes your Man
- DEAD
- Monkey Gone To Heaven
If you scroll through your music library and see inconsistent capitalisation like this it'll have one of two effects.
If you're a sane, rounded human being you might think Hey, that capitalisation is inconsistent but never mind.
If, however, you're a raging OCD sufferer (the target market for bliss, some might say ;-) ) you ABSOLUTELY MUST CHANGE THOSE NAMES. Choose your capitalisation scheme and get taggin'!
This doesn't only affect track names of course. It can also affect artist names, release names, genre classifications and more. However, an important question is how you handle canonicalisation.
Capitalisation can also be considered a mutation of data that sits within your data pipeline. Whether the source of your data is your existing tags, or new data looked up online, the changes that a capitalisation rule would make should be applied to all inputted data into your music library. Thus, within bliss, capitalisation rules should be implemented to wrap data being sourced online as well as existing tags.
I'm hoping to implement capitalisation rules sometime in the next few months. wiSh Me LUCk!
Thanks to Dave Bleasdale for the image above.
