Adding tags to an album from file in samedirectory

[adhawkins]

Hi all,

When I rip my music, it is ripped to a whole album FLAC file, and then tags
are applied based on data from the MusicBrainz service using flactag.

My 7 year old daughter now has a Radio in her room, and is starting to
browse our music collection herself. As a result, I think it's time to start
'fencing off' the library to prevent her from listening to stuff she
shouldn't really be listening to.

I don't really want to add anything to the tags directly in the music files,
as I have an overnight job that compares the tags in the files with those
derived from MusicBrainz, and performs any updates.

What I had in mind, was perhaps a means to place an extra file in the same
directory as the FLAC file for the album, that would contain some extra tags
that would also be applied to the album (say a 'Genre' tag, which I could
use as the means of limiting library views). Is there any way of doing this
currently? Failing that, is it the sort of thing that could be relatively
easily accomplished using a Plugin?

Is there any guide to getting started with writing a plugin, particularly
one that will be invoked during a scan to add tags to the database. I'm a
programmer by trade, and have a basic knowledge of Perl, so would appreciate
any pointers. If others thought it might be useful, then I'd be happy to
make the plugin available (or work with a more experienced plugin writer) to
help achieve this.

Thanks for any advice or suggestions as to how else I might achieve what I'm
trying to do.

Andy

[DJanGo]

Hi,

just look here to some threads with searchterms like kids library.
There are (under 7.9) many ways ....

[adhawkins]

I'm aware of the Plugin example for creating limited library views. However, these rely on having either some tag or path to search on.

I think it'd be simpler to have (say) a new tag in each album file that lists (say) whose libraries that album should appear in. However, as I mentioned, I don't want to be manually editing the tags for my music, as the tagging is all done automatically based on MusicBrainz data.

So I envisaged having a file called (say) extratags.txt in each album directory, containing something like:

LIBRARY_NAMES=Dad;Mum;Bob

or

LIBRARY_NAMES=Dad;Mum

or

LIBRARY_NAMES=Bob

Then I can use the custom library view plugin to create an view for (say) Bob, that only lists music where he appears in the new LIBRARY_NAMES tag.

Does that make sense? Or can you suggest a better / simpler way?

Thanks

Andy