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Installationof Be in your Stereo. |
These attributes must be indexed in order to
quickly produce any search results based on them. Nothing will show up when you try to find tracks if these
indexes are not built.
Once you have created indexes for these attributes, you need to put information into those indexes. Though you might think otherwise, BeOS doesn't automatically index information that existed before the index was created - only new information is put in the index. The standard way to do this is to duplicate your audio file folder in Tracker, then trash the original.
If you don't already have information in your audio files' year, genre, artist, and album attributes, there are many tools to help you build some. mp3 files support a small amount of extended information called id3. Many encoders will automatically populate the id3 information from places like CDDB or FreeDB.
An obvious thing to do is pull id3 information out and store it in BeOS attributes, and tools like id3attr do just that. The BeOS tip server has a useful article to give you further ideas. Once the id3 tags have been extracted, you can use something like MP3 Tags and Attributes or MP3 Army Knife to graphically set and re-write information with a Tracker add-on.
Note that you don't have to use any of the id3 standard's canned genres. Make up your own.
Also note that you don't have to have every attribute of every file set. However, at least one of the attributes (year, genre, artist, album) must be set in order for the plugin to find it.
Once you've got your attributes set up:
alias setgenre="addattr Audio:Genre" alias setartist="addattr Audio:Artist" alias setalbum="addattr Audio:Album" alias setyear="addattr -t int Audio:Year"