Murfie metadata - Murfie responds!
October 07, 2014 in digital music by Dan Gravell
After I posted an audit of Murfie metadata last week I was most impressed when a new email dropped through my inbox from their team in charge of ripping and metadata! John Kruse, who handles metadata cleaning, sorting and grooming at Murfie, noticed my post, and in his email answered most of the concerns I outlined with the metadata Murfie delivers.
I should first of all say that the metadata provided by Murfie is generally pretty good! There were just a few concerns, some of those subjective. For example, one of the first things I highlighted was an inconsistent use of the YEAR tag. Some albums appear to contain a full date, while others just have the (more normal) year. John responds:
Our current standard at Murfie is to remove month and day from the year tag, so the album you downloaded with month and day appears to be an operator error. We may move to include month and day information on albums in the future to help with searchability, but at the moment, we instruct our Operations crew to remove month and day.
That's a good approach. I think just having the year probably suits most music players right now, but the full date may still retain useful information.
Probably my biggest concern was the inclusion of a RATING tag. This doesn't make much sense; who is to say what my rating for any given track is? John put forward:
We agree with you about the rating tag being unnecessary. At some point in the past, we added as much information as we could to the tags, but the rating tag has been removed from future rips. Older CDs may still have the rating tag.
I definitely think removing the rating will be a good move. Finally, I mentioned that there's no separate cover art file. John again:
We also agree with you that the album art file should be include with downloads. For certain manual processes, the folder.jpg file is already included, and we're looking into including this file with our automated systems in the future.
It'll be great when this is included John (of course, bliss can provide this automatically using the art embedded by Murfie's processes.)
I have to say I'm really impressed by John and Murfie's commitment to excellence and soliciting customer feedback. I'm already looking forward to downloading more FLACs from their store!
Thanks to cogdogblog for the image above.
