Whirlycott Audiotron TOC Generator

I don't maintain this software anymore. I sold my Audiotron and now I use another device.

Current version: 1.30 Released Apr 24th, 2004 [ download ] [ Released under the GPL (Gnu Public License) ] by Philip Jacob Copyright © 2003, 2004

This software creates an index file that the Turtle Beach Audiotron home audio device uses to dramatically speed up the otherwise lengthy process of making a list of all the music files on your file server. Instead of reading data from all of your music files, the Audiotron instead reads in the TOC file (probably takes < 30 secs depending on the size of your collection). When your collection starts to go over a few hundred music files, you will certainly see the need for a TOC generator. Once you start amassing a large collection (> 2000 files), relying on the AT without using a TOC generator becomes wholly impractical.

I wrote this code because I wanted an Audiotron TOC generator that I could run via cron on my Linux file server which holds my mp3 files. At the time I wrote this, there were two other popular command line TOC generators out there, but I didn't like either of them (hacky, hard-to-modify code or limited features), so I put this together. There are other GUI apps out there, but the fact that I wanted to run this via my cron scheduler influenced my decision to write this in a language that is conducive to that kind of non-interactive environment (i.e. perl).

I think it is better designed than most of the TOC generators out there and the fact that it uses a cache to store previously parsed mp3 files really speeds things up. I am quite sure that there are a few lingering bugs existing in it, but I will be happy to fix them as they are brought my attention.

Features

• Runs on MS Windows, Linux, OS X, etc.
• Does not have a GUI, so you can run it automatically using your operating system's job scheduler (i.e. cron or as a Scheduled Task)
• Only supports MP3 files right now - more formats will be supported soon
• Keeps a cache of previously inspected mp3 files to reduce processing time
• Generates a sorted TOC (as described in the Audiotron API documents) so the Audiotron can parse the TOC file faster
• Configurable to support multiple share locations (as long as they are accessible from the same server)
• Portable to anything that Perl is portable to
• Efficient, well-documented code is easy to understand
• Boris Pasternak also notes that this code was successful in building a TOC for his extremely large music collection. On his P3 500mhz file server, this code processed 25,000 MP3 files in about 72 minutes without a cache file. After the cache has been built, the process is reduced to 25 minutes.

Changes

• Version 1.30
  • The program will now contact the Audiotron to tell it to reload the TOC which saves you from either having to do this manually or rebooting the AT to get it to reload.
  • Thanks to Jeremy Laurenson for doing some MS Windows testing. For now, he advises only using shares without spaces in the directory names (i.e. "C:\Music" instead of "C:\My Music")
  • Thanks to Stephen [kiwin] Palm for some advice on the text output as well as code to back it up.
• Version 1.22
  • The ATTray incompatibility fix in 1.21 wasn't actually included in the release, but it is fixed in this version.
• Version 1.21
  • Fixed some bugs related to charset conversion (Thanks to Kees Verruijt).
  • Added a note to Windows users about not putting spaces in their Audiotron directory names. I'll provide a better fix in a future release. (Thanks to Jeff Coffler for pointing out the problem).
  • David W. Lowrey contributed some code that can rewrite artist names such as "The Beatles" so to either "Beatles, The" or just "Beatles".
  • David W. Lowrey noticed and fixed an incompatibility with the ATTray application.
• Version 1.15
  • Now includes support for running on MS Windows (Thanks to Jeff Coffler for testing the code).
• Version 1.13
  • Fixed bug whereby the Audiotron couldn't load up files with diacritic chars in the pathname.
  • Fixed regex bug noticeable when you have multiple tocs. (Thanks to Guy Dreier)
  • Fixed bug where the track numbers were all blank. (Thanks to Guy Dreier)
  • The code now checks to see if a new version is available (optional).
• Version 1.3 - Initial release

Installation and Requirements

First: You need Perl (I'm using 5.8) and the following modules. Please note that this should happily work with perl 5.6 or possibily even earlier versions as long as the following modules are available.

File::Basename - Included with perl 5.8
LWP- you might need to install this
File::Find - Included with perl 5.8
File::stat - Included with perl 5.8
MP3::Info - you might need to install this
Set::Scalar - you might need to install this
Storable - Included with perl 5.8
Text::Iconv - you might need to install this (Not required if you plan on running this on Windows; in fact, Text::Iconv won't even work on Windows)
strict - Included with perl 5.8

If you are not already using the wonderful CPAN module, you can automate most of this installation if you have a working version of perl. In fact, unless you have a good reason not to do so, I highly recommend that you use cpan to install the modules above. If you are running MS Windows and are using ActiveState's ActivePerl distribution, you can use their included PPM utility to install the modules.

Second: Apart from that, after you have downloaded the code, you should open it up and modify the values clearly marked in the END USER CONFIGURATION section (that's you!). For now, you need to modify the @music_dirs to reflect the pathnames on your system and also provide the hostname, username and password for your Audiotron. Then, just run it. You will see output like this:

phil@localhost:~/audiotron-toc$ perl audiotron-index.pl 
Whirlycott Audiotron TOC Generator
<http://www.whirlycott.com/phil/software/audiotron/>
Copyright (C) 2003 Philip Jacob
Starting...
Time stamp for this run will be 1061322712
Reading in cachefile...
Found 5479 MP3 files...
Checking cached files for modifications since 1061158163 ...
        Found 0 modified or changed files.
        Done!
Going to reuse old cache data...
Doing full checks on 24 files...
        Processed 10/24
        Processed 20/24
Storing cache file...
        Done!
Generating TOC...
        Done!
Checking to see if a newer version of this code is available...
        The version you are using is: $Revision: 1.5 $
        The latest version is:        $Revision: 1.5 $

Exiting happily.

After this initial run, a cache file will have been created that stores most of the data needed to regenerate the TOC without having to re-scan all of the mp3 files.

Upcoming features:

• Support for other media types (.wma, .wav, etc.)
• Smart playlists (i.e. recently added, etc.)
• Something else? Send me a patch or a suggestion for an idea!

Bug Reports and Feature Requests

Please email me with any bugs you find or features you want (note that the email address has been slightly obfuscated to avoid spam-harvesting robots). In order to provide you with a fix, I will need any and all diagnostic information that you can provide to me.