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Positive Feedback ISSUE 72
march/april 2014

 

Bliss Digital Music Management
by Pete Davey

 

Bliss Digital Music Management

For years, I've ripped CD's, or downloaded music from the Internet (legally, of course) and have always found it difficult that most people simply don't understand how to properly tag the metadata!

Little things that matter; Disc numbering, album art, proper "various artists" tagging (don't even get me started on this one!) These things really matter especially when you start approaching tens of hundreds of thousands of songs! I enjoy seeing the album art, and I despise seeing songs grouped in the wrong places. With the physical media, it's no issue. You have the disc and the case, so it's not a big deal—but when you're searching through a library for something particular, you want to be able to find it!

It's akin to the dewey decimal system. Who remembers that! I'm sure most of you do (for the young bucks, look it up). Until that happened, it was near impossible to locate books in a library. Well, I prefer to hold my music files up to the same sort of standards. It's important to me. But what is even more important, is a tool that can be trusted to maintain all of this up to your stringent standards.

I can't explain how many times I've run across some random tool from the internet that promised to look up the data online and to properly tag it only to be let down and have to spend hours repairing the mess it made.

When the creator of Bliss approached me, Dan Gravell, I was a bit skeptical at first—only due to my past experiences. I spent HOURS, DAYS, just going through my library painstakingly tagging each and every album/song. I even wrote iTune scripts to automate most of it, but those still were only run per album, not en masse.

Bliss—appropriately named I might add—is a metadata management tool. It was created by someone that obviously really cares about how music is managed on a computer, but more on that later. Upon first launch, you are greeted by an extremely simple interface—which was very alarming to me as I was about to allow a utility to make permanent changes to my audio files and it was hard for me to swallow that such a simple utility (on the surface anyway) was able to handle all of these tasks, automatically, AND on a regular basis.

Seriously—this is the Holy Grail here folks—this is the true "set it and forget it" utility that is the end all—be all digital audio metadata utility. You simply tell it how you want your music tagged and it will handle the rest, all in the background. It's really nice to know that there is a piece of software out there that I can trust with my library, that I've spent years creating.

It's web based, too. No thick application running, it's accessed via your browser and has an extremely point and click interface. Another thing, you buy "fixes", meaning it's finite in nature and you only buy batches of fixes when you need them. Pretty cool idea, depending on how large your library is, is how much you pay for it. If your library grows, no problem, just buy more fixes.

Sorry to keep this one short and sweet, but if you've been burned by utilities in the past, give this one a shot. It's worth it.

http://www.blisshq.com

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