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Charging them extra for every letter they modify in the original requirement spec would be the right thing to do. As "regression" charge. 
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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While I sympathize with how (I think) you are feeling, and the frustration (I think) you are experiencing, I do wonder if the very nature of the software business doesn't involve a degree of "mess," and "imprecision" because of the different roles, expectations, and agendas of companies, administrators, project managers, and ... programmers.
Whether I was working for a large company (Adobe), or working as a contractor for small to medium-sized companies, I never experienced any software project that wasn't "bent out of shape" by a mixture of:
1. the need to support legacy code, legacy UI implementations
2. naive expectations of unrealistic goals being met within the nominal time period for achievement
3. clash of personalities, and other interpersonal issue
4. organizational politics
On the other hand, I was never "burdened" by having to regularly go through some kind of process like "Agile" involving a public performance in which I might have to grit my teeth, while lying through them, because everyone was too afraid to say the obvious fact that "the Emperor had no clothes."
cheers, Bill
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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Vunic wrote: building bridges to the moon
We didn't tell you which moon. If you needed to know, you should have asked!
Now hurry up and finish that bridge to Charon[^]. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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I thought they said it very clearly.
Seven red lines all perpendicular to each other, some in green and at least two to be transparent. Also, one of the red ones to be in the shape of a kitten.
What's the problem?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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That's called documentation!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Strange that it not in camelCase.
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A good soldier does axactly as he is ordered, to the letter.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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Maybe their name was already taken and they had to be creative for the host's name 
Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true
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So my neighbor's come up with a good question. He's got a lot of MP3s (10s of thousands), and he's had a problem with file duplication that I helped him solve by purchasing some software (De-Dup from PerfectTUNES). This software "listens" to audio files, so duplicates can be matched regardless of file type (.mp3, .flac, .wav, .ogg) or bitrate, and ignores silence at the start and end of such files, and completely ignores tags, which I suppose is a good thing once you find out a lot of files are incorrectly tagged. Since tags are ignored, it also won't confuse a live version of a song vs its album counterpart. Of course it can't make the distinction between a song that comes from an album, and the same thing coming from a compilation or best-of album, but for all intents and purposes, that's exactly what such software should reasonably be expected to do.
So that took care of his file duplication problem.
One thing it won't do however is automatically assign tags to these untagged (or incorrectly tagged) files. I know Shazam can do a very decent job of identifying obscure songs, but unlike Shazam and the like, this software doesn't make any effort to identify songs - it just walks through a big file dump and looks for matches but doesn't then take the next logical step, which would be to go online and fetch tags/descriptor IDs. And since Shazam only "listens" to sound coming from an external output, it can't assign tags to the originating file once it's identified the content.
Does anyone know of software that can do that sort of thing - that is, listen to a file on disk, identify what it is, and then tag it...even if it only managed to fetch artist and album titles, that would be a great start.
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FWIW, I've used this one but it doesn't 'listen' to the content.
Mp3tag[^]
It connects to some online services (I've forgotten what they are) and fetches album information and album art, which it uses to tag the files with.
I'm also not sure it is suitable for tens of thousands of MP3s.
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Indivara wrote: FWIW, I've used this one but it doesn't 'listen' to the content.
Mp3tag[^]
And that, right there, is the blocker. Assume all files are completely untagged and have names you can't rely on. If it doesn't look at the content, then it's a non-starter.
I've used Mp3tag and it's absolutely fantastic at what it does - but it's not what's needed here.
I'm looking for personal experiences and opinions, but meanwhile, this looks promising: MusicBrainz Picard[^]
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How about Mp3tag[^], ID3 Hunter[^] (open source) or WinAmp[^] to auto tag using GraceNote FreeDB?
Edit: ID3 Hunter fails to build because the string resources and settings files aren't present in the source. 
/ravi
modified 21-Aug-16 12:16pm.
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I never realized Winamp could do auto-tagging. Is that built-in, or with some extra plugin?
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It's a hidden built-in feature. Click the link in my reply to view a brief YTube video that shows how to enable and use the feature.
/ravi
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Neat. Based on the video, I thought you had to let Winamp play songs before it would auto-tag them, but later on, it does mention you can make a list and then use Send To / Autotag. I'll definitely have to try it out.
OTOH, it doesn't look like it provides any way to accept/reject suggested changes; it'll just apply them. But, it still seems like a great option if you have a big pile of completely unidentified material.
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Yes, it's a good start. I (strongly) recommend MP3Tag once you've gone through the first phase with WinAmp. It's an awesome tag editor + file renamer.
You can also use my humble 13-year old app MP3 Pal[^].
/ravi
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Ravi Bhavnani wrote: I (strongly) recommend MP3Tag once you've gone through the first phase with WinAmp
No need to sell me on it - I've been using MP3Tag for years.
And since you've written your own MP3 tag app - you're probably a good candidate to ask: Years ago I let some program update tags in a bunch of MP3 files, and--I've never been sure whether that was just a coincidence of not--shortly thereafter a lot of files had audible glitches in them here and there. I initially attributed this to the tagging program corrupting the audio portion of the file, but could never really prove it. It was so long ago, I forget what program it was. Could even have been Windows Media Player for all I know...
Since you have experience looking at tags and rewriting MP3 files with updates - how likely (or plausible?) would it be, you think, for such a program to corrupt an MP3? Is the method foolproof, or is it easy to make basic mistakes that would introduce audio glitches?
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/ravi
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hmm, not sure if its an option, but when I loaded music CD into the iTunes library, it did find the correct album, song title etc.
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Kenneth Haugland wrote: when I loaded music CD
There are free apps that will do that. But I think the OP wants to tag individual songs automatically.
/ravi
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Yeah...my neighbour's looking at tagging tens of thousands of files he's already got. He's not going to re-rip everything.
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Yeah, this is where I got the link to MusicBrainz from I mentioned in one of my earlier replies. So far, so good, but I'll also have a look at Magic MP3 Tagger. No reason to limit myself to a single tool.
Thanks.
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I still use ID3 TagIt, even if its development has ceased long ago. It allows for retrieving tags easily from an online database. It also has many useful functionalities for manipulating tags, on one signle file or one several at the same time.
You always obtain more by being rather polite and armed than polite only.
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