Category: Microsoft

Navidrome, Not Compilation Albums, and Tagsharp-DLL

I love Navidrome, but one of the things I don’t love about it is how it opts to index albums. It uses the Album Artist tag to determine albums. If an album has differing Album Artist tags, it’s going to break that album into multiples, showing the tracks for Album Artist A as one album, Album Artist B as another and so on. In a world where featured artists are a common thing among all genres, this is annoying. The option, other than to update Album Artist to one consistent artist, is to set the Compilation tag. With the Compilation tag set, Navidrome ignores the multiple artists and keeps the album categorized based on Album.

But what if, like me, you have a massive library that you haven’t set this for?

Pain. Here’s what I’ve done.

First, carve off a copy of your database file (don’t use your production copy, even though we’re not making any changes to it. Safety first!). Open the database in DB Browser, and run the following query:

This will return a list of albums that have a song count of 1 and a compilation tag that isn’t set. This isn’t perfect – you’re going to catch single track albums, and you’re going to miss albums that are split in increments other than a single tune, but it’ll get you close to catching most of what you’re after. Given that I run Navidrome in Docker with a mounted volume to a network share I had to massage the data to represent their actual paths, so keep that in mind if you’re doing something similar.

Once you’ve got your list of album paths, save it as compalbums.txt. If you don’t have taglib-sharp.dll, you can get it with nuget if you’re using Visual Studio. If you aren’t go to the nuget site, download the package, open the file in your favorite zip file manager (which is 7-Zip, right?) and pull out the appropriate dll. For the purposes of these instructions I have everything in E:\mp3tools. Adjust accordingly. Create the below .ps1 file and run it. If you’re uncomfortable – and I don’t blame you if you are,  I currently have pretty much zero error checking thus far – copy some sample albums to a different path and test.

Remove old machines from Mouse Without Borders

I love Mouse Without Borders, but holy cow do I not understand how it doesn’t have a function to remove old machines from its settings. It seems like a ridiculous oversight. At any rate, I figured out how to do it. This is as of Powertoys v0.83.0. As per usual, you’re poking under the hood, so be forewarned.

In Windows 10/11, the settings for MWB is stored in a .json file found in C:\Users\YOURUSER\AppData\Local\Microsoft\PowerToys\MouseWithoutBorders. AppData is a hidden dir, so you’ll either have to enable seeing hidden dirs or path to it directly. Open the file in a text editor – I use Notepad++ – and head down to around line 45. There you’ll find MachineMatrixString. Delete the machine names you want to remove from MWB and replace them with empty quotes. Head to the next section, MachinePool, and again remove the machine name and the corresponding value following it, separated by a colon (if it’s a long-gone machine from your network, that value may be NONE) and replace it with a colon. You’re going from something that looks like this:

To something that looks like this:

Note that the before settings depict 3 machines and 1 empty slot and the after settings depict 2 machines and 2 empty slots. Mouse Without Borders has 4 slots for machines. If you just delete the machine you want removed and don’t repopulate with empty values, the MWB UI in PowerToys will lock up.

In my experience you can now save this file and don’t even have to restart PowerToys or MWB. Open the UI and click into MWB or, if you were already in MWB settings, click out and back in, and your machine settings should be automatically updated.

Navidrome, Clients and the Compilation MP3 Tag

As I outlined in a previous post, I switched from Jellyfin to Navidrome for my music. While on the whole I’m happy with the change, I discovered that Navidrome handles Various Artists albums such that if the Compilation tag isn’t set, it indexes the album from one into as many as there are artists. And, as outlined in the aforementioned post, this is not a bug, but by design. The intent is to account for different artists with the same album name, and that makes sense.

So I set out to attempt to automate the modification of the Compilation tag – a quest that turned out to be more complicated than I anticipated. The Compilation tag is apparently not a ‘standard’ tag. If you load up an mp3 in taglibsharp and have it vomit out all the tags, the Compilation tag won’t be among them. Here, try it yourself in PowerShell. You’ll have to update the path to your taglibsharp.dll and your test mp3 file.

Here’s an example output:

As you can see, no Compilation tag there. Compilation is technically an iTunes Flag Text Frame, and is set with a Boolean value (1 for Yup, 0 for Nope). It’s defined as TCMP. As of this writing id3.org is down, but here’s the archived page on this tag.

Given all this, I threw together the below. As per usual it’s unrefined, has almost zero error handling, and will be something I improve upon over time. This thing assumes your compilation albums are in directories formatted as “Various – Name of Album.”

Bonus: If you, like me, discovered you have a whole mess of compilation albums in directories with the format “VA – Album Title” instead of “Various – Album Title,” This one liner will help correct that.

Navidrome, Clients and Albums With Varying Artist Tags

I’m using Navidrome as my music server now, having switched from shoehorning Jellyfin into that role, and I quite like it. One thing I discovered, however, is that it – and quite a few clients that support it – rely on the Album Artist tag to help index files. Initially I found this problematic because many of my files didn’t have Album Artist populated. I solved this by writing a PowerShell script to copy the Perfomers tag data (Performers = Artist) to the Album Artist tag. I’ll share that in another post.

But then I discovered a different problem. If an album is a compilation or has variance in the artists from file to file (for example: This Guy feat. That Other Guy), it’d index files into separate albums of the same title. Navidrome’s developers confirmed that this is a feature, not a bug, and it makes sense. The solution for compilation albums is to set the Compilation tag to 1, which I haven’t automated yet but will shortly. The solution for non-comp albums is to make sure the Album Artists tag is consistent.

To accomplish this, I threw together the below script. It’s not optimized, it doesn’t have error handling or confirmation, and it’s apt to be destructive if you’re not careful. Still, it’s something you can build on, just as I inevitably will. As with all my music file related scripts, it requires taglib-sharp.dll. Obtain this file from TagLibSharp. You don’t have to futz with nuget or anything – just download the zipped package, yank the dll out of it, and put it in a subdir you’ll reference in the script.

This script will prompt for the full path to the files you wish to update, and then the name you wish to update the Album Artist tag to.

Powershell – Monitoring a log file

I had a situation at work where I needed to monitor a log file for a particular entry. I needed to be notified when that entry appeared. This log file gets created anew, with the current date, every day. Here’s what I came up with:

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while($true)
{
# get the date
$now = get-date
# create the log name from said date eg :20231223Err.txt
$fileName = '{0}{1}{2}Err.txt' -f $now.Year, $now.Month, $now.Day
# network path to said log
$fullPath = "\\path\e$\LogFiles\app\$($fileName)"

#I don't need this to run in perpetuity - it's a temp situation - so I'm just
#invoking this in a Powershell window and letting it rip.
Write-Host "[$(Get-Date)] Starting job for file $fullPath"
$latest = Start-Job -Arg $fullPath -ScriptBlock {
param($file)

# wait until the file exists, just in case
while(-not (Test-Path $file)){ sleep -sec 10 }
# matching the phrase Queue Count. could make all these variables
Get-Content $file -wait | where {$_ -match 'Queue Count'} |
foreach {
Send-MailMessage -SmtpServer SMTPSERVER -From me@email.com -To me@email.com -Subject 'Queue Count' -Body $_
write-host $_
}
}

# wait until date change
while($now.Date -eq (Get-Date).Date){ sleep -Sec 10 }

# kill the job and start anew
Write-Host "[$(Get-Date)] Stopping job for file $fullPath"
$latest | Stop-Job
}

The Magic of Logparser

I had a slew of IIS FTP logs to dig through for a work project. I needed unique visitor details, and I needed it from a month of logs. Some of these daily logs were in excess of 40mb. I threw together a PowerShell script to do just so, kicked it off, and waited. And waited. I reconfigured the script to be more efficient in its processing, kicked it off again, and waited. And waited. And researched, because this was taking far too long. And – late to the game, I know – I found Microsoft’s Logparser. Logparser is a free tool, and it’s filled with magic. With one simple query it managed to pull the raw data I needed from the log files in *seconds*.

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#log files in c:\temp\iis, results to same path

logparser "SELECT DISTINCT c-ip, cs-username INTO C:\temp\iis\results.txt FROM 'C:\temp\iis\*.log'" -i:W3C -o:W3C

#

In less than a minute I had a text file of unique visits gleaned from 550 MB worth of plaintext log files. From there I could use PowerShell to filter out any IP dupes (some connections do not have user details, thus producing some leftover duplication) and resolve hostnames from IP addresses to create a final masterlist. I’m not sure how Logparser does what it does so quickly.

Windows 10, NVidia, and Paint Shop Pro

I’m a luddite – I love Paint Shop Pro 9. Yeah, I use Illustrator and Photoshop and Inkscape and Gimp and all that goodness but, in a pinch, PSP9’s been my go-to quick and dirty image manipulator forever.

Then I got a fancy new laptop with a fancy new video card… and PSP9 wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t produce a window on launch, even though I could see it there in the task manager, running. And when I uninstalled and tried to reinstall, it hung for infinity on “registering modules.”

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