OIDUA

About

Oidua is an audiofile metadata lister for directory trees. Here are two examples of how the output may look.

Album/Artist                           | Files |    Size | Length | Type | Quality
==================================================================================
Aavikko                                |       |         |        |      |
   2000 - Multi Muysic                 |    12 |  42.0Mb |  35:33 |  Ogg | -q6
Beaver                                 |       |         |        |      |
   1998 - The Difference Engine        |    10 |  57.3Mb |  43:37 |  MP3 | -r3mix
   1999 - Lodge                        |     5 |  39.9Mb |  28:16 |  MP3 | -r3mix
   2000 - Mobile                       |     8 |  63.1Mb |  42:45 |  MP3 | -r3mix
Cathedral                              |       |         |        |      |
   1993 - The Ethereal Mirror          |    10 |  86.3Mb |  54:33 |  MP3 | -aps
   1996 - Supernatural Birth Machine   |    11 |   411Mb |  57:57 | FLAC | Lossless

Album/Artist                                  Fil  Size  Type   Bitrate(s)
==========================================================================
Music
  Entombed
    1993 - Hollowman                            6  27.5   MPC   VBR
    1993 - Out of Hand                          3  13.8   MPC   VBR
    1998 - Same Difference                     13  40.0   MP3   128
  Spiritual Beggars
    1994 - Spiritual Beggars                    6  34.4   MP3   160
    1996 - Another Way to Shine                 9  52.6   MP3   128, 160, 192
  Ulver
    1999 - Themes From William Blake's The Mar 13  70.7   MP3   160, VBR
    1999 - Themes From William Blake's The Mar  6  68.1   MP3   VBR

What information and how it is presented is easily customizable. The examples above were configured for the human eye, but it's just as easy to make it a comma separated list or XML or anything you like.

The original goal was to make a replacement for the no longer maintained Audiolist. Since then Oidua has grown into a complete superset of Audiolist's functionality and it can in fact emulate Audiolist (with the exception that it recognizes more file formats). See the documentation section for details of Oiduas capabilities.

Windows users of the GUI persuasion should try out the graphical front-end Guidua in the download section. Guidua is developed alongside Oidua by Brandon West. Please contact us if you want to make a GUI for your platform.

Status

The latest release of Oidua is 0.16.1. The latest Guidua is 0.16. Both are considered stable.

The site is up again after some downtime. We're sorry for the inconvenience. We hope to handle things more gracefully next time.

There has been no development of Oidua for some time now, though it isn't entirely dead. We've been throwing around a few ideas and Sylvester said he felt like doing some actual coding. We'll see what the future has in store.

Try out our chocolate stylesheet from the bottom of this page.

Don't hesitate to write us. Be it feature requests, problems, comments or anything.

Download

Oidua is free software released under the GNU/GPL 2. I don't know about the IP issues of Guidua, but I guess the binary is in the public domain.

Disclaimer: Use at your own risk. Please file bug reports and/or fixes.

oidua-0.16.1.python.tar.gz (requires Python 2.2)
oidua-0.16.1.win32.zip (requires Microsoft Windows)
setup_guidua_0.16.exe, a win32 GUI by Brandon West. (requires Oidua 0.16.x and Microsoft Windows)
All Oidua releases

Changes from 0.16 to 0.16.1 (2003-08-25)

fixed the multiple basedirs and --ignore-case bug
fixed recognition of --indent and --ignore-case long options
fixed oidua to actually use the --ignore-bad option
fixed "bad files" logic for --debug
fixed case insensitive sorting of wildcard expansions
fixed the broken unescaping of escaped brackets in the format string
documented the --merge option
improved error handling in the conf module
all files now refer to COPYING instead of including a long legal text of their own

Changes from 0.15.1 to 0.16 (2003-08-15)

added customizable output. obsoleting --preset and --width
added audiodir module (brand new)
added conf module (abstracted from oidua.py)
added --merge option to merge output of (partially) identical directories
added --strip option to strip empty directories from output trees
added --ignore-bad option to not list audiotype failures
added support for mp3 spacer files
added support for id3-tags in flac-files, thanks to Nathan Owen
fixed directory duplication in output. they are never listed twice
fixed listing of root directories as nameless
fixed a bug in the mp3 profile dectection
fixed a compatibility issue with python 2.1.3, thanks to Ford Prefect
removed -g/--global-sort option in favour of --merge
removed -p/--preset option. use --output instead
removed -W/--width option. use --output instead
changed the magic line to look for python in the entire path
better progress indication
more error checking in options parser
major code rewrites

There is also a complete ChangeLog.

Known problems

There seems to be a Unicode problem. Contact us if you get strange characters in your output.

Documentation

General

Oidua is a command line tool. Look at its usage here.

The supported file formats are MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC and MusePack.

Directory merging with --merge

Using the --merge option basedirs with identical names are merged. This Means that all their subdirs are considered being subdirs of a single directory, and therefore sorted and displayed together. If there are duplicate names among the subdirs then those are also merged.

Metadata

Oidua can gather a bunch of different metadata about it's operation.

The -D/--date option records the date and time of its invocation.

The -S/--stats option outputs some general statistics about it's input.

The -t/--time option clocks the operation and outputs how long (real time) it took to process all the directories. Note that this is affected by disc cache and general CPU load.

The -V/--version outputs the versions of oidua and the audiotype module.

Profiles

Profiles are approximations of encoder settings used for a given file. The following profiles are recognized:

LAME MP3:: -r3mix, -aps, -ape, -api, -apfs, -apfe
MPC:: NoProfile, Unstable, Unspec., BelowTel., Telephone, Thumb, Radio, Standard, Xtreme, Insane, Braindead, AbvBrnded
Ogg:: Xiph oggenc 1.0 -q1 through -q10 and GT3 -q5 through -q10
FLAC:: None

Customizable output format

The output format is defined by the format string which is specified with the --ouput option. The same string is output with its fields evaluated for each audio directory. Anything enclosed in brackets in the string is considered a field. A field must have the following syntax:

	[TAG]
	[TAG,WIDTH]
	[TAG,WIDTH,SUFFIX]
	[TAG,,SUFFIX]

TAG is any of the following characters:

	a	list of bitrates in Audiolist compatible format
	b	bitrate with suffix (i.e. 192k)
	B	bitrate in bps
	d	depth; distance from respective basedir
	f	number of audio files (including spacers)
	l	length in minutes and seconds
	L	length in seconds
	m	time of last change
	M	time of last change in seconds since the epoch
	n	directory name (indented)
	N	directory name
	p	profile
	P	full path
	q	quality
	s	size with suffix (i.e. 65.4M)
	S	size in bytes
	t	file type
	T	bitrate type character (see below)

The bitrate type field outputs one of the following characters:

	~	mixed files
	C	constant bitrate
	L	lossless compression
	V	variable bitrate

WIDTH defines the exact width of the field. The output is cropped to this width if needed. Negative values will give left aligned output. Cropping is always done on the right.

SUFFIX lets you specify a unit to be concatenated to all non-empty data.

Other interpreted sequences are:

	\[	[
	\]	]
	\n	new line
	\t	tab character

Unescaped brackets are forbidden unless they define a field.

Note: If you have any whitespace (or anything else your OS considers a special character) in your output string you must put it inside quotes or otherwise it will not get parsed right.