MusicBrainz

There’s a plugin for MusicBrainz Picard that works with tango.info, which has previously been discussed. Support for tango releases on MusicBrainz is notoriously spotty, since its focus lies mainly on English-language music released by major record labels in the Anglosphere. Hence, relying on MB tag data is not a viable option for mass tagging.

Tango-dj.at

‘El Tango - Pasion y Emoción’ is a good example. The tango.info listing makes a few critical mistakes, so another source is needed. Probably the most complete and accurate information is provided by tango-dj.at.

This script that takes any tango-dj.at URL as input and spits out formatted text that can be pasted into puddletag or MP3Tag:
scrape-tango-dj-at.py

The pattern, which of course can be modified: %title%~%artist%~%album%~%genre%~%year%~%composer%~%lyricist%~%vocal%
Best to use only a single album at a time.

Tango.info

Before writing the plugin for Picard, I had been using a hacked-together snippet of code for scraping tango.info. It is available here: tinfo.py.

Since there wasn't a working one, I wrote a small plugin for picard that automatically fetches album and track information from tango.info.

Just put it into your plugin directory, and if your tracks have barcode tags, it will do all the magic for you. It currently sets genre, date and vocal(singer/s) metadata, but it can be easily adapted for other fields.

The code is here, including usage instructions.

Update: The plugin has been merged into picard-plugins, which means you should be able to download it directly from the picard website. It should be included in the next release of picard, which will be version 1.4.0.

The Indepentent of all papers managed to publish a heartfelt obituary for the magnificent Juan Carlos Cáceres. You should read it, if only for this snippet:

Fleeing the military dictatorship, he travelled via Spain to Paris, arriving, by chance but to his delight, in May 1968.

Imagine Phil Davison sitting there, smirking and altogether being very content with himself for producing this one great sentence.

Onto the music; very refreshing to hear nuevo without the ubiquitous presence of the bandoneón, and the rhythms… not really Candombe; something very similar, simple and moving.

Two pieces for late-night listening: Toca Tango and the great Tango Negro

Such an upbeat tune, sure to put a smile on anyone's face.

Listen to it here. There is also this version which is played more often.