MetaX and tagChimp

Last week I wrote a review on Handbrake and MetaX which lightly touched on tagChimp. This week I am going to review a nice web based service that MetaX has been tightly integrated with. tagChimp.

If you like me have a lot of movies in your iTunes library, you will like this web based service that is community driven. MetaX used to only search Amazon, but now has the ability to search tagChimp. Before this integration you were subject to low quality cover art and you had to settle for less than perfect tag data (unless you added the missing information from Amazon). Now however when you perform a search you get high quality artwork (generally a max height of 600px) and accurate tag data. Now if you do not find the movie you are tagging in tagChimp’s database, not to worry. When you click on Write in MetaX it will add the data to tagChimp (Only if you have not disabled sharing with tagChimp in MetaX’s preferences). At this time tagChimp is relatively new so not all movies have the chapter data associated with them. Tim is still hard at work making improvments to the site every day. Recently he made it so that if the movie you are editing does not have chapters or the chapters are named like Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc. it will not add the movie to the tagChimp database. This was done to ensure that the tagChimp data was the highest quality possible.

The main new feature I like in MetaX is in the chapter editing section. Before you could not use the slider to always get an accurate time for the chapter. It would jump between 1:22 -> 1:27 etc. This did not always happen and it depended on the length of the chapter you were editing. Now though Rodney was nice enough to give up left and right arrows in the UI that would nudge the value by :01 so that we can have accurate times.

Over the last few weeks I have seen drastic improvements to tagChimp as well as MetaX. The developers have even more features planned for the near future. Today I noticed a new feature of tagChimp that I find to be quite cool. Although I don’t own an iPhone they have created the ability for you to export your iTunes library to an xml file and upload it to tagChimp. You might be asking yourself: “Why would I want to upload my movie data to tagChimp?” Well if you are anything like me you cannot remember every movie that you own at home. This service allows you to login to the tagChimp website and check your library to see if you already have the movie at home.

While tagChimp still has some issues they are working hard to iron them out. Things such as duplicate movies in the database. They are working on a method to stop from having duplicates and are weeding through all of the data to ensure the highest quality data is retained.

Features that I would love to see in future revisions of tagChimp would include the following:

Advanced User Privileges
By this I mean a system that would allow a user that has proven to submit only the highest quality tag data would have the ability to delete duplicates, lock tags, etc. This could be achieved through the admin’s locking the users tags. For instance if I have submitted 50 movies that the admins have locked (meaning high quality data which can no longer be edited) then the site would give me the advanced user features.
More Ajax in the UI
More User Statistics
User Statistics Accessable via Developers API
Cleaner Design on some of the pages (Community, My Account)
Single Sign-On for the site and the forums (I hate having to sign-in for each)

The more people who join the community the better the data that tagChimp provides will be. I hope that more tagging applications integrate the tagChimp Developer API so that we can get windows users in the community. Currently I am only aware of MetaX which supports tagChimp. However I have noticed that the tag count seems to be increasing at a rapid rate over-night.

If you have not already done so I highly suggest that you upgrade to the latest version of MetaX. If you do not like the tagChimp integration Rodney has given you the option to turn it off in the preferences.

Development, Entertainment, Internet, Mac, Raves, Reviews, Software, Websites.

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