Album / Track Lookup Solution

[atlanticom]

tldr; replace your existing c:\Program FIles (x86)\Acoustica Spin It Again\acuutils.dll file with this alternate version (exactly the same, but url of musicbrainz lookup has been changed) and lookups will start working again! File locatated at: http://siamb.jhbsa.com/acuutils.dll (or as a signed installer package for ease of download/installation at: http://siamb.jhbsa.com/SIA-Lookup-Patch.exe )

I purchased Spin It Again back in 2008 to convert my vinyl LP collection to mp3. It did it's job and I was happy. I recently came into possession of another large set of albums and decided to add them to my digital collection. After dusting off and reinstalling Spin It Again, I realized (as others have noted in the forum) that album/track lookups returned no results. Being a software developer, I decided to look into the problem and see if I could do anything about it. It turns out that I could... and I did.

The root of the problem is that musicbrainz.org changed their database lookup api to a new version (v2) then deprecated and finally disabled their original api (v1). Spin It Again only knows how to make lookup requests to the old version 1 endpoint using the old protocol, and only knows how to consume responses compatible with the version 1 format.

The solution strategy... find a way to convert the v1 requests to v2 format, submit the v2 request to musicbrainz, receive the v2 response and convert it to a compatible v1 response, send the response back to Spin It Again for processing as usual. All of this is easy enough to figure out and do with a proxy web service. The challenge was 'how to get Spin It Again to ask the proxy for album info instead of musicbrainz directly. Some quick digging with a hex editor discovered the musicbrainz.org url hard coded in the acuutils.dll file. I then edited the file to replace the musicbrainz.org domain with the domain of my proxy script siamb.jhbsa.com and voila! Spin It Again can ask the proxy using v1 commands, and the proxy asks musicbrainz using v2 commands, and then transforms the results before sending them back to Spin It Again.

I'm currently using this solution with great success. I've occasionally discovered quirks in the response conversions and I've been tweaking the proxy to accommodate them. I plan to leave the proxy operational for the community to use. Feel free to use (but not abuse) the service.

Blessings to all. Be safe.

[Acoustica Eric]

I get an error when trying to run sia after replacing the dll with this one.

[atlanticom]

Hmmm. I installed my originally downloaded version of SIA v2.1 b39. Perhaps the final SIA download is a new version with changes to that library.

I'll download and install the currently offered SIA package and see if I receive the same error (as soon as Aerosmith finishes recording

Thanks for letting me know.

[atlanticom]

That was it. The final release of SIA was v2.5 b46 which had changes to that library since my originally downloaded version.

I made the change to the final release of the library and tested it with SIA v2.5 b46. Everything looks good here. Please try downloading the patched library again and let me know if you still experience any problems.

Have a great day!

[Acoustica Eric]

That worked, very impressive!
Thanks for sharing this with the community.

[Acoustica Eric]

I created a couple installers for this fix.
64 bit Windows
ftp://ftp.acoustica.com/AC-Software/Spi ... ch_X64.exe
32 Bit Windows
ftp://ftp.acoustica.com/AC-Software/Spi ... ch_X86.exe

[atlanticom]

Eric,

Great news & thanks for evaluating the patch and creating the installers!

FYI: I just reinstalled using the patch installer you created and had to coerce/force Edge and Windows 10 to allow me to keep and install the file because the installer is unsigned. Are you able to create a signed installer (so Windows will better 'trust' the installer.) If you are unable, would you mind if I created one? If I do it, it would obviously be signed using my developer certificate and not acoustica's, but hey... that's better than fighting the browser with an unsigned copy.

[Y.I. Oughta]

Thanks so much for this!!