Getting a simple Squeezebox display [Archive] - Squeezebox : Community : Forums

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Martyn

2009-12-31, 11:54

I'm sure this must be a question with a simple answer, but it's been baffling me for a long time...

I rip to FLAC using dBpoweramp and like to access my music files through my Squeezebox via the Music Folder. However, the track titles show up as long file names. This is next to useless, because only the first half fits the display. For example:

Music Library > Music Folder > Pink Martini > Sympathique > Pink Martini-01-Armado Mio.flac

If I access the files through Artists or Albums, I don't have this problem. Instead I get:

Music Library > Albums > Sympatique > 1.Armado Mio

How can I make the track titles accessed via the Music Folder to look like the Albums versions?

Many thanks in advance for your help in resolving this irritating detail,

Martyn

garym

2009-12-31, 12:31

I know this is not likely the answer you want (so probably not helpful). But is there any reason you don't simply use well tagged files and then either the album, artist, genre, etc. method of browsing. The music folder approach is really rather clunky and doesn't take advantage of many of the useful library features of the software.

That said, the music folder approach will simply show however you've named the file. Obviously, your file name is "Pink Martini-01-Armado Mio.flac". You could use mp3tag to rename your files with a batch command to "01 Armando Mio.flac". You could also set up your naming command in dbpa to give you this format file name as well on new rips. Given that you already use an ARTIST/ALBUM/track directory format, it is not really necessary to have the artist/album name in the file name. Also, given your file names, you can easily use a batch function in mp3tag or dbpa to fill in your tag metadata from your directory structure and file names.

But again, making sure your tags are as you want them is a much cleaner approach.

Martyn

2009-12-31, 14:42

Hi, Gary. All answers are welcome!

I guess I don't really know what a well tagged file is - I think I'm simply using the default that dBpoweramp came with. I use the Music Folder because it gets me to a file quicker. I haven't built any playlists yet - I tend to navigate to an album and let it play. I don't navigate via Albums, because there are a lot more albums than music folders (plus I'd have to remember the album title). The Artist approach seems to be even worse, with a great many more artists to scroll through before I reach the one I want.

If I understand you correctly, I should do two things (as a minimum):

1. Use mp3tag to re-name my existing files as a batch process. Is there somewhere I can find a simple tutorital on how to do this?

2. Set dBpa to [track] [title] to eliminate this problem for future rips. I assume that dBpa will continue to create the appropriate folders as it rips (as it does now).

If there's a "cleaner approach" to all this that will make life easier in the future (assuming that I ever have the time to become more adept at this), how can I determine what this should be? Thanks, again,

Martyn

garym

2009-12-31, 15:05

I guess I don't really know what a well tagged file is - I think I'm simply using the default that dBpoweramp came with.

This is just a file with all the metadata you want. Most people are happy to have ARTIST, ALBUM, TRACK NO., TRACK NAME, GENRE, COMPILATION TAG (if a compilation). You can add a lot more, but those are the basics. I'm sure dbpa is adding those already.

I use the Music Folder because it gets me to a file quicker. I haven't built any playlists yet - I tend to navigate to an album and let it play. I don't navigate via Albums, because there are a lot more albums than music folders (plus I'd have to remember the album title). The Artist approach seems to be even worse, with a great many more artists to scroll through before I reach the one I want.

I don't use playlists much either. I'm talking about just picking artist and then typically within artist I look for the album. I can't see how scrolling through music folders would be any faster...in fact seems like it would take longer given less specific organization. I'm doing this currently with about 60,000+ tracks and I can quickly find everything I want. Is your library substantially larger than that? Even so, seems like the music folder approach is not optimum.

If I understand you correctly, I should do two things (as a minimum):

1. Use mp3tag to re-name my existing files as a batch process. Is there somewhere I can find a simple tutorital on how to do this?

2. Set dBpa to [track] [title] to eliminate this problem for future rips. I assume that dBpa will continue to create the appropriate folders as it rips (as it does now).

First, yes, in Dbpa, use [track] [title] to get the song file names to be just that.

Second, you probably want to retag to get to [track] [title] and mp3tag will do that for you (so can dbpa), but I think you should probably spend some time learning about tags, what tags you want, what organization you want for the files, etc. (for example, do you want your compilation albums to show up in separate directories or separate tracks under each artist...I have compilation albums ripped to: MUSIC/COMPILATIONS/ALBUM NAME/tracks) There is a mp3tag forum that will be helpful and there is documentation there too on using mp3tag. It has a little bit of a learning curve but is very powerful.

http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Main_Page
http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/BeginnersGuideToTagging
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/support.html

If there's a "cleaner approach" to all this that will make life easier in the future (assuming that I ever have the time to become more adept at this), how can I determine what this should be? Thanks, again,

Martyn

In my opinion, and many others on the forum, having good tags is the cleanest, easiest, most powerful approach to managing your music library. There's a lot of interaction between having securely ripped, well tagged, well organized files and successful use of squeezeboxes (or other software). Best to try and do it right up front.

Happy New Year!

Martyn

2009-12-31, 15:59

I'm way behind you - only about 4200 tracks so far (I haven't got to the classical CDs yet). Squeezecenter lists 1150 artists and 300 albums, but I have only 150 top level directories in My Music - thus I find it much easier to jump-and-scroll through my Music Folder than by Album or Artist. Maybe I'm missing something somewhere.

I hear you on the doing it right up front, it's just that life doesn't seem long enough to learn all this stuff. It's OK when you're twenty-something and again when you've retired, but in between there's twenty or thirty years of too-much-to-do-and-not-enough-time-to-do-it.

I haven't started on the classical yet, because that looks like being still more complicated. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to make the time.

Thanks again - I appreciate your help (and time),

Martyn

davep

2009-12-31, 18:11

I'm way behind you - only about 4200 tracks so far (I haven't got to the classical CDs yet). Squeezecenter lists 1150 artists and 300 albums, but I have only 150 top level directories in My Music - thus I find it much easier to jump-and-scroll through my Music Folder than by Album or Artist. Maybe I'm missing something somewhere.

Clearly something is messed up with the tags that you do have if you have 1150 artists for 300 albums! Your figure fo 150 folders suggests you really have 150 artists with 300 albums, so an average of 2 albums each - which seems reasonable. With correct tagging you'd have the 150 artists listed under 'Artist' when browsing, and then see each of the albums for a selected artist on the next level down. But as you say, this will take some work. However, if you don't do it you're essentially stuck with the long filenames you have now.

MP3Tag is free and, once you get stuck into it, pretty straightforward to use, so you might want to give it a try on a couple of albums and see if it works for you.

davep

Martyn

2009-12-31, 18:49

davep

2009-12-31, 19:35

There are various compilation albums and others where there are several performers (rather than a band name), but I suspect that the main reason for the increase is the inclusion of composers as "artists".

So far, I've learned how to re-name my files, only to have them listed as 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3, etc! I've since learned how to change the track numbers to 01, 02, etc. to eliminate this problem (with a few rogue exceptions). Next I'll try this performers/composers problem...

Yes, I too have had trouble with the Composer info getting in the way. In reality I do not need to use my SB to find out that Lennon and McCartney wrote A Day In The Life - which can then be listed three times, one under each composer and one for the band. Too much information. I now rigorously delete all composer info from my tags if put there by CDDB to make sure things are kept simple. Classical tagging is another whole country and here I can imagine that the Composer tag could be useful but I have very few Classical albums ripped so far and must admit that their tagging is not really done well. If I was to get into seriously ripping my Classical collection I would want to spend time designing a suitable tagging scheme. I recall that there are some threads on this here on the forum.

davep

Philip Meyer

2010-01-01, 00:53

>There are various compilation albums and others where there are several
>performers (rather than a band name), but I suspect that the main reason
>for the increase is the inclusion of composers as "artists".
If you rip all songs on an album into the same folder, and all songs have the same album tag, then your compilation albums should be automatically detected as compilations. If you set the "My Music" setting "Group compilation albums together", the artists that only appear on compilation albums won't appear in the Browse Artists list.

If your ripper is setting an album artist tag for mp3 files, you may find your library looks better for you if you choose the option "Treat TPE2 MP3 tag as Album Artist".

garym

2010-01-01, 07:25

Yes, I think you're life will be easier with compilations grouped together. Use mp3tag to assign a "1" to the tag field COMPILATION on these albums, and as mentioned, set SB to group compilations together in its settings. This said, if your 150 folders are something other than artist (maybe your folders are styles of music). If this is the case, make sure you GENRE tag is what you want, and you can also browse music in SB using genre. Classical gets much more complicated. The last few posts of this thread have some great info on classical tagging: See

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?p=500656&highlight=classical+tag#post500656

Martyn

2010-01-01, 13:56

I've now learned how to add and populate a "composer" field to mp3tag's screen. I suppose my next step is to clear all those entries in order to remove them from my SB's "Artists" list and make it more manageable. I'm somewhat reluctant to do this, because it seems like I'll be deleting useful information - is there another way of avoiding composers showing in "Artists"?

Philip, "Group compilation albums together" was already set. How do I check whether dBpoweramp is setting an album artist tag for mp3 files? (I've set "Treat TPE2 MP3 tag as Album Artist" anyway).

Gary, I started off with EAC and then changed to dBpa. These defaulted to a simple folder structure of My Music/Artist/Album which has worked quite well so far (thankfully, in this instance "Artist" doesn't include composers). What's the purpose of setting Compilations to "1" im mp3tag?

I haven't paid much attention to "Genre" so far, because the metadata "look-ups" seem to be all over the map - I need a more reliable taxonomy and then the presence of mind to pick the right one!

Thanks for the classical links - they will be very useful when the time comes.

Philip Meyer

2010-01-01, 16:21

>How do I check whether dBpoweramp is setting an album artist tag for mp3 files?
>(I've set "Treat TPE2 MP3 tag as Album Artist" anyway).
>
I think dBpowerAmp shows a list of tags that it will set in the lower-centre panel when ripping. I think there's an option in the settings somewhere to enable/disable the writing of the "Album Artist", but I don't rip with dBPowerAmp myself, so I can't remember specifics.

Of course, it's not really Album Artist that it's writing to for mp3 tags (it writes to TPE2, which is Band/Orchestra).

You can look at your rips in Mp3Tag (look in Extended Tags to get a list of all tags that have been set). Mp3Tag will call list a TPE2 frame as a "BAND" tag.

what_to_buy

2010-01-15, 14:58