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[Arcadian]

I've recently been buying and ripping Pure Audio Blu-Rays and i'm trying to find the best approach for library management of Dolby Atmos .thd tracks. In the past i've focused on converting DTS-MA and regular Dolby TrueHD surround files to multichannel FLAC which obviously makes them fully supported for tagging in MC and playable in anything and everything.

Great. With TrueHD Atmos however, you have this height metadata to deal with. Unless i'm mistaken, converting these to FLAC strips this away leaving standard 7.1 surround.

I thought I had found the answer after using MKVToolNix to put the .thd Atmos tracks into Matroska MKA files. MP3Tag fully supports tagging MKAs, the tags read beautifully in VLC and I find good playback support in many media players including PLEX, JRiver and VLC and such.

My parade was thoroughly rained on though when to my shock and horror my favourite God-tier media player / library management software Media Center won't read all the MKA tags and won't write any library metadata back to the files.

MC reads some tags like Artist, Genre, Track # and even displays Comments added using MP3Tag as 'Description' if I look under Advanced in the MC tagging side panel.

So my questions are:

1. Why only partial reading / writing of MKA tag data by MC?
2. Are there any plans for the devs to add full support for MKA metadata in MC? Might that be a nice addition now that Atmos ripping is a thing?
3. Or is there a better more 'taggable' container I should use for my Atmos .thd files that will allow full metadata management?
4. Is there a workaround for MKA tagging? I've read that Matroska uses XML I think? No idea how to make custom XML edits though or if that improves things where MC is concerned.

I know there are people on these forums who are much smarter than me with this stuff, any expert advice would be greatly appreciated! Or even just general thoughts on the whole Atmos music thing. It's getting bigger and bigger these days... What's the best way to manage it?

[JimH]

Have you tried makeMKV?  MC30 can rip using it.

[Arcadian]

Sorry i'm not sure what you're suggesting. I currently use MakeMKV to decrypt / backup the disc then switch to DVD-AE to extract the Atmos thd files from that. I'm aware that MC (and other apps) integrate with MakeMKV to piggyback off it's decryption but how would that give me an extraction format or container that's fully taggable in MC?

[Arcadian]

No better alternatives I suppose? I hope the devs will bring in full MKA tag support in future or come up with some other way to manage Dolby Atmos tracks with metadata that doesn't just live and die in the library. In case it's helpful to anyone, here's how i've worked around this for now using MC's features.  My primary goal was to have the Atmos track metadata stored in such a way that I wasn't retagging everything if I lost my MC library. The solution i'm using is Sidecar files for only MKAs and an album art jpg in the album folder named the same as the album with the setting: Tools > Options > File Location > Cover Art > Audio Mode: 'In the same folder as the file'.

With these changes, I can do a full re-import of my files and automatically build the library back retaining MKA metadata.