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Author Topic: Copy/Paste New Track Titles  (Read 695 times)

Michael S.

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Copy/Paste New Track Titles
« on: June 29, 2024, 02:19:31 pm »

I mostly use dBpoweramp for CD ripping.  For older rips in Media Center that are missing cover art, sometimes I load the CD in dBpoweramp and copy and paste the cover art to Media Center.  This usually works well (sometimes also find missing cover art in Google images or Amazon within Media Center).

In some cases, the old rips could use better track titles and other Metadata - is there a way to copy and paste track titles and other Metadata from dBpoweramp to Media Center after loading the CD in DB?  Not finding any way yet.
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HPBEME

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Re: Copy/Paste New Track Titles
« Reply #1 on: June 29, 2024, 08:19:59 pm »

To update all of an album's tracks in one shot, right-click an album cover and choose Library Tools/Lookup Track Info from Online Database.  If you only want to update a specific track or tracks, perform the exact same operation on each track, or several tracks, as needed.  More info here: https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/YADB

Repeating the process is easy - once you've invoked the command, it rises to the top of the menu of recently used commands (see: Options/Tree in View/Right-Click Recent Command Count).

A couple caveats however:
- For greatest hits/compilation CDs, lookup returns track info for the actual albums (not the compilation CD itself) and assigned those album names and release years.
- While you can undo the updated info (album name, track name, year, etc.) tags for Date Tagged and Date Modified are also updated and will NOT revert with the undo command.
   (That may not matter to you, but figured you should know in the event that it does)

That said, this compilation lookup behavior actually accomplishes what I've wanted to do for years with my compilation CDs (capture each tracks actual release year and from which original album) without having to search each track's information manually. This is particularly useful for greatest hits albums with all tracks from the 60s or 70s for example, but the compilation CD itself was released in the 2000's. Having that CD mixed in with CDs actually released in the 2000s has always bothered me.  In addition, MC automatically creates an "average" release year more albums containing multiple years for the date. 

I still need to think about the exact workflow and how to automate the process while keeping existing tags intact to the maximum extent possible, but answering your question has been serendipitous.
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Michael S.

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Re: Copy/Paste New Track Titles
« Reply #2 on: July 04, 2024, 03:36:13 pm »

Thanks, for whatever reason the YADB lookup never works very well and finds little to nothing for already ripped disks.  It's strange because when Media Center is used to rip CD's, it always find a lot of Metadata that you can choose from.  It's puzzling why the CD is needed to find plentiful Metadata but maybe it has additional information that is not encoded in the rip.
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HPBEME

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Re: Copy/Paste New Track Titles
« Reply #3 on: July 04, 2024, 04:53:50 pm »

Though I provided a way to look up metadata using JRiver's online database, I have to admit I've never made use of it in actual practice. I agree that when you use MC to rip (which is all I ever use myself) it always finds the correct track info (for me at least), including for some pretty obscure artists in my collection.

When I experimented with the online lookup feature prior to my previous reply, I noticed only one choice for album metadata is provided. This differs from when you initially rip a CD, when there are almost always multiple album metadata options you can pick from. Maybe this feature just needs to be retooled a bit to perform like it does on an initial rip?  Perhaps the developers could provide clarity on that question?

In any event, if metadata from the DB-Poweramp rip is embedded in the music files (which I presume it would be), and you import those tracks/files into MC, then running the Update Library from Tags tool on those files will update MC's library with the "better" track titles from the DB-Poweramp rip. Have you not tried that? If not, right-click on an album you want to update, and choose Library Tools/Update Library (From Tags) from the context menu.

To be clear, the MC Library is a database, not the actual music files themselves. Consequently, MC's library/database can contain different info from the embedded tags themselves. This is why MC includes two tools that allows the user to write the tag information in each direction.
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kr4

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Re: Copy/Paste New Track Titles
« Reply #4 on: July 04, 2024, 05:07:09 pm »

FWIW, I've always gotten "No information was found for these files" since I've been a user of MC.  Don't try any more.
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Kal Rubinson
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HPBEME

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Re: Copy/Paste New Track Titles
« Reply #5 on: July 04, 2024, 11:37:48 pm »

FWIW, I've always gotten "No information was found for these files" since I've been a user of MC.  Don't try any more.
I guess I must've just gotten lucky in my experimenting then.  The YADB look up I did on 4 different albums returned valid results for each.  I've since tried it on a couple more for more obscure artists, and got the dreaded no information found dialog. 

It's puzzling why the CD is needed to find plentiful Metadata but maybe it has additional information that is not encoded in the rip.
Maybe that is exactly where the issue lies - that sounds like an excellent guest to me.
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EnglishTiger

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Re: Copy/Paste New Track Titles
« Reply #6 on: July 05, 2024, 04:24:27 am »

It's puzzling why the CD is needed to find plentiful Metadata but maybe it has additional information that is not encoded in the rip.

When using DBPowerAmp to rip discs what gets copied to the "Ripped Files" is dependant on if the user has told DBPA to copy that Metadata to the relevant tag if and when it is available.

Because DBPA does not expose every Tag/Field in the user interface sometimes you have to rip a CD that you want that extra/better metadata for to a different folder, import it into MC and then use MC's Cut nd Paste Options to transfer the data from one copy of the Album to the other; and then remove the copy you no longer need. P.S this is a far quicker method than using Cut nd Paste to transfer Metadata from the DBPA UI to the MC Tag Window
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Matt

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Re: Copy/Paste New Track Titles
« Reply #7 on: July 05, 2024, 03:03:23 pm »

FWIW, I've always gotten "No information was found for these files" since I've been a user of MC.  Don't try any more.

The server is not working right today.  We'll look at it soon.  Thanks.
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Matt Ashland, JRiver Media Center

bob

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Re: Copy/Paste New Track Titles
« Reply #8 on: July 08, 2024, 12:47:28 pm »

The server is not working right today.  We'll look at it soon.  Thanks.
That's not the case. It works fine for MC30 and above.
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