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[MBlue72]

Hello:

I am evaluating Media Center vs. dBpoweramp and others. So far, I am pretty impressed with MC 12 but am having a problem getting cover art. All of my CDs are classical music, which I realize is a pretty small minority these days.

I think I have set everything correctly, including "download cover art from internet after rip." But I am simply not getting any cover art to appear. I tested my settings and procedures by ripping one of my wife's Pop CDs (Norah Jones) and everything worked fine -- I was given several cover art options to choose from at various sizes. I have also tried manually downloading from the internet -- no success.

Further information: When I rip using dBpoweramp -- no problem. I get cover art quickly and accurately. Even Windows Media Player shows the correct album cover when I play the CDs.

Is this simply a weakness of MC for classical music CDs? I would greatly appreciate any advice or experiences from any classical music lovers out there (or anyone else).

Thanks,

Dave

[)p(]

Yes I also ripped with dbpoweramp because much more of my classical cd's are recognised with it.

peter

[Mr ChriZ]

Submit the cover art back to JRiver database and as a result JRiver database will improve for the next person.

[)p(]

Submit the cover art back to JRiver database and as a result JRiver database will improve for the next person.

I will when I am ready cleaning it up.

still I wonder if it would not be better for mc to use one of the large meta data services for music and movies instead of creating their own db and rely on their users.

peter

[Frobozz]

Cover art for classical CDs is a problem for Media Center.  The cover art database works well for rock and pop music but not so well for classical music.  The cover art lookup algorithm in Media Center relies on the album title and artist and possibly some other tags (I don't know the details).  That works for rock albums like "Pink Floyd: Dark Side Of The Moon" because the artist and title are well defined and everyone uses pretty much the same artist and album tags.  No so for classical music.  There is no consistency in how different people tag the artist and album for classical music.  Doing cover lookups based on artist and album is going to give poor results.

I'm hopeful that the next version of Media Center will have a system that better handles cover art for classical music.

I end up ripping many of my classical CDs using dBpoweramp so I can get cover art from AMG.  But the cover art from AMG is small and of low quality.  I prefer cover art that is 500x500.  So next I look on Amazon and Buy.com for the album and hope they have good cover art.  Sometimes I'll do a Google image search.  Last resort is I scan it in myself, but I prefer to avoid that because it is time consuming.  If I'm going to scan it myself I'm going to take the time to do it right, make sure the scan is clean, the colors are correct, moire artifacts cleaned up, etc.

[Alex B]

MC's online cover art database uses the "Album Artist (auto)" and "Album" fied values as identifiers.

With typical pop music that works pretty well, but as said, classical is a different beast.

Here's a good example. I just ripped this 3-disc album:


Amazon link

and noticed that the Artist and Album tags that I got from YADB are varied:

Disc 1
Album Artist (auto):
(Multiple Artists)  - someone has submitted the following artists: Arie (4 tracks), Chor (1 track), Choral (5 tracks) and Rezitativ (18 tracks)
Album:
Herbert Von Karajan / Matthäus-Passion (J. S. Bach) Disc 1

Disc 2
Album Artist (auto):
Johann Sebastian Bach
Album:
Matthäus-Passion (CD 2) - Berliner Philharmoniker - Herbert Von Karajan

Disc 3
Album Artist (auto):
Johann Sebastian Bach
Album:
Matthäus-Passion (Herbert Von Karajan - Berliner Philarmoniker) Disc 3 of 3


I prefer to have the discs as a single album and use the disc number field so I tagged all discs as:
Album Artist (auto):
Bach
Album:
Matthäus-Passion BWV 244 (Karajan)


Here are some possible variations:

J.S. Bach
Matthäus-Passion BWV 244 (Karajan/Berlin Philharmoniker)

Bach - Karajan / Berlin Philharmoniker
Matthäus-Passion

Johan Sebastian Bach
Matthäus-Passion BWV 244 (Herbert von Karajan)

Bach/Karajan/BPO
Matthäus-Passion BWV 244

Herbert von Karajan & Berlin Philharmoniker
J.S. Bach: Matthäus-Passion

Bach
St. Matthew Passion (Karajan)

J. S. Bach
St. Matthew Passion BWV 244 (Karajan/BPO)

Bach (Karajan & Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra)
St. Matthew Passion

Johan Sebastian Bach
St. Matthew Passion BWV 244 (Herbert von Karajan and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra)

Bach/Karajan/BPO
St. Matthew Passion BWV 244

Herbert von Karajan - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
J.S. Bach - St. Matthew Passion

And so on...  Add the disc numbers in the album names in few a different ways and you get a huge number of quite possible variations.

[Alex B]

I think the only possible solution would be to automatically include an unique CD identifier in the file data when CDs are ripped with MC. This should be a separate library field and also a physical file tag when possible. I assume MC already creates an identifier code for the online CD database.

This CD identifier would be included in the cover art submissions and it would be used as an additional search term during lookups. The cover art lookup tool would then return the results of both searches.

In addition, this CD identifier field could be used with a "rerip" feature.

[MBlue72]

Thanks to all of you for your suggestions and all the information you've provided. It really helps.

I am getting more and more comfortable with MC compared to any of the other programs currently available. In a head-to-head competition with dBpoweramp, MC is quite a bit in the lead (although dBpa does seem like an excellent program too, with several advantages as well). Forcing a classical music collection to fit into existing applications seems like the proverbial "square peg into a round hole" -- but I think you all discovered that a while ago.

My situation is that I now have a home-made database using Microsoft Access. I have toiled at it for quite a while still but only have about 25% of my collection cataloged. I recently decided to rip my collection onto my 1T hard drive on a new computer. I bought a SqueezeBox system for my wife 1-1/2 years ago and we've been very happy with it. I will be asking for a new Squeezebox for myself for this holiday season. In preparation for that I began to research ripping software -- that's how I found JRiver. Suddenly, the light bulb flickered for a while, then went on. Could I obviate my entire Access-based database with a MC-centric approach? Clearly, there is a great deal of information generated during the ripping process that could be the backbone of my new database. Some bad data is generated too, but it seems manageable.

So now I have ripped a small (15 CD) sample database using the trial versions of MC 12 and dBpoweramp. I am learning a lot for sure. When I started I didn't know the difference between a FLAC and a FLUNK (I have chosen the former BTW).

Anyway, back to the original topic (can you hijack your own thread?) ... I have fooled around a bit with finding cover art from sites such as Amazon and Arkiv. It obviously works but takes time and yields uneven results. I also worry about finding cover art from the older CDs I purchased in the 80's. So, I am considering scanning the CD booklet material as I go, making it part of the library-building process. I am even considering scanning useful booklet pages for track and recording information too. I haven't gotten into MC 12's organizational capabilities for image files yet, but it seems a natural and should work out well.

Anyway, thanks very much for your help.

Dave

[JimH]

Apologies for the translated page, but Musibit is a hardware/software solution dedicated to classical music.  They use MC.

I believe they are located in Madrid, but I think you'll see them all over the world soon.

[)p(]

My situation is that I now have a home-made database using Microsoft Access. I have toiled at it for quite a while still but only have about 25% of my collection cataloged. I recently decided to rip my collection onto my 1T hard drive on a new computer. I bought a SqueezeBox system for my wife 1-1/2 years ago and we've been very happy with it. I will be asking for a new Squeezebox for myself for this holiday season. In preparation for that I began to research ripping software -- that's how I found JRiver. Suddenly, the light bulb flickered for a while, then went on. Could I obviate my entire Access-based database with a MC-centric approach? Clearly, there is a great deal of information generated during the ripping process that could be the backbone of my new database. Some bad data is generated too, but it seems manageable.

Nothing comes even close to mc in regards to organizing a large classical library. I think your on the right track 

Take a look at some of the import/export features and plugins...good change you might be able to import your access data in mc.

You can take advantage of the custom fields you make in mc's db in squeezecenter with the custom scan and custom browse plugins. With Craig's mc2slim app you can even use mc to control your sb's with mc. I am actually trying out a third route in which I use Virtual Audio Cable ( http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.html ) to send the output from different zones from mc directly to different sb's with the sb's wavinput plugin.

peter

[dgilgonzalez]

As JimH comments, Musibit is a Spanish company that is distributing a Music Server based in MC, in some countries in Europe. This is the English web page:

http://www.musibit.com/index_eng.html

I work in the technical department, and I can say you that one of the most important problem we had was the metadata with classical music, because, as Alex B said, in classical music there are much more information that in Pop or Rock music. For this reason, we are creating a data base with around 20.000 classical music CDs, to guarantee to our customer that any classical music CD they could try to ripping will be done perfectly, with all the information they would need.

MBlue72, don't hesitate contact us.

Daniel

[)p(]

For this reason, we are creating a data base with around 20.000 classical music CDs, to guarantee to our customer that any classical music CD they could try to ripping will be done perfectly, with all the information they would need.

Maybe j. river should contact you to integrate it with their db 

peter