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[JamieShanks]

Hi everyone,

I'm having a 'upgrade and tidy up the library weekend', and got such a helpful response to my other question, I thought I'd try again

This is a general appeal for advice - does anyone have any experience on managing a library that contains both FLAC and mp3 copies of the same music?

At the moment my set up is that MC only sees mp3 files.  I also have FLAC files elsewhere on the disk, in a folder MC doesn't know about, that are same CDs as the mp3 files. 

I've been wondering about "upgrading" MC from mp3 to FLAC for a while, but have been putting it off as it seems like this is a major retagging job.  The mp3 files tags are set how I want them - tidied up (classical music, so the automatic tagging services are generally a mess) and with a couple of custom fields set.

The FLAC files are not tagged at all, beyond the Artist-Album-Track info that EAC imports.

Has anyone been in this situation and have any suggestions on how to proceed?

It seems like I could:

(a) retag the FLAC files as I want them, and hope never to have to do this again, but this would be such a big job I probably just wouldn't.

(b) use some external tag editor to export all the tag info into a database and reimport it.  If so, does anyone know which is best?  As far as I can see, Mp3tag only does mp3s, and won't re-tag FLACs.  It seems like the problem here is the FLAC files - there are far fewer tools for these than mp3.

(c) do something terribly clever inside MC that I don't know about - tell it 'hey, see this album, its the same album as this one, so copy X to Y please'.  I've found the (very useful) tag editor on the right-click menu, but this seems only to copy tags around within the same file.  Or am I using this wrong?  Is there a way to do this simply?  Or to have both sets of files side-by-side and tell MC they are duplicates of the same album somehow?

I'm comfortable editing text files by hand - I've had to do the iTunes manual edit after moving music to a new hard drive, so am happy with the idea of a manual edit of the MC database file doing a search and replace of ".mp3" to ".flac" - if this is safe and going to work.

Thanks for any suggestions people can make,

Cheers
Jamie

[JimH]

(b) use some external tag editor to export all the tag info into a database and reimport it. 

MC's library is such a database.  You can use the Library tools to move information from the library to the tag and vice versa.  Backup your library first.  Then set up a new database with a few files in a new location and experiment a little.  Right click on a file or two and choose Library Tools.

That doesn't solve your problem of transferring tags from one file to another, but the Stacks feature might.  You could try it.

[Frobozz]

I'm in the same boat.  My library is mostly MP3 but I have started doing FLAC.  New stuff that I rip is in FLAC.  I'd like to replace my most listened to MP3 albums with FLAC versions without losing too much tag info.

I also have a good amount of classical music that has been carefully tagged for consistency in composer names, track names, and some custom tags.  I don't want to lose that information.

I haven't figured out an ideal way to do it in MC.  I tried experimenting with stacks.  But the stacks feature only helps if the MP3 and FLAC files already have the same names.  If the tracks already had the same names I wouldn't be in this pickle, a catch-22.  "Update tags from library" also results in a similar catch-22.  Filenames need to be the same.

I'd like to see a specific feature in MC for copying over tag info when replacing an MP3 version of a file/album with a FLAC version or some other format.

Mp3tag works on FLAC files (and many other formats) despite the name making it look like it is MP3 tagging only.  Just make sure you have the latest version.

I have experimented with using Mp3tag to copy over tag info from an MP3 album to a FLAC album.  It works, but is highly manual.  In Mp3tag you can select all of the files in the MP3 album, do a copy, then paste on the FLAC files.  That does a bulk copy/paste of the tags for multiple files in one swoop (just make sure the files/tracks are in the same order when you do the copy and the paste or you'll end up with a mixed up album).  Problem is that it copies all tags, even those tags that you don't want (like encoder settings).  So I have a custom "Action" in Mp3tag that strips out all of the tags that I don't want copied over (it is destructive so only do it on a copy of the MP3 files).  Then I do the bulk copy/paste of tags and all is good.  Import the FLAC files to MC, delete the MP3 versions, and all is good.

The Mp3tag process works, but is too manual to be practical for a large number of files.  It is also prone to errors if you are not careful during the copy and paste.

I'd like a more automated way of copying over selected tags from an MP3 version of an album(s) to a FLAC version.  I haven't found any utilities that are specific for that yet.  I may end up writing my own.  I'm in the process of learning Python and this might make a good project for playing with Python.  There are Python libraries available for reading/writing MP3 and FLAC tags.  But Python isn't so good for GUI apps so it would probably end up being a CLI app only useful to myself.

[Alex B]

Here's a link that might help a bit:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=46869

[JamieShanks]

Thanks everyone, this is very useful information.  I appreciate you all taking the time to help out.

JimH - I think stacks is a good start for what I'm wanting to do, but as you say, I'll need to play around.   That's a pretty cool feature.  The wiki pages make it sound like MC will assume the largest file (i.e. the improperly tagged flac) will be treated as the master, and potentially the mp3 tags will be matched with it.  I shall take care

Frobozz - thanks for that info too, I hadn't realised mp3tag did other formats too.  I might do a few files this way, but like you say, it seems like it might be time-consuming, and the manual work might introduce errors. 

One thing though for doing this - you could use mp3tag to make sure the file names match (now knowing it handles flac) - by exporting the mp3 file names to a text file, then doing 'text file to tag' and 'tag to filename' inside mp3tag - since the tags are being reset anyway, it wouldn't matter if this introduced errors anywhere else, like truncated 'artist' folders/fields.  That should guarentee the same files names in both sets of files.

And all this makes me think I should have planned ahead way back when!

The thing to do seems to be to decide whether I want to keep the mp3s afterwards, which I hadn't actually got around to thinking about (cowon player, so I don't neccessarily need to).  If I do, then the stacks thing seems the best way, if not, then copying tags around independently. 

(And while I was writing)

Thanks for that that too Alex - I thought someone must have delt with this before    I hadn't though of doing it this way, but this sounds like it might be simpler (for a certain definition of simpler).  Very iTunes world stuff.   If I rename the mp3 files so they have.flac extensions, then sneakily replace the physical mp3 files with flac files while MC isn't looking, then tell MC to update the files from the library, that should copy the tags back.  I might give this a try on a test album and see what happens.  Thanks for that!

Thanks again everyone, really appreciate the suggestions and info.

Cheers
Jamie

[Frobozz]

Here's a link that might help a bit:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=46869

I tried that method today and it works.  It feels very naughty and wrong though to be copying files around like that behind Media Center's back.  There was a caution mentioned in that thread to make sure that auto import and update for external changes are disabled before doing that funny business.

That method seems to result in the cleanest transfer of tag info and has the benefit of getting the database info as well.  Some of the files that I moved over using Mp3tag to transfer the tag info ended up with extra tagging info specific to MP3 in the FLAC tags.  A "Library Tools >> Remove Tags" and then a "Library Tools >> Update tags from library" cleaned up the unnecessary extra tagging info.

[Sauzee]

Is there any update on how to copy tags from one file to another?

It isn't exactly intuitive at the moment. Some sort of wizard would be great.

It seems a pretty common task. I've seen quite a few posts on this but there doesn't appear to be  definitive methodology.

I'm actually using MC 14 now but don't think there's been any development in this area since MC13.

[BryanC]

I am interested in this as well. I never got around to doing it in 2008 because it seemed like so many things could go wrong, but I'm ready to take the plunge now.