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Batch transfer tags to media files on Mac via MPL file created on Windows?
couchjr:
MrC, thanks again for your generosity and patience. Your advice in other threads has already helped us a great deal, and taken us as far as we've already come, so we're very grateful.
It seems that MC does indeed write tags into the DSF files via the "Update file tags from Library" command, so that's not a problem. Given the goal below, does that mean there's an easier way? I'm very new to MC and hi-res computer audio generally, so please don't hesitate to tell me if I'm missing something obvious. It may also be obvious that I'm not a programmer.
Our goal is to convey the tags from multichannel DSFs, being tagged by one person in Windows, to the stereo DSFs of the same titles, from the same ISOs, resident on a Mac (and extracted at a different time). The multichannel files are still being tagged (including some custom fields) so if we did the entire library at once, we'd have to wait until they were all tagged, which would take a long time--weeks or months. And any method that involves copying DSF files from one computer/drive to another involves a lot of wait time. Those are our reasons for batching. We thought sending an MPL file to the Mac to transport the tags for the stereo files would be far faster and easier than sending copies of all the multichannel files and swapping them out as in the "re-ripping" method described on the wiki. If there's an efficient way to do larger batches, or even the whole library, I'd love to know it. If it's fast enough, it might make sense for us to wait and do them at the end--though that would probably mean I couldn't find or play any of the stereo DSFs in the mean time :( .
I should be able to test doing a search/replace on the path portion of the filename field of a simple MPL using each of the absolute and relative path options sometime this week. If I can make it work, I should be able to let you know what the most efficient viable "before" and "after" paths are (part of this evaluation will involve making sure we can dependably repeat the export location of the MPL in our workflow). If the relative-path method works it might be as little as changing a single character, if we export the MPL to the same directory where all the album folders live.
I've never used Automator, but if you were able to write a scriptlet it sounds like it would save time and more importantly reduce the risk of errors if we have to do many batches. The collection of (nearly all) classical SACDs we're backing up runs to more than 3000 disks and will grow, so volume and time are concerns.
Thanks again.
MrC:
You're welcome. Your approach (of importing the tag values) seems reasonable. Once you try a few and gain experience, you'll find it is pretty easy.
couchjr:
Began testing tonight. New problem: could not get MC Mac to import an MPL file created by MC 19 Windows. During the import step, when I browsed to navigate to the albums.mpl file, it was greyed out and could not be highlighted to finish the import (other folders visible in the browse window were not greyed out). I tried using three different, freshly created and exported MPLs--same result.
The file was created in and exported from MC 19 Windows to a directory at the topmost user-definable level of the file system, right after the C: drive designation. (The media folder referred to by the playlist was in the same directory). The albums.mpl file was then copied onto a thumb drive, inserted into the MacBook Pro, and copied from there into a directory at the same level of the Mac file system (where the media folder to be updated was also at the same level). Then I tried the import, with results as above.
I was able to open any of the MPL files on the Mac to read using BBEdit, a competent text editor on the Mac. Each file looked like a well-formed XML file to me, and BBEdit color-coded tags, values, etc. as expected. I did notice that the MPL file showed up in Finder with a dark-terminal-screen icon with "exec" in lime green and a"Kind" value of "Unix executable file." If I saved the file after opening it in BBEdit, it changed to a generic "document" icon and a "Kind" value of "Simple text document." (That version wouldn't import either--I tried.)
I tried creating, exporting, and importing an MPL of the same album from the Mac version of MC, and it imported fine. The albums.mpl file icon was a generic document icon and the "Kind" just said "Document." If I opened and saved this in BBEdit, it also changed to "Simple text document."
I presume there's nothing in the actual content of the file itself that would cause this problem, but rather something in the file format, extension, or metadata pertaining to MC Windows that MC Mac can't recognize. Can someone help? Can you duplicate this in JRiver land? Is it a bug or have I missed something?
It's particularly frustrating because reading (in BBEdit) the MPL files exported from both Mac and Windows versions with the relative paths option checked, the path in the "Filename" field was precisely identical in both. So if I can get MC Mac to import the Windows MPL file, I can probably use it to update tags with no translation of the path notation required at all! (Of course, when I exported without the relative paths option checked, the differences in notation and drive designation showed up, proving that the exported file was in fact coming from the other machine, and not an accidental duplicate of the one created on the Mac.)
Any fixes or further troubleshooting instructions welcome. Thanks!
couchjr:
I just noticed MrC's comment on another thread:
Re: Playlist transfer
« Reply #9 on: November 20, 2013, 01:08:05 pm »
Reply with quoteQuote
This seems to be an MC Mac problem. Neither MC18 nor MC18 are importing Unix/Mac style paths in an M3U playlist.
I noticed that the Windows MPL exported with relative paths checked seemed to use a style identical to Unix style paths, e.g.: .\filename\01 etc.
Related?
Although the MPL exported without relative paths checked seemed to use normal Windows style, and that couldn't be highlighted for import in the browse window either.
MrC:
I do MPL imports on the Mac routinely, and just tested in again.
Be sure the file suffix is really .mpl (do a Get Info).
The Relative paths option does not produce the correct paths, as you've noticed. So these imports fail.
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