Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[johnsg]

Hello: I am evaluating jriver; I am close to uninstalling it...

All my albums are in single-file FLAC format that have been muxed into an MKA file with chapters and tags built using XML per the Matroska specifications. Foobar2000 will correctly detect each album, and list tracks per the metadata. jriver doesn't even recognize the .MKA files.

Is this expected behavior, or is there a trick needed to make jriver interpret the metadata? This puppy's about to be taken out into the back yard and summarily shot if it cannot even handle a simple little Matroska audio file with a chapters and tags.

Cheers!

[Matt]

I'm not sure MC supports MKA files.  But FLAC files fully support tags, so use those.

[6233638]

Media Center plays MKA files for me - I ripped some music DVDs to the format a while back, as it let me retain the original compressed audio (I think they were all DTS) and add chapters for each track via MKVmerge.
 
It does only list this as a single track in the library though.
Skipping through chapters works when hitting the next button or right-clicking the cover art and selecting Jump To →
 
You could probably list all the chapters as separate tracks by creating particles. That's not something I have got around to yet.

[johnsg]

Thanks for the replies so far. Having looked a little harder, the albums in .mka format are all listed as 'Unknown Album by Unknown Artist' within the 'Unassigned' leaf in the treeview.

JR will play the files, at least in the sense that it will play the FLAC-encoded stream inside the MKA container. Oddly, JR can also winkle out the enclosed .JPG and display the album art.

But JR cannot interpret the Chapters or the Tags that are properly encoded inside the MKA file. So basically, support for MKA is very limited and pretty hopeless.

Back to Foobar for me....

[6233638]

Maybe you could send one of your MKA files to logs[at]jriver[dot]com
 
Chapters are working correctly for me.
All my tagging was done inside Media Center so I don't know if there's an issue importing tags from the files I created or not.

[johnsg]

I suspect the issue is where the tags and chapters are located.

It is possible to take a single FLAC file (representing an entire album of N tracks) and to embed a cue file inside the FLAC as part of the metadata. The text file used to set out the Cue contains both tagging data (names of Artist, Album and Tracks) as well as the elapsed times of the tracks (aka Chapters, if you will).

Alternatively, one can take the same FLAC file (without the embedded cue file) and then handcraft two XML files, one for the chapters and a second for all the tags. Matroska treats Chapters and Tagging as two separate issues. The tags can be linked to chapters by using referencing Chapter UID numbers in the Tags file. Then you need to use the MKV Tools (probably the GUI called mmg.exe) to mux the FLAC file with the Tags and Chapters and perhaps other media such as Album art.

I have taken the latter approach. I suspect that JR is able to cope with a FLAC file with an embedded Cue sheet. But the full-blown Matroska route is not working.

John

[6233638]

Again; I did exactly what you are describing when I ripped audio DVDs to MKA, adding chapters using MKVmerge. (mmg.exe)
They are working correctly for me:
 

 
I agree that MKA support could be improved, but perhaps there is an issue with your files which is preventing MC from reading the chapters correctly.
 
Sending the JRiver team a sample file which shows this problem is the fastest way to get things fixed.

[Hendrik]

Sounds like he might expect the chapters to show up as individual tracks automatically, sounds like foobar might be doing that.

[fitbrit]

Sounds like he might expect the chapters to show up as individual tracks automatically, sounds like foobar might be doing that.

Particles from chapters for audio?

[johnsg]

Here is an extract of the Chapters and Tags from one of my .mka files - a pair of XML files zipped together...

John

[johnsg]

Incidentally, there is a good reason for using .MKA container, as opposed to just a FLAC with a cue sheet. The INDEX command does not support playing lengths in excess of 99 minutes. Not a problem for a ripped CD, but I own some Pure Audio Blu-Ray discs that play for longer. That's why I stopped using cue sheets and started using Matroska containers....

John

[Hendrik]

Why not simply split it into individual tracks?

[6233638]

Why not simply split it into individual tracks?

After trying to stream gapless audio to networked devices, I can understand why you might want a single file with chapters or a cue sheet, rather than splitting it into individual tracks.
 
The reason I used MKA though was because the discs used lossy compression, and I didn't want to mess with it.