Print

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

[JohanJooste]

Morning Guys, when importing WAV encoded tracks from external hdd some tracks of an artist is listed as "Unassigned". Note that it
happens with several artists and although some tracks are correctly listed under example Bruce Springsteen / Born in the USA, some
of the same Artist/Album tracks are listed as "Unassigned". Sometimes even a complete albums is listed as "Unassigned"

I checked these tracks under "Unassigned" and it seems that the tags does not exist/include the metadata. Originally I ripped it in WAV format
and the library was compiled with tags, cover art and metadata changes complete no issues. Only when I had to rebuild the library by importing
I found this issue.

The current workaround is to select the tracks and manually change the tags/metadata. Problem is the library has about 39 000 songs of which
around 3000 is listed as "unassigned".

Please help.
Thank you
JJ

[JimH]

There is a Library Tool that can fill the property from the filename. 

There is a tool to fill the track numbers from the list order.

If you have an old MC backup, you might get the tags from it.

WAV is not a great format.  FLAC or APE or any lossless codec would be better.

[JohanJooste]

Thank you for the reply Jim - tried the Library tools with no success. Still require some manual labour to sort out the incorrect tracks.

Anyway if WAV format has an issue, why are only some files affected and not all the 39 000 odd tracks ?

tx
JJ

[lisbethfox]

Why do you have a WAV library?
Just convert them to FLAC. They get decompressed in memory, its identical to WAV then.

[JohanJooste]

Hi lisbethfox, reason for that is pure and simple - the WAV format carries the best clearest audio quality for high-end digital
playback. As an avid audiophile, we have tried and tested all available encoding formats and found the WAV format to be the
best clearest fullest solid and most defined. Yeah it eats up a lot of storage space due to it being an exact copy of the CD
leaving much less chance for interference (encoding/decoding) or loss. 

That is part of the reason why I chose JRiver MC aswell as the program engine is far superior to other well known mediaplayers
and the quality of the playback is just up there. Another fact is that JRiver MC is suggested by the Editor and Columnists of the
USA Stereophile Magazine as their choice of mediaplayer.

Anyhow, I would really like a solution to this issue as I do not understand why only some tracks have the problem and not all the
tracks in the library.  ?

Regards
JJ

[lisbethfox]

FLAC is lossless.... it will always produce a 1:1, bit identical copy of the original file.
JRiver takes that flac, and all at once decompresses it to a wav file, and reads that from memory with no disk access.
Take a WAV, compress it to flac, decompress to wav, compare those files. They will be bit identical. You could do this 1000 times and the result would always be the same. In fact, if you are REALLY concerned about 'loss' I would use FLAC over wav (despite them like I said.. sounding identical) From their website

"Suitable for archiving: FLAC is an open format, and there is no generation loss if you need to convert your data to another format in the future. In addition to the frame CRCs and MD5 signature, flac has a verify option that decodes the encoded stream in parallel with the encoding process and compares the result to the original, aborting with an error if there is a mismatch."

Explain how a WAV file could sound "best clearest fullest solid and most defined" LMAO? Thank you, honestly I laughed my ass off. People like you give audiophiles a bad name because of ridiculous unsubstantiated claims "best clearest fullest solid and most defined"
Read up on how digital audio actually works ya dingus.

It's truly baffling.

[JohanJooste]

  - your response is all theory.... I do not have to explain myself.

Easy rip a track in both WAV and FLAC - play it back on a high-end audio system and you'll hear the difference....

Oh and by high-end a mean the likes of Classe, McIntosh, Chario, Kimber and Audioquest.

[lisbethfox]

I use discrete biamplification and high end class a amps on the mid's / highs of all 5 of my identical floorstanders. I have a treated room and a mid range power conditioner. I'd be able to hear the difference mate.

I ABX stuff alot, with very different gear. WAV and FLAC are the same both in theory and practice. I understand the hesitance to decode FLAC in real time, as an audiophile that makes sense but when it gets decoded to WAV beforehand its essentially the same as unzipping a zip file. -_-


Now having said that, if you have some Classe Mono blocks I'm jealous as ** because those sound gorgeous and I could never afford them.

[JohanJooste]

Yup spot on - those Classe's sound sweet paired with the Academy Serendipity's - anyhow in my experience the last year
or so with all the testing/listening I have done the WAV just sounds better, maybe its my ear tuned into it... 

Anyway I am not planning to rip my entire CD collection close on 4000 albums into FLAC just for the sake of the argument, as
the last exercise took around 9 months to complete.

Would still like to know why 90% of the tracks import correctly with all metadata and only some have issue's... Maybe the
MC Gods can look favourably upon us and advise.

Regards

PS. Might be worth your while to invest in the Classe's ... it took some convincing on my side aswell - no regrets though.

[Arindelle]

oh, oh not another wav discussion.   lets cut this one short people -- off-topic.  If people like listening to wav fine, go for it.

However lets not spout universal truths either. Like

the WAV format carries the best clearest audio quality for high-end digital playback. .... your response is all theory....

 It is not theory.  What everyone perceives, however, is their business This might a good read for you Johan http://www.computeraudiophile.com/blogs/mitchco/flac-vs-wav-part-2-final-results-155/

Now getting back to your question, I can't say the "how" there is no artist or album artist tags. But as for the "why", it probably wasn't embedded/associated with these file. Perhaps, you were tagging through another player and it wasn't written to disk? Could you check with an external tag editor to see, assuming you used the tag window already? If the metadata is not present, there are tools that Jim mentioned that would sort out 3000 files very quickly if the file names are coherent. If they are visible, post back. There is a way normally to recover these (Library tools=>Update Library form Tags).

PS-
@Johan FLAC as a container is superior for tagging. One can say that wav has less I/O "demands", but with your gear you probably have a recent PC that is reasonably configured. It is the compression that uses more of the CPU, but this is no longer an issue with modern set-ups used for playback that aren't multi-taskling all over the place. This might interest the OP ...  for info there is  the possibility to have non-compressed flac if this is a concern. Converting to flac btw does not mean you have to re-rip - you could even keep both formats if you prefer.

@lisbeth -- Joan of Arc saved France, after all !!

[JimH]

Anyway if WAV format has an issue, why are only some files affected and not all the 39 000 odd tracks ?

Probably because some have no tags.  Try the tool again, carefully.

[JohanJooste]

Tx Arindelle for the reply I will have a look at the URL and learn...

As for the tagging - I switched to MC about a 2 years ago (from iTu... ) and have since only been using MC. Ripping from
original CD's, tagging and populating the library as we go along, all new, no imports or conversions or anything from
another player. All seemed fine, everything is in place or so I thought.

Only after I reloaded my machine (several windows issues ;-(... ) and had to rebuild the library I came across this
problem. If only I exported and imported the Library this would not have happened.

Yes I checked and the tags for these 3000 odd files was not written to disc on the original rip and tag exercise and I believe
this is where the issue resides - it was not tagged and saved properly initially. I followed Jim's advice and found no clear
tags / metadata. Issue is of the same artist/album half is tagged and the rest not .... why would that be ? Could it be a problem
within MC not allowing enough time for the tagging process or could it be the WAV encoder or what... ?

Look I understand that FLAC has a superior container etc etc but still that does not explain my problem - If the WAV container/format
is the problem then all the tracks should have the same issue not only roughly 10% of them - unless there are some universal accepted
percentage of loss or something around the WAV format/container...  

My soul aim here is to help better MC as a mediaplayer, although it is already far superior to the rest.

Thank you for your persistance.

Regards
JJ

[dtc]

One issue with wav files is that tagging is not universally supported in a uniform way. You might want to experiment with uncompressed flac files - no compression, but the advantage of flac tagging.

[Arindelle]

Look I understand that FLAC has a superior container etc etc but still that does not explain my problem - If the WAV container/format
is the problem then all the tracks should have the same issue not only roughly 10% of them - unless there are some universal accepted
percentage of loss or something around the WAV format/container...  

OK lets talk about a fix ... you should have some consistent way of creating files that you have ripped (I assume )

Theoretically you can fix all of your tags in one shot (probably not the best idea .. best to try on a few first just in case)

I could select files =>right click=>Library Tools and Fill Properties from File Name
 choose template and fill in your ripping mask (you can click on the magnifier glass if you don't want to type

eg. for one of my files Z:/Tame Impala/Lonerism/01_Be Above It_Lonerism_Tame Impala.flac so I filled my mask out like in the attached image.

Now IF all files have the same naming convention -- you could select all of your files, if there is no difference changes won't be made.

Or you can select your empty ones.  Finally you want to update your tags from the library again using library tools. Backup your library manually before and after under a different name.

What you would also want to check is this http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Save_File_Properties_in_Disk_Files plz read this.

Now you should also read the general tagging section in the wiki too, but understand that some fields cannot be writtent to disk, the ones that you are missing shouldn't be an issue. I don't remember which fields can or cannot for wav -- there are a lot of them. http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Tags

Once you have done this all new tagging will be written both to disk and to the library. Having multiple backups of physical files as well as frequent backups of your library will insure that tagging is recoverable in a lot of different ways. With FLAC files almost everything can be written to disk

[JohanJooste]

Thank you for the post I will definately have a look at this.

Regards
JJ

[Vincent Kars]

All seemed fine, everything is in place or so I thought.

What you see is the library (the database).
If you tag, it will be reflected in the library.
Not to be mistaken for written to the tags as well.
In the past tagging WAV was disabled by default in JRiver.
Might explain why some tracks don't have meta data.

If you still have the old library you might try "update tags (from library"
With todays versions of JRiver tagging WAV is on by default

Success

[Vincent Kars]

Easy rip a track in both WAV and FLAC - play it back on a high-end audio system and you'll hear the difference....

As we know, what is send to the DAC, be it WAV, FLAC, APE, any other lossless format will be bit identical by desing.
However, to obtain this result will generate different "noise patterns"
FLAC requires more CPU, WAV more I/O

I suggest to try memory playback. Regardless of the format a track is expanded to raw PCM in a split second.
This will yield the lowest CPU load possible and no access to the HD (for the audio ) during playback.
Theoretical memory playback could even improve on playing WAV straight from the HD.

[JohanJooste]

Thank you for the reply Vincent - I will keep my library updated and backed up thanks, not to have this issue in future and I will do
manual work to sort out the untagged files if any pops up.

Still I'd like someone to advise why 90% of the WAV tagging is working fine and the rest not... Surely if its "on" by default then ALL
WAV's should be tagged and not only some. Unless I am missing something.

As a sidenote - I ripped a Remastered album of Bruce Springsteen's - The Ghost of Tom Joad to a different external HDD also creating a
new library with only this album in both WAV and FLAC formats - ALAS they dont sound the same on playback. The FLAC seems dull and
checking the ripped files size I saw it to be about half the size of the WAV file. The WAV has a broader more envolving sound.

Anyway I do not want to get into an argument again with the others - the WAV sounds better to my ears than the FLAC not sure why
but it does....

Regards
JJ

[Vincent Kars]

FLAC is lossless compression, half size (50%) is a normal value.
Now that you do have identical tracks in WAV and FLAC, have you tried memory playback?
Eager to know if you do hear any difference in this case.

[Arindelle]

Still I'd like someone to advise why 90% of the WAV tagging is working fine and the rest not... Surely if its "on" by default then ALL
WAV's should be tagged and not only some. Unless I am missing something.

Would you have made custom fields, or used fields which do not write to disk by default? http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Tags#Fields I would update the tags from the library for those 10% and the problem will go away. Some tags of course supported in FLAC / Vorbis comment are not supported for Wav as you know.

[JohanJooste]

Nope, no custom fields Arindelle - stock standard fields as provided by JRiver. I tried updating tags from library but to
no avail probably because the tag info do not exist. Anyway went on and tagged and bagged the problem files and as a test
tried the import library on a different machine and alas same problem - same files.....

This is really annoying - but given the fact that library imports are only done if and when - maybe I should just make sure
the library is complete and backed up.

Tx for your time anyway.

PS. One of the problem albums is the 2008 Andrew Lloyd Webber 60 Album - if you want test the WAV rip and then simulate
pc rebuild and import library....