Print

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

[billwalker]

I originally purchased JRiver to work with a hi-rez DAC, but I'm having just as much fun ripping my CD collection.  My new Dragonfly DAC makes them sound much better than my old CD player.

However, some CDs get split into multiple album files when ripped.  For example, the Dueutsche Grammphonen CD of Rostropovich and the Collegium Musicum Zurch playing Concertos by three composers gets turned into 3 albums, one per composer.  I've tried deleting these 3 and reloading, but the same three albums result.  Is there an easy way to re-combine these into a single album file?

[JimH]

Welcome to the forum.

Are you ripping with MC?

The Album Artist tag probably needs to be set.

[billwalker]

That worked, thank you very much.

Yes, I'm ripping in MC20.  I think MC sees this as multiple artists, probably picking up the tags from the Internet somewhere.  That is how it works, right?  Once I click on "edit disc information" and correct this, the CD gets ripped as a single file.

Maybe this should be a topic for a separate post, but can you explain exactly how and from where MC automatically gets the file information, and why so many classical CDs and albums use the "Artist" field for composer?  I don't see this in my jazz and pop CDs.  How hard is it in MC to create a separate field for composer?  There are times when it would be nice to sort my collection either by composer or by artist.  Only have about 50 CDs loaded so far, but have several hundred more to go.

[JimH]

Edit "Album Artist", not "Artist".

[blgentry]

Bill, you're asking two different questions:

1.  Why is my CD split into multiple albums and how can I fix it to show as one album?
2.  How can/is/should Artist, Composer, Performer, Soloist, etc, metadata organized in digital music files?

The answer for #1 is pretty easy:  In JRiver MC, any compilation CD with multiple artists will get broken up into multiple logical albums.  MC's fix for this is to tag all of the songs from that CD with the "Album Artist" tag.  This tag is an override.  Your Artist tags stay as they are, but the Album Artist tag is used simply to group all of these songs from the same CD together.  A common entry for Album Artist is "(Multiple Artists)" , or "Various".  Either one will group them all together as one album so it looks as you expect.

To do this, select all the songs from the album in question.  Then select "Tag" (right click and click Tag).  In the Tagging Pane on the left, find the entry for "Album Artist".  It should be blank.  Fill it out as Various or something else and press enter.  Done.  Your songs should now show as a single album.

Question #2 is a big one.  Classical music organization is not standardized.  There's a lot of information here on the forum if you do some searches.  I know very little about it as I only have a handful of classical titles in my collection.

Hope this helps.

Brian.

[billwalker]

Aha!  Your last post started me digging a bit more, and I find there are lots more tags available than the default views within MC20.  I have added a sub-view under Audio, called composer, and I'm playing with defining this view, and populating the "composer" fields.  Thank you, this gives me something to do while listening to music .

[JimH]

On our wiki, there is a Classical Music topic.  Lots of threads here about it, too.

[Vincent Kars]

why so many classical CDs and albums use the "Artist" field for composer?

Most media players and internet databases are designed with pop music in mind.
For classical you like to know the composer (not to mention  composition and performers)
Most tagging schemas do have a tag for composer but often this tag ignored by the media players.
A common trick to circumvent this limitation is to put the composer in a common supported tag like Artist or Album Artist (often at the expense of not listing the performer).

Today support for the composer tag is more common.
JRiver does it but a lot of other media players as well.
Unfortunately the internet databases as used by JRiver (their own YADB and FreeDB at riptime) still adhere to this old work-around.

Fortunately, the flexible interface of JRiver (views, custom tags) makes it a nice tool for tagging classical.

[glynor]

Aha!  Your last post started me digging a bit more, and I find there are lots more tags available than the default views within MC20.  I have added a sub-view under Audio, called composer, and I'm playing with defining this view, and populating the "composer" fields.  Thank you, this gives me something to do while listening to music .

Not only are there a ton of default fields, but those are really only.... Suggestions. You can add your own, and even make special fields that are calculated using MC's Expression Language.

More info:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Library
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Library_Fields
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=86996.0

[SolMan1]

Thanks for the suggestions.  Just started using JRiver Media Center a few days ago with no problems whatsoever until I got to a compilation dis,

Just went to tag and did a multiple select of the files that belonged to the same album and edited the blank Album Artist with the name Various Artists.  Works to separate CD1 and CD2, etc..  Album names must be different.