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[blgentry]

I just did a project I found extremely satisfying and I thought I'd share.

I've owned the Led Zeppelin Boxed Set 1 and 2 for many, many years.  For those that don't know, those are the compilation albums that comprise all of Led Zeppelin's studio work.  But for whatever reason, the songs on these compilations are NOT in order of the original albums.  They are in some other order determined by the guys that put the collections together.  So this is 6 CDs comprising 8 studio albums, plus a handful of unreleased tracks.

The tracks not being in album order has always bothered me, and even though I'm a fan of Zeppelin, I didn't really listen to these CDs that much.  I've always wanted to re-order them back into their original album release order.  This morning I decided to build some play lists to do that.  Pretty easy:  I built 8 play lists, opened up a split view and dragged songs into the correct lists and order, according to the wikipedia articles on each album.  Took about 20 minutes.

But then... I sorta wanted album art.  ...and I thought it was weird to have these virtual albums in my play list area, even though I created a playlist group for them.  So I did some forum research and found a few posts about "virtual albums", but it all seemed very complex and there were too many details and ideas.  So I opted for what someone in one post said:  Copy the files to different directories and organize them as albums in the order I want.  That would mean double copies of every file but...

You know what?  I never liked the order on these compilations anyway.  Why would I *ever* listen to them in that order again anyway?  I wouldn't!  So I decided to not COPY them, but to MOVE them to new directories, named for the original albums.  So I went through each playlist and did:

1.  Rename, Move, Copy tool:  Tell it the new directory as <my music directory>/[Artist]/<new album name>/.  Under File, tell it to rename the file as

Code: [Select]

Padnumber(CustomData(#), 2)_[Name].  This grabs the play list order and prepends the original track number of the album to the file name like:  01_Whole_Lotta_Love.flac
2.  Library Tools > Fill Track Numbers From List Order.  This changes the tags so the Track # is correct in the original album order.
3.  Tagging Pane:  Change the: Album name, Date, Total Tracks.  Erase: Album Artist, Total Discs, Disc #.
4.  Cover Art > Get From Internet...

This worked amazingly well!!  It also taught me a fair amount about the Rename, Move, Copy Tool, and just the interface in general.  I had the idea while doing this that I should be able to do it slightly more efficiently, but it really wasn't too bad.  Probably 1 to 2 hours total.  I did make 2 mistakes that took me a few minutes to resolve.  There's one song that's in the boxed sets twice; once live and once studio and I had them in the wrong places.

...and now for the first time in like 20 years, I have Led Zeppelin's albums correctly displayed, ordered, and accessible with representative album covers!

Can you tell I'm excited?  This is awesome. 

Brian.

[dmac6419]

Got the box set too. Got it in the late 90's when it came out or when it came to my attention, gotta check this out.

[blgentry]

^ There's a gotcha with Boxed Set #1.  It doesn't have the complete set of songs from ANY of their studio albums.  It's missing at least one song from every single album.  Luckily Boxed Set #2 fixes this by including every one of those missing songs, plus one more that isn't on any of their studio albums.

So Boxed Set #1 + Boxed Set #2 = All 9 studio albums + 5 additional songs (4 on BS1 and 1 on BS2).

If I can be of help on this, I'm happy to.

Thanks,

Brian.

[Awesome Donkey]

Gosh, I was 5 years old when the first boxed set came out. I remember listening to my father's copy a lot - it's what got me into Zeppelin in the first place. I bought my own copy of the box set a few years ago, along with all the original studio albums (both the Barry Diament masters and the Page remasters). A few years ago I ripped them all in FLAC onto my PC where they reside today in my music library. Ahhh, such memories.

[mwillems]

Got the box set too. Got it in the late 90's when it came out or when it came to my attention, gotta check this out.

If you're starting from scratch and haven't made playlists yet, there's another way to do it that might be a little faster.  You can just manually change the album and track number tags to "create" the albums.  That's what I did with the Steely Dan "Citizen" boxed set (it's a similar deal, no direct disc to album mapping, but all studio albums are in the set, just broken up).  

Start on an album view looking at the boxed set, and Ctrl-click to select all the tracks on a given album.  Then open the tag window and edit the album tag; it should only change the album value for the files you have selected. If you refresh the view it should now show up as a separate album.  Then fix the track numbers and  run "get cover art."  Done in about a minute per album (if you already have the wiki open)  If you want your hard drive folder structure to mirror the library you can then use rename, move, copy at the end with something like "<musicdirectory>/[Artist]/[Album]/[Name]", but that's optional because JRiver only cares about tags, not physical location,

Once you've gone through the trouble of making the playlists, blgentry's method is much slicker, but if you're starting from zero, it will probably be faster to just edit the tags in JRiver.

[glynor]

Then fix the track numbers and

I have a very quick way I worked out to fix track numbers, figured it was worth sharing.

I had a calamity a long, long while back. This was in the days of yore when we didn't have fancy modern features like automatic Library Backups. Yes, we lived like animals in those days.

Anyway, I lost track numbers for a whole pile of albums in Media Center.  The [Track #] field was just blown away for reasons lost down the memory hole. Worse, I didn't notice this until after I'd just done Rename, Move, and Copy Files on a whole bunch of them (it was called Rename Files from Properties back then), which is how I noticed, but I'd been doing them in batches so I couldn't just undo more than a few, and, well... I was pretty hosed with 50 or so albums that were now all in alphabetical order with 00 - [Name].ext filenames and no backups to save me. Animals with only sharp pointed sticks.

But, I came up with a pretty slick system to fix this, and I still use it here and there, and now it is even easier with modern, fancy MC features:

1. After you do exactly what mwillems suggested and tag the selected files with the right Album name, find it in the view (showing the files in the wrong order, but just the files and not anything else).

2. Play them or whatever to get them in Playing Now, and switch to it in MC if needed.

3. Select one of them and use your Link to open AMG's Album search for the album.  Move the browser to your other monitor (we ain't just got pointy sticks anymore) or use Aero Snap or SizeUp (for Mac) to arrange your windows so you can see both Playing Now and the browser window at the same time (if you're "roughing it" with only one monitor).

4. Now, just drag the tracks in Playing Now up and down to put them in the right order.  Freaking brilliant.

5. Control-A. Right click > Library Tools > Fill Track Numbers from List Order.

6. Smile when you realize how not-hard-at-all that was, and crack an adult beverage of your choice.

[glynor]

PS. Same system works brilliantly for fixing Episode numbers in TV Shows too, which is where I use it the most.  The only differences from the above method are:

Step 1. Replace [Album] with [Season].

Step 3. Open your TheTVDB Fancy Search for the episode you picked (instead of AMG), and find the right season in the results.

Step 5. Open the Tag Action Window if not already open. Control-A. Type =Counter() in the [Episode] field in the Tag Action window.  If you have more than one set to fix, keep that text in your clipboard as you go, for extra win.

Step 6. Go ahead an open a second one. You earned it. While you're enjoying it, right-click > Get Movie & TV Info to fix the rest of the metadata, now that you have solid [Series], [Season], and [Episode] tags.

[Arindelle]

Yes! drag to playing now +1 Glynor

also, if you decide to do this through tagging only and not permanent file renaming, I do exactly like Glynor suggested. (although the "snap" from windows is a bit buggy on my skin for JRIver??).

Just before I do his step 5 I select all "out of sequence" track numbers (that are now in the right order), and highlight them and then LIBRARY TOOLS=>LINK TRACKS. eg. .... Track 8/album1, Track 9/album1, track 2/album2 I would select the latter 2 tracks and link them

Then I do the magic fill track number from list order. In normal album artist/album type views this is unnecessary of course as you'd be sorting by album (maybe then disk number) then track number anyway.

But if any views use expressions or are based on genres, sample rate or soloists or such, even if the order gets jumbled they will always play in that order.

This combination link thing is pretty cool for lots of reissued jazz and rock (I'm trying to boost my collection on STax records 70's soul and r&b and they often do this especially since Tarentino started using a lot of this type of music in his soundtracks)  -- you know when you get 2 or 3 albums on the same cd. Then they add "bonus tracks etc.. I always want to be able at least to play the original tracks in the original order -- any alternate takes can be pushed to the end of the track order.

[blgentry]

I was just at a record store... a store that sells actual *vinyl* records mostly.  They also have some used CDs.  As I was checking out, I saw they had The Police, Synchronicity sitting on the counter and remembered how much of a "big deal" that was when it came out.

Then I remembered that I have The Police "Message In A Box" box set with everything The Police ever recorded in the studio, plus a few more.  It's got a similar problem to the Zed Zep box sets in that the discs aren't complete albums.  It's not all mixed up though.  They just have each album's songs in sequential order and sometimes live or B sides before or after, and in one case, an album is split across two discs.

I got kinda burned out on The Police a few years ago and hadn't even ripped these discs into my computer yet.  So today I ripped them and then broke them up into the "real" albums like I did for Led Zep.  But this time it was easier because they were mostly sequential, with B sides in between.  I used a slightly different workflow, which made it faster:

1.  Find the range of songs for the album you are breaking out, in the big track listing (for example, all the songs from Ghost In The Machine).  Verify order.  Tag to change album name, number of tracks, and year.  Blank out disc # and total discs.
2.  Switch to view of only that album.  Select all, Library Tools > Fill Track Number From List Order.
3.  Repeat 1 - 2 for all albums.
4.  Select all albums from album view (or any other view).  Cover Art > Get From Internet.  Select the album art you want and press Save.
5.  Select all albums.  Library Tools > Rename, Move, Copy Files...  Set your rule to include Artist and Album name.  Set file name to include track # and song name.  Verify that it all looks right.  Press OK and watch all the files get moved to the correct directories in one step!

This was pretty quick.

Once again WAY better than having the box set in my collection.  I now have the "real albums" all broken out correctly with album art, etc.  Awesome! 

Brian.