INTERACT FORUM

More => Old Versions => Media Center 11 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: Doof on September 18, 2003, 03:51:39 pm

Title: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: Doof on September 18, 2003, 03:51:39 pm
I've got an album here... APE+CUE=APL

The following items are all in the same folder:

Full album APE file.
CUE sheet.
11 APL files (one for each track)
Cover Art.

All of the APL's have the same Artits, Album, Genre, and Year assigned to them.

They all have the correct track numbers assigned to them.

They all have Artist Bios.

They all have lyrics.

MC has labeled this album as "Single Artist (incomplete album)".

What more do I need to do to make this complete?!? Need I sacrifice my first born?
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: KingSparta on September 18, 2003, 03:55:40 pm
any missing track#s?
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: LonWar on September 18, 2003, 04:20:19 pm
I have a Iron Maiden Bonus Disc that does that... Could never figure it out... :-/
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums&qu
Post by: Omni on September 18, 2003, 04:47:07 pm
Quote
All of the APL's have the same Artits, Album, Genre, and Year assigned to them.


Maybe one of the Artist's fields has an extra space in it somewhere, like a trailing space?  If you select all eleven tracks, does the Artist field change to "<varies>"? <rhetorical question>  Better yet, does the "Album Artist" field change to "<varies>"? <again, rhetorical question>

Omni
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: Doof on September 18, 2003, 05:25:34 pm
Nope... no missing track numbers, and there are no <varies> except for things that should be... like track number, name, BPM, etc.
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: Doof on September 18, 2003, 06:09:37 pm
Ok. I figured it out. It was the Full Album APE not having a track number assigned to it that was causing this.

Guess I'll either have to delete it from the library, or assign it some bogus track number...
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: zevele10 on September 19, 2003, 04:27:25 am
Doof

What do you mean?

An album in only one file ?

Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: Doof on September 19, 2003, 06:21:59 am
Yeah. Using Exact Audio Copy, the full album is ripped to one giant APE file, and a CUE sheet is created. The CUE sheet is just a text file that contains information about where each track begins and ends within the APE. Then you use the MakeAPL utility that comes with Monkey's Audio to read the CUE sheet, and it creates an individual APL file for each track. The APL's themselves are just pointers. They point to their relevant piece of the APE. And MC treats APL files the same way it would if you had ripped the enitre CD to APE using MC.

And according to Matt, there's no difference between using the APE+CUE=APL method, and just ripping all tracks to APE.
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: Kurt Young on September 19, 2003, 06:59:22 am
My two bits on your question, Doof...

In my experience, if 9 of 10 of an album's songs are in one folder, and the 10th one isn't in the same folder, then MC will call it an incomplete album, regardless of how the fields of each song are populated.

This is in the context of the view schemes like "Single Artist (Incomplete)" etc.
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: Doof on September 19, 2003, 07:09:02 am
Quote
Ok. I figured it out. It was the Full Album APE not having a track number assigned to it that was causing this.

Guess I'll either have to delete it from the library, or assign it some bogus track number...



;)
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: kiwi on September 19, 2003, 09:10:41 am
Hm... that's interesting, I have two copies of one album and it says that both are incomplete.

Weird.

I'm going to try moving one to a different location and then out of the library.  I'll see whether that fixes things.

Does the incomplete album function just look to see that you have songs from track 1 to track n, where n is the highest number?  Or does it check with the cd database to see how many tracks are supposed to be in each CD?

kiwi

Edit: I renamed one of the albums (added "2nd copy") to the name.  Now it works w/o a problem.  I bet that if you set the track number for the full CD APE that it might work.  Either to be the all the track numbers + 1, or to track number 0.

Also, I played with chaning a song's track to be a different value, so the tracks have a gap in them and it caused the track to be "incomplete".
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: zevele10 on September 19, 2003, 10:39:11 am
If you have twice the same album ,both are in 'incomplete album'

If you have song number 5 with the artist name not the same=
  You
and
You
or
Rolling  Stones
And
Rolling Stones

If you have song 5 and song 05

Both song and album would be in incomplete albums.

If not all the songs not in the same folder- needs to be in the album name folder as well ,not only the artist name folder- you get an imcomplete album.

NOW ,the ice on the cake :
Even if NONE OF IT  , you ,many times get an imcomplete album.

Must be something to do with all the tags.
I just do not know
I asked 1000 times ,but never get an answer..

I just do not use it anymore.

When playing an album ,i just check songs numbers to see if  all songs here.

I just want to listen to music ,not to bang my head on a jukebox

Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: Matt on September 19, 2003, 01:08:36 pm
Use the "Clean File Properties" tool so you don't have that mess.  For me, it does a great job.
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: zevele10 on September 19, 2003, 02:53:31 pm
Matt
Thank you for the tip
This helps.

Now , i may be wrong but i feel that it helps also:

Before doing any taging ,i remove ID3V2 tags.
After that i tag my songs-

It looks like you get a much neat result.

I do not mean only p2p songs ,but Emusic and other places where you can buy music  or get free like mp3.com
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: kiwi on September 19, 2003, 05:13:25 pm
Does it do anything more than look at the track sequence?

kiwi
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: LisaRCT on September 20, 2003, 06:53:07 pm
incomplete albums are caused by careless handling . . . like when you carry them and spill some of the songs out,

even if you see a trail of songs on the ground behind you, just try getting them all back in the proper albums,

and if the numbers fall off them, you may never get them back into the proper order.

I dropped one from the second floor and it shattered . . notes everywhere, what a mess!  And I had just washed the floor too.
Title: Re: What causes &quot;Incomplete Albums&qu
Post by: bspachman on September 24, 2003, 08:47:21 pm
Quote
In my experience, if 9 of 10 of an album's songs are in one folder, and the 10th one isn't in the same folder, then MC will call it an incomplete album, regardless of how the fields of each song are populated.

So, if I'm understanding this thread correctly, a "complete" album must fulfill the following conditions:

1) Same album name
2) All Tracks numbered & in sequence
3) Same artist (and/or album artist)
4) All tracks located in the same folder

Do I have it right? I guess I'm confused about the need for requirement #4 (and to a lesser extent, #3). For example, I have a few multi-disc sets that I have stored in multiple subdirectories, but are all part of the same album. I have the tracks for the entire set numbered sequentially so it will playback in order, but the albums show up as incomplete.

For example, I have the Original Cast of Sweeney Todd (2 discs). On my drive, the tracks are stored as "Sweeney Todd/Disc 1" and "Sweeney Todd/Disc 2".

In MC, I have the entire album tagged as Album=Sweeney Todd and the tracks running from 1-29, where disc 1 consists of tracks 1-21 and disc 2 consists of an additional 8 tracks. Looking at Single Artist (incomplete) shows that tracks 22-29 are in Sweeny Todd, but are incomplete because their path is different from the first disc.

What's the reason for needing all the tracks to have the same path? Is this a bug or a feature?

Best,
Brad
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: modelmaker on September 24, 2003, 10:04:27 pm
I ran over a Donny Osmond LP with my chair and those tracks are all over the place now, I haven't found all of them, so I guess that'll be an incomplete album too.
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: kiwi on September 25, 2003, 06:05:17 am
For me, it only seems to be the first two.
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: zevele10 on September 25, 2003, 07:03:40 am
In MC, I have the entire album tagged as Album=Sweeney Todd and the tracks running from 1-29, where disc 1 consists of tracks 1-21 and disc 2 consists of an additional 8 tracks. Looking at Single Artist (incomplete) shows that tracks 22-29 are in Sweeny Todd, but are incomplete because their path is different from the first disc.
-=-=-=-=Sweeney...Cd2 starts at song 22
so it is see as an incomplete album

Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: bspachman on September 25, 2003, 10:29:26 am
Right, I understand why it's listed as incomplete (tracks 22-29). What I can't figure out is the reason for the requirement that all the tracks share the same path.

If all 29 tracks are in the "/Sweeny Todd" directory, regardless of file name, then the album is complete.

If the 29 tracks are split up in"/Sweeney Todd/Disc 1" and "/Sweeney Todd/Disc 2", then the album is incomplete.

It's a mystery to me....

Brad
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: kiwi on September 25, 2003, 03:13:01 pm
Are you sure that the album name is not different?  Or some other tag?
Title: Re: What causes "Incomplete Albums"?
Post by: Kurt Young on September 25, 2003, 04:15:51 pm
I'm pretty sure.  I've had albums fail the logic when one track was in a different folder.  I just used MC to move it to the folder where the rest of the tracks were (via rename from properties) and MC says complete album.  No tags changed.  That's where I drew that conclusion from.
Title: Re: What causes &amp;quot;Incomplete Albums&am
Post by: xen-uno on September 26, 2003, 11:37:29 am
Doof / Matt,

Regarding "The CUE sheet is just a text file that contains information about where each track begins and ends within the APE". Are the individual track names stored in the cue sheet (or somewhere else)? I haven't had time to experiment with this, but what I want is to APE (or FLAC) my CD's and throw them on some DVD+RW's. If I create the ape/cue sheet and later split the APE up into individual tracks, will I have to hit the net to get the track names (barring typing them in)?

Do tell...

10-27