My $.02 below
Hey bros. I've had jriver for quite a while and it's a great player. I'm just now starting to get into the library functionality. Is it pretty good at looking at a directory structure and finding album art/writing tags for mp3s/FLAC or should I use another tool for that?
I find that MC is pretty good as a first pass tag scraping utility. It will get the basics and is fully integrated with the MC Library fields so no manual manipulating tags from scraper "A" to the MC library fields.
I have a LOT of music (as I'm sure many of you do) and I just started an auto-import. I've got lots of differences in my directory structure. Some directories and files use different naming schemes etc.
Is JRiver good at fixing any of that that you guys know of? Does it grab tags/art by an audio signature or by the filename or by the exiting tags?
MC is just as capable of manipulating tags as any other metadata utility Ive used but you can get yourself in a world of hurt with some of the library tools if your not careful to read and understand what the tools will doo to your media. MC does not scrape by audio signature. I suggest MusicBrainz Picard for this
Forgive me for being lazy. I'm sure all of this is in the docs...
Forgiven; a lot of people helped me get started in this area so Ill tell you how I scrape metadata. Everyone has their "way" to do this and you will change several times before you get a rhythm going. No doubt you will come up with a work process totally different than anyone else's; but that's the beauty of some of the tools out there. So at the rist of oversharing, heres my work process:
- Take a hard look at exactly what metadata you want to collect and make sure you have appropriate library fields to hold the data. Select a few key fields to be stored in the files physical tags and leave the rest in the MC library
- Not sure if your on Mac or Windows but from the Windows perspective, find yourself a capable command shell and dump windows powershell like a bad dream. I use ComEmu but I suspect there are lots of better options out there
- Get yourself the latest copy of MCUtils and dig in deep into the configuration process. MCUtils is a set of Perl scripts which will scrape AllMusic, Discogs, MusicBrainz and TMDB. Take your list of fields you generated in step 1 and sort out which source will scrape which field and base your configuration files from there. Try to avoid scraping the same field from multiple sources or better yet, make use of the * symbol in your config file so as to not overwrite fields if there already populated
- Download and install MusicBrainz Picard and run it. Also open up a command window and MC.
- select an album's worth of tracks in MC and open the tag window. Drag the selected files them to Picard. I usually cluster the files as Picard will attempt to match things based on a single album rather than multiple recordings that way.
- Select the cluster and either "lookup" or "scan" for metadata; lookup is a tag match whereas Scan is an audio match
- Copy the MusicBrainz Release Id from Picard and paste it into the cooresponding library field in MC; then run the MB script.
- Usually, the MusicBrainz database will populate the Discogs Release ID and the AMG Release ID library fields for you so at this point, all you have to do is run the AMG and Discogs scripts and your media file will be tagged. If MusicBrainz doesn't populate the AMG or Discogs ID's you will have to search them out yourself. In one of the posts, there are a nice set of nice links that allow you to search Allmusic and Discogs for your particular album. With a little tweaking, the links will take you within one or two clicks of the exact work. From there, copy the cooresponding ID's into your library fields and run the scripts.
- One of the nice things about ComEmu is the ability to create alias's that will take the script command line and assign it to a much simpler key combination (or single key). I created aliase's for MusicBrainz, AllMusic and Discogs; then created an alias that ran all three scripts back to back starting with MusicBrainz. With this setup, I can tag a complete album accurately and completely in about 10-18 seconds depending on how many tracks are in the album and the speed of your internet.
- Don't go wild tagging everything until you are sure you have all the tags you want as every time you change the script configuration files and MC Library you may have to re-scrape the metadata
- You may also want to create some library fields such as "Metadata Approved" and "Cover Art Approved" so you can create views/panes to show which files you have tagged to your satisfaction and which files have yet to be tagged. This will help keep you organized
I know this is probably as clear as mud but feel free to ask ton's of questions. Moe is the house expert on MCUtils and most of the other long timers are knowledgible of the overall process. plus, I've stolen bits and pieces from most of them over the past few months so they will recognize their work/ideas!
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Topic: Tagging (Read 1399 times)