Print

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

[GHoel]

I am not a technically advanced person as are most on these boards but need a simple question answered if at all possible.  I have been using JRiver Media Center for a number of years for simple tasks such as ripping cd's to FLAC and organizing my library after seeing the way ITunes was heading and it's limited functionality and I am glad I did.  It seems that I used to be able to, in a very uncomplicated manner, simply rip audio cd's to FLAC, obtain album cover art, make simple mis-spelling edits to imported album information, and add simple information such as release year, remaster, reissue, repress, into the "Album" field, and have it stay there.  An example of this would be in the album field per se.  If the imported meta data when ripping was the following:

Dark Side Of The Moon

I would edit to the correct title in the following manner and add a small amount of meta-data as follows:

The Dark Side Of The Moon (Harvest) - 1984 RM RI

Hence, the correct title of the album, pressing entity, year, remastered, reissue.

All of this information use to seemingly store on my laptop and I could copy all these FLAC files to my flash drive for playing on my high end Kenwood in my truck.  Furthermore, all the metadata would show up on my Kenwood, much like Itunes info would through my Ipod when plugging it into an older, lesser, system in my truck that did not play FLAC format.  Album art would show up, Artist, Album info/w above edits, and song title.

just a reminder here, I am NOT tech savvy, so please excuse the following explanation if it is not overly technical.  Sometime in the last year or so, it seems, and I am probably wrong, it seemed to me that this information would periodically disappear which now I know it does.  Apparently JRiver sends out database/server information on a regular basis that overwrites everything not in compliance with what was imported with the cd rip, hence, all edits are lost.  It may have been that for years I used an old Windows 8 laptop and lower 20s versions of Media Center that never had this issue.  In the last couple of years however, I upgraded to a new laptop with Media Center 31 and 32 which now runs Windows 11 which has done something in relation to not allowing file editing.  Not sure if this has something to do with it or not.

After finishing a very long project of re-ripping all my selected music files from cd to FLAC, 2,500 to be approximate, and making the above type grammatical and short album edits, and copying to my flash drive, I find that a lot of the album information that was ripped in MC 31 and MC 32 from many albums, will not show up on my Kenwood system as it once did.  Either the album art fails to show up, the edited album information does not show up, the presentation format on the Kenwood screen is not the same either as it was in the clean and simple layout of artist, album, and song title for many of these files.  To the contrary, and simultaneously, this missing edited information is there on my laptop in JRiver when I make a flash drive copy and it would seem that if this information was displaying in JRiver on my laptop, at the time of copying and stored on my laptop, it would transfer also as it use to.  In addition, it seems the info and album art that was ripped from the older versions of JRiver from the older laptop shows up and displays correctly on the Kenwood system.

So anyway, I think that is a thorough enough explanation of the problem.  I do not know whether these issues could possibly come from Media Center updates or Windows updates or some combination thereof.  i really like JRiver for ripping, organizing, fixing minor album information, and flash drive copying and that is about all I do with it.  In the past, it was never a problem to do the things mentioned above.  So I guess that it was generally a very user friendly system for the technically adept and even the not so technically adept like myself.  At this point I am at a loss as to what could be going on for what use to be a very simple task of ripping, editing, and copying.  I have spent numerous hours searching in this help forum for what I call "field editing" or "automatic updates" but to no avail as the language is too technical and verbiage too different from what I know and use.  Is this the area known as tagging?  If so, I use to never have to do this in Media Center for my edit changes and what I did.

If there is a way to turn off the auto updating, or server overwriting of metadata field data on the laptop files, that would be great. I really would like to keep my album edits and word/title fixes without having it all overwritten.  I do know about going back to the recovery files in the documents folder to get most of what I have lost and have used that a couple of times to retrieve most of what I have lost.  Eventually though, it gets overwritten again and I am back to step one. 

So, with all that said, I would just like to rip, edit, organize, copy and keep all my files on my laptop in a stable system without any worry about things erroneously changing or not copying over to the flash drive based on what is displaying in Media Center.  This is the way it use to be so not sure what has changed.

If I sound incoherent and repetitive, I am very tired and it is very late, so sorry :-)...     

[JimH]

Sometime in the last year or so, it seems, and I am probably wrong, it seemed to me that this information would periodically disappear which now I know it does.  Apparently JRiver sends out database/server information on a regular basis that overwrites everything not in compliance with what was imported with the cd rip, hence, all edits are lost. 

JRiver doesn't update your tags unless you tell it to.  That's not the problem. 

It's possible that the tags in the file are different from what you see in the program.  In other words, the database doesn't reflect the tags.  You can set MC to keep them in sync.  You can also use Library Tools to copy data in either direction.  Check the wiki and be cautious until you understand what is happening.

It's also possible that your truck's player isn't showing you everything.

[GHoel]

Thank you for the quick response Jim as I really appreciate it.  Also, I am glad to know that the metadata field information preservation is indeed referred to as tagging.  I saw a long discussion on one of these threads about all of the different terminology uses in reference to tags, tagging, metadata, library, fields, files, etc and how it means slightly different things to different people in reference to Media Center so it does become confusing.  I have always just known folders, files, fields, and metadata.

JRiver doesn't update your tags unless you tell it to.

To my knowledge, I have not told it to unless somewhere I inadvertently turned it on.  With that said, I am assuming that when updating to a new version of Media Center, or an update to a current version, this tag is by default "off", or is left in the position it was in prior to updating.

Is this a universal setting that, when once applied, ceases the updating of tags (metadata field edits) in "all" of your individual library's files/folders?

To shorten the time involved here, could you by chance quickly spell out the menu drop down options for checking that this feature is off in Media Center?

I will continue to look in the interim, but a verification from the source master would be greatly appreciated as I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to do the below function and kind of lucked into it.

In other words, the database doesn't reflect the tags.  You can set MC to keep them in sync.

I believe I found the answer to this question for what I needed to do as I am not familiar with the sync function.  What worked for me, presumably, with the writing of edited "album" field metadata and then having that edited "album" field metadata copy to my flash drive and show up correctly in my vehicle's Kenwood is seen below.

I made a list of the steps for the simpletons out there to hopefully be able to find this rather quickly and go through it if you listen to music in your vehicle which is where I listen to it 90% of the time these days.

TO SAVE “ALBUM” FIELD METADATA EDITS IN JRiver MEDIA CENTER & HAVE IT WRITE TO YOUR BACKUP FILES/FOLDERS FOR COPYING TO A FLASH DRIVE

1.   Make metadata change in “Album” field in JRiver Media Center.
2.   Choose “TOOLS” from drop down.
3.   Click “OPTIONS”.
4.   Select “LIBRARY & FOLDERS”.
5.   Click on “MANAGE LIBRARY FIELDS” under “EXPRESSIONS”.
6.   Ensure that “SAVE IN FILE TAGS (WHEN POSSIBLE)” box is checked.
7.   Highlight all album fields in folder by clicking on track 1 and then holding the “shift” key while simultaneously clicking on the left mouse
        button on the last track.  This is a folder in your music library by the way consisting of all the album files that have been ripped from that
        particular album.
8.   “Right click” on the highlighted area and highlight “TOOLS” from the drop-down menu which brings up an adjacent drop down menu.
9.   Highlight and left click on “UPDATE TAGS (FROM LIBRARY)” in the adjacent drop-down menu.
10.   Presumably, this writes your “ALBUM” field metadata edits in JRiver Media Center to the file/folder.
11.   This was checked and verified on a flash drive copy of album music folders made from JRiver Media Center and plugged into a vehicle
        Kenwood audio system.

Thank you again!  I appreciate your patience as I have worked around a lot of tech people in the past and I know it is frustrating to you all so this is just to verify that I really do appreciate the time and patience.

[markf2748]

FYI: The left side "Tree Tag Pane > Tag Dump" lists the fields with values which are actually written into the selected audio file as tags.  Their grouping and format depend on the audio file type.  For example:

flac:   Vorbis Comment Block
wav:  id3v2.3
mp3: id3v1 and id3v2.3

Unfortunately they are mostly not in alphabetical order, so you have to examine carefully.

All this applies to the currently loaded library and its music files, but it should remain valid for files copied to the flash drive.  To directly examine files on the flash drive, build a new library based on importing files from that drive.