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[MaNdraK]

hi, i am considering upgrading to mc12, and reading the reports, i think i will...

however, i have mc10.0.173 and have few questions. i bet that all have been answered before, but I SWEAR i am not taking the lazy route - i've spent few hours looking through the forum to find the answers but, no luck.

1. I have few albums that are in mp3 stored on my hard disk, have lost the cd's. when i try to tag them (select all tracks, right click "look up the track info on YADB") - NO chance. it works fine if i load the original cd and try to encode it/import it to mc, but not if i have an album in mp3...it will tag 1 or 2 songs sometimes, and usually from the wrong albums. is this normal? if not, how can i tag them?

2. Duplicates: imagine i have two albums, one a rock compilation, and the second one a ac/dc album, and they both have the song "back in black". is there a way to erase one of the songs, but when i choose either of the albums i would like to be able to see/play the song in both of them. preferably with different tagging (to correspond to the album), but not necessarily. possible?

3. In every album folder, i have cover art picture. When i go through directory on the left hand side, drives and devices, access my hard disc from there, open a folder, click on a song, the art pops up! that does not happen when i play through media library\audio...why? do i have to download some plug-in?

thank you, i appreciate your time.

MaNdraK

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some day you're a pigeon, some day a statue.

[bspachman]

Hi there!

I won't be a definitive source, but I may be able to point you in the right direction.

1) I'm no YADB expert, but in your case, I'd look to other places on the internet for track information: Amazon, Artist Info within MC, etc. Doing a few albums manually shouldn't be too awful. As for why the lookups fail, my guess is that with the CD, they start with the emedded codes on the media. If they aren't available, then YADB falls back to its audio fingerprint ID methods, which can be a little unreliable...

2) If you mean deleting 1 of the physical files from the hard drive, sure. Just modify the path of one of your library entries to point to the remaining physical file.

3) I think option you need to change here is Options->File Location->Track Image Location. In the dropdown list box, change it to "Next to File" with the appropriate naming scheme for your images. They show when you navigate through the drive/devices tree because MC is actually browsing your hard drive in that part of the tree instead of relying on its internal database.

Hope this helps,
Brad

[JimH]

CD lookup and track lookup are completely different and use different databases.

Ripping a CD uses CD lookup and TOC.

The fingerprinting method for track lookup works extremely well, but the database is much younger so has fewer entries. 

[Alex B]

2) If you mean deleting 1 of the physical files from the hard drive, sure. Just modify the path of one of your library entries to point to the remaining physical file.

MC does not allow two (or more) identical complete filename paths (path & name) for separate library files.

MC avoids possible filename duplicates by automatically changing an entered duplicate filename to "[Filename] (n).xxx", where (n) is (1), (2), (3) etc. I.e. MC adds a sequence number in parenthesis.

About two years ago I explained how a cue sheet can be used for creating "virtual" tracks, but the system is not practical. It is quite complex and involves a lot of manual work. It is better to just keep the few duplicates. Back then I created a few cue sheet based "Best Of" albums that consists of tracks from artists' main albums, but I have not bothered to continue creating them.

Sometimes I create virtual best of albums with a playlist, like in this example: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=33953.msg231763#msg231763. Unfortunately, a playlist cannot appear as an individual album in a view scheme.

(Edit: Changed the quote to link. It was a bit OT.)

[bspachman]

MC does not allow two (or more) identical complete filename paths (path & name) for separate library files.

MC avoids possible filename duplicates by automatically changing an entered duplicate filename to "[Filename] (n).xxx", where (n) is (1), (2), (3) etc. I.e. MC adds a sequence number in parenthesis.

Well, color me embarrassed... I admit to not having tried this, but man, it sure seemed like a logical solution....

I guess this begs the question as to why MC cares what the filename is for a library entry?

brad

[hit_ny]

How else could MC distinguish between files if they had the same filename

note when i say filename i using MC speak for the term, there are 3 fields MC uses

filename = path+filename

filename(name) is just filename.ext
filename (path) is volume: + path

[bspachman]

How else could MC distinguish between files if they had the same filename

I guess the more I think about it, the more I see the problems that would result if you could assign arbitrary filenames to library entries.

At first, I was only thinking of the upside, which would be to solve the OP's problem of wanting to eliminate multiple copies of the same song on his drive. If you could have multiple library entries pointing to the same file, you wouldn't need to create a work-around like AlexB's.

Of course, the main problem is what happens when you edit the library entries that point to that file, right?

brad

[dcwebman]

FWIW, having aliases for songs so that one song could appear in multiple albums has been an often requested feature for many years. Things like that and the new tabs are just simple examples of what can make MC stand out among the crowd.

[benn600]

But the funny part is, sine I use FLAC, I see the bit rate for each song.  I find that no two songs are ever the same bit rate--when you consider identical songs.  They are also usually a second or two off which just shows that there are still differences, and in some cases, a single words can be different which I have noticed with "clean" versions of certain songs.  But even beyond that, absolutely identical songs are added to discs at different levels (therefore affecting the bit rate) and like I said, this defeats the purpose of removing identical songs because they are not technically identical.  Plus, you may not realize there are slight differences without listening to both amazingly carefully (basically impossible to be sure).

I also find it's not worth deleting duplicates.  Since I use my Xbox for playing music, I like keeping duplicates because it browses my NAS file system.  So, if I deleted duplicates, one of the albums wouldn't have a certain track in it.  That would be somewhat annoying.  It just isn't worth the pain.

I rate duplicates 2 stars (my lowest rating...1=talk or really long stuff like meditation pieces) and that way, they won't get synchronized to my portable player.  And I have plenty of space to store a few hundred MB's or even a few GB's of extras.  The pain, potential for problems, and general confusion that could be created is no where near worth it.

You are also not keeping a complete collection (or backup) assuming you're ripping to FLAC (mp3 doesn't even if you keep all the tracks).