Print

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

[jmone]

How does everyone manage multiple versions of the same album (eg I have say the std CD + a High Res Version), do you:
1) Give them different Album Names
2) Try to use Stacks

Thanks
Nathan

[MrC]

I append something like "[2009 version]" to the album title.  This can affect CD track and artwork lookups though.

[Scolex]

I use customize view.
For example I have the following under Audio:
Panes Low with "Set rules for file display" as File Type\is\mp3
Panes High with "Set rules for file display" as File Type\is\flac; wav

[Frobozz]

I do the same as MrC.  I add something unique and descriptive within square brackets to the end of the album name.

My common patterns are:
[Remastered]
[Bonus Tracks]
[Bonus Tracks] [Remastered]

If there have been multiple releases or remasterings I'll do something like
[Remastered 2001]
[Columbia Legacy 1999]
[40th Anniversary]
[Deluxe Edition]

For high res I add the bit rate and sample rate
[24/88200]
[24/96000]

[jmone]

OK - I'm doing the same for now, eg:
1) CD Rips to Flac + make a MP3 of these as a Stack
2) HiRes (eg 24bit/96khz) added as a "new" album titled "Album Name - Hi Res" to keep them separate.  Unfortunately I've had to resort to a 3rd party tagger for these (Tag&Rename pulling data from Amazon) - the JR either finds nil results or incorrect tags.  How is everone else getting the Meta Data for these ones?

[rick.ca]

How is everyone else getting the Meta Data for these ones?

If the track names are okay, I've always found it easier to tag manually. But wouldn't the MC lookup work if you simply modified the album name afterwards?

[Frobozz]

If I need to do a tag lookup, either within MC or outside of MC using a third party utility, I remove the square bracket square bracket info before doing the lookup.  Then I add the square bracket info back after the lookup.

It would be neat if MC could be set to ignore the square bracket bits in the album title when doing things like a cover art lookup and cover art submission.

[bspisak]

CD Rips to Flac + make a MP3 of these as a Stack

I just started doing the same thing (flac for archiving the CD and MP3 for portable devices) and thought stacks were the way to go.  (Isn't this what they were designed to do? - Not sure of the history here.)

I just put the flac and mp3 in the same physical location and tag them both the same.

I then stack the two versions of each track together. You can do this all in one operation by selecting the entire album and using Stacks->Advanced->Autostack by Name, et. al. MC asks which file you want on top of the stack, and you can select flac or mp3. The top of the stack is the one that it plays when you add the track to playing now. You can expand the stack and filter the results to get the other version or create a separate view scheme that will show you only mp3s or only flac.

Unfortunately I've had to resort to a 3rd party tagger for these ...  the JR either finds nil results or incorrect tags.  How is everone else getting the Meta Data for these ones?

If you have the metadata for the mp3, but not the flac, you just select both files at once, open the Tag Action Window, then for each tag you want to make the same (it will say [varies]) select it in the Tag window, scroll to the correct tag value and it will copy it to the other file.

There's probably a faster/cleaner/easier way to do this, but this has worked fine the couple times I've done it so far.

[rick.ca]

There's probably a faster/cleaner/easier way to do this...

Depending on how many files are involved and how consistent the filenames are, it might be easier to export a playlist of the tagged album, edit the playlist to point to the other files (easy if just a matter of changing .mp3 to .flac), and then import the playlist.

[glynor]

How does everyone manage multiple versions of the same album (eg I have say the std CD + a High Res Version), do you:
1) Give them different Album Names
2) Try to use Stacks

This original question is a bit old, but I thought I'd chime in quickly... I have two methods:

1. If they are not identical albums and include additional content (ie. a re-release that includes additional tracks) then I give them different Album tags.
2. If they are identical albums other than formatting concerns (ie a multichannel version and a stereo version, an original mono and re-released stereo version, or a FLAC version and a MP3 version) then I use stacks.

Basically, if I want to be able to select and use one of the versions as my "default play" type, and I only want to keep those additional versions for "special purposes or circumstances" then I use stacks.  If it contains different content, then it is a different album as far as I'm concerned.  Mostly, things end up working well with stacks (type #2).  A good example would be the Pink Floyd reissue of Piper at the Gates of Dawn.  I had the original mono release for a long time.  Then they re-released a "remastered stereo-expanded version".  I'm not a purist and so I listened to the new version and liked it, so I stacked it "on top of" my original mono version of the same album.  I wanted to keep the mono version just for good measure, but I didn't really need to use it very often, it was mostly kept for archive and completeness purposes.

A good counter example I've run into a lot is my largish collection of Aphex Twin/Richard D James stuff.  He constantly issued different versions of albums for different places (Japan vs US vs Europe), or even sometimes just with different labels (the BMG version of RDJ The Album was quite different from the "original" release).  These versions were often substantially different from one another, including different tracks, with tracks in different orders, or even divided up into multiple discs differently (and in a few cases, tracks with the same song "title" were actually quite different songs).  These, where I have the different versions, get tagged with separate album tags.

Lastly, I'll occasionally do a "hybrid approach".  If an album is re-released with identical content but then has a bunch of "bonus tracks" tacked onto the end, I usually only keep the extended version.  However, if there is a reason to keep the original version (the subsequent release was remastered, for example) then I'll lop off the "bonus tracks" and tag them as a separate album, and stack the versions of the "original album".

Stacks are nice because you can choose which of the versions you like best and then stack that on top.  In some cases, remastering makes things worse.  In those cases, it might be nice to have the remastered version for some reason (maybe one or two tracks are good), but then I'll stack the original on top because that's the experience I generally want when I just play the songs.