Artwork

Dear John,

How exactly do you "ask" iTunes to embedd album art ? If you go through the "find album art automatically" option, it often does not work. What you need is that iTunes embedds the art directly into the record-file. This is done by selecting the records of the album, go onto "show info", go to Illustrations and dbl-click the picture frame. Than select the jpg for the art. This is a lot (!!) of manual work since you have to first download and locate the art-picture.

My experience is that dbPoweramp works a bit more automated on this and is easier to use.

Cheers,

Iver

You should use Bliss, you won't need to do all the manual work. iTunes uses its own format for album art and rips music into an amazingly complex folder structure. Bliss will crank through your entire collection automatically, asssign artwork and clean up the folders.

Another method is MusicBrainz Picard, but I find it complex.  Bliss is something like 10 GBP, Picard is free. but I've found Bliss well worth it. http://www.blisshq.com creator of Bliss also wrote a  very good free guide to ripping and organizing a music server.

I'd also uggest you use something like MAX or dbPowerAmp (coming sometime soon for Mac) to rip your CDs. These give you a lot more flexibility to manage the way the files are ripped and organized. There are several good programs. then, the import into iTunes is really easy.

I'd like to ask about album artwork.

I have the download of meet me in London and the NServe software just doesn't recognize the album art which is in PNG format. Additionally I have problems with album art from other download sites such as HD Tracks and also that nice free download of the Goldberg Variations.

I have a copy of TAG and Musicbrainz as my metadata editors but whatever I do the software just doesn't display the artwork.

Cheers

Tim

Tim, the way I deal with artwork is always to include the .jpg file as "folder.jpg" within the folder that has the music files.  I have zero problems when doing it that way; I don't use a metadata editor to 'tag' files with the artwork; I just do it this way and it works every time with the uServe and NDS!

I also just include a cover*.jpg or cover*.png in my album folders. This works for the Logitech Server. It can tell it, what to look for. You should explore your server software for a similar function. Make sure that both formats, .jpg and .png are recognised. AFAIK Naim streamers can deal with both as long as they are served to them properly.

But if you also want the album art to show up in iTunes you need to embed it into the audio files, if the tags are set outside of iTunes.

Thanks for the advice.

I have just gone into a couple of the music folders and made a copy of the album artwork and renamed it folder.png for the meet me in london album and tried another album and did the same with a jpg file.

Lets see what happens.

Tim

It has to be jpg. this is not unique to naim, it a very common way of doing things especially with upnp. Find the album artwork on google. Download, name folder.jpg and put in the relevant folder of music.

Or use bliss, which will do this for you.

Thanks everyone, I seems that bilss is the answer, I'm away from home for a few days and run the programme on a small library on the mac book(200 albums) and it works beautifully, now I cat wait to apply it to the 1 TB collection on the NAS at home, it will be great to get this sorted then I can sit back and enjoy the music.

Didn't work for me. Additionally if I go into the Music Store or any network share that the UNitiserve uses it seems to trigger the unit to apply a unrecognized IP address to it.

However I will try Bliss.

Tim

Still Frustrated....

After all the initial excitement of finding bliss and running it I now find out that Bliss does not support AIFF files which the majority of my rips are in, the programme managed to sort artwork for over 1000 albums and do it in a very simple way. I must say Dan Gravell from Bliss was very helpful with tech support but I'm still left with all these albums without art, plus I still have another 300 CD to rip, so what do I do?

I tired a programme to convert an AIFF into FLAC but that messed up the indexing system, besides it would be a very tedious exercise to do that to over 1000 files.

I've tried ripping with XLD but that rips music to the NAS as individual tracks instead of neat folders(can't find anything in settings o change that)

MAX sounds good and I will experiment with that today.

db poweramp sounds like a good programme when it's available for mac, I should think it would do a similar job as Bliss.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

indeed it's not right Bart, in the settings theres an option to "use temporary folder, then move to destination" thats ticked. Everyone raves about XLD and I would like to rip the rest of my music in FLAC, I must be missing something.

Do you have it organising files. Perhaps you need to check the preferences again.

I am not familiar with XLD, but usualy you can specify the destination folder and file name as a combination of a fixed path plus individual settings per album. This could look something like this:

C:\add Music\flac\%album artist%\%album%\%artist% - %title%

halleluja, I have XLD working properly, of course it was 1 tick in the settings(automatically split files)

Thanks all for your feedback.

John, which sub-menu is that in? I looked and didn't see it.

Glad to hear you're in a better spot now with your ripping!