How to organise a UPnP collection?

Posted by: Goon525 on 19 February 2013

I'm driving my SU from a NAS, wired via an Apple Extreme router, and that's all working just fine. But I'm finding, as I download more stuff, that the organisation of it is becoming messy. The bulk of the collection is classical, and I find music may be sorted by the conductor's first name, or other not terribly logical things. As my download library grows, I can see this becoming a real issue. I'm not after a player or a ripper, just some good guidance (or software recommendation) on how to start playing with the metadata effectively. Help gratefully received. 

Posted on: 19 February 2013 by southern man
 
 

Hi Goon525,

I don't pretend to be an expert in this, but I have spent many 100s of hours in the last few months tackling the same challenges.

From my experience (about 2-300 CDs onto a Vortexbox NAS), classical CDs are more complex than non-classical, but that's partly because I want more info per track/album.

For software, I have found foobar to be quite useful for changing tags, even though I still haven't worked out exactly how the UPnP display determines which tag to show (composer,artist,album artist) when more than one has been filled in. However, I suspect some patient trial and error would answer that ........ maybe later

 
Posted on: 20 February 2013 by mutterback

There's no easy answer.

 

The one thing I'd recommend you start with is your own personal guidelines and follow them consistently. I find these helpful: http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Classical#Guidelines Having said that, implementing these guidelines would take a huge amount of time - more than I choose to invest myself....

 

Musicbrainz also has a free tag editor called Picard. It's incredibly powerful, but takes time to figure out, and can easily change tags on 100s of files at once (a double edged sword).

 

A much simpler method I use is Bliss. http://www.blisshq.com which will make some tags consistent, particularly with genres.

 

I'd focus on Genre and Album & Track Artist, and Composer to start with. Not sure Naim App supports search by Composer, as I don't use the app. But, with those three, I think you can get most of the way there.

 

Editing track names so you get the whole work title in there also helps, but can be a lot of typing:

1-Sonata_No._3_in_C_major,_Op._2_No._3_I._Allegro_con_brio.flac  vs. I._Allegro_con_brio.flac

Posted on: 20 February 2013 by Goon525

Thanks to southern man and mutterback for responses to date. I should have made it clear that I DO use the Naim apps for control of my NAS.

Posted on: 20 February 2013 by PinkHamster

Hi Goon,

 

You might try this:

 

https://forums.naimaudio.com/di...85#23389351208834485

Posted on: 20 February 2013 by Goon525

Thanks for the link, Hamster. Actually caused me to contribute to that debate on another matter.

Posted on: 21 February 2013 by Goon525

If anyone else is interested, and is principally interested in classical, the new (March) issue of Gramophone has a full page article on this very subject, and recommends Bliss, which I think I will be trying. It looks like it does precisely what I need, and is free for the first 100 fixes.

Posted on: 21 February 2013 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Goon, using upnp you should find the physical structure of your files is largely irrelevant, and simply having a directory for each album would work. The metadata is built into a database by the upnp server. This allows you to search and browse by any category within your meta data such as genre, composer, album artist, recording label, instrument etc. Asset is a upnp server that supports this, and works well with Nstream. You also create your own meta data tags for your own unique organisational attributes if you require such as musical key. Additionally you can define your own virtual directories using meta data as appropriate. 

Simon