Missing album art

Surely as far as the a new NAS is concerned everything you added, presumably at once, is recently added?

No, I've been running the NAS and a NAC n-172XS / NAP200 for about a year with no problems.  The file created dates on the various flac files vary by over 4 years, which is when I first started converting CDs to HD.

WB

Who knows which bit of metadata its using for "recent." Different programs use different data. I concur with garyi - because you changed something, its probably grabbing that date. Wait 2 weeks and see what happens.

In terms of the album art - the best tool I've come across is Bliss www.blisshq.com Paid software, but well worth it. Can run through your whole collection, automatically clean up metadata and add art (or attach existing art correctly.) You could also use Music Brainz Picard (free) but its much more geeky.

OK folks, thanks for the input.  Looking at the tags, all dates seem to be correct, as do the flac date properties, so it's still a mystery.  Perhaps the Synology index file is corrupted and is not erasing old data.  But I don't know where that's stored, dammit.

WB

I don't want to sound like a jerk, but I think you're missing something fundamental about how and where the data is being stored that - I think - will  help you down the road.

FLAC tag data are stored inside the FLAC files. They are not based on any real standard. Different applications use them differently (and, in fact, you can create your own tags.) There's 2 dimensions to this: the tag labels such as "Artist" vs. "Album Artist" and how the application uses them.  One application could decide to grab "Artist" tag track by track, another "Alum Artist."  Every application you use to control playback needs to suck in the FLAC tag data into its own database to manage browsing, searching and sorting. So, you could change the tag inside the files, and your app still might not update them, or may update them on some schedule (daily, weekly, every hour...)  Your app won't display the changes until it updated its own database.

However, what we suspect you're dealing with here is a 3rd dimension of data.  This data is *outside* the FLAC tags, similar to the "last updated" date on a file on your PC. What we suspect is that the Synology App is using the date from the NAS file system or its own database to control which tracks are "recent" Since you upgraded the NAS, it probably refreshed its own data - whether from the file system or inside the app database - and every file is now being seen as "recent."

You can get all of the FLAC tags right, and your App may still seem to have some errors, or have a lag until it updates its database. 

I see metadata as the main hurdle left for the industry to manage better before streaming can become truly simple.  Its one reason why people like the NServe and iTunes - the application you use to control playback was designed together with the way the metadata is stored, and they both clean up the metadata from their own external sources online. If you are using FLAC files and data from lots of sources, and different control apps, inevitably things will get a bit disconnected - which is exactly what you're experiencing here.

My approach is to try to fix it incrementally, as I have time, and/or when something really annoys me, and otherwise just ignore it.  When I get frustrated with all this, I put on an LP 

OK, thanks Mutterback, I guess I'll just wait and see if it fixes itself.  It's just frustrating that something that worked perfectly under software version 4, doesn't work under the "new and improved" version 5.  Nothing's been changed except for the Synology update, and it's not possible to wind back to version 4.  Ah well, this is not the first time - I still prefer Windows 7 (or DOS for that matter!) to Win8.

Cheers

WB