Ripping CDs and Album Art

On a PC I use dbpoweramp, you confirm the album art at rip time and its added with no issues - I also use it to rip MP3 and flac at the same time, so I have hi res and portable audio.

If you have previous flac rips without art, you now right click on the files and use their search tool or copy from the web/clipboard and it update the files. Or you can get their Album art tool to go through all your previous files.

+1.

No idea how FairStars handles errors on the disc but db's database check and error recovery is tops. Have a read of the website.

+2.  DBpoweramp really is hard to beat for both error correction & tag edits

If the album art is placed in the same directory as the track files as a JPG called folder.jpg the server will pick it up and display it provided that the tags in the track files point to this JPG.

Hi John,

A couple of things.  First, there are two ways album art is handled.  With flac files, the album are can be embedded into the file itself.  Additionally, the album art can be in a separate file (commonly named folder.jpg) stored in the same folder as the music files.  Your cd ripper (or Album Art Downloader) may be doing the former.  You can look into your folders and see if it's doing the latter; I suspect it's not.

What the Naim app 'sees' for album art is only what the server running on your ReadyNas is sending to it.  I have no idea if that server is looking for a file named folder.jpg and/or whether it's looking for art embedded within the flac files.  (Note: some servers need to be told to look for a file named folder.jpg; there often is a setting for this.) 

Ultimately, you need to know what the server wants.  But if you want to use the belts and braces approach, do both. 

Don't blame me, what Mac users have to use instead of dbpoweramp? AFAIK iTunes on Alac, right?

mp3tag is excellent for editing tags and adding album art to your ripped files on the NAS drive.  When the automatically stored album art isn't correct or missing, I scan or photograph the cover from the actual CD or screen copy one from an online music web store, though these are usually low quality images.  Old classical recordings can be reissued many times with different covers and it can sometimes be difficult to find a preferred version.

I use EAC for eipping and complete everything in MP3 tag. Sometimes I have an issue with music which I downloaded in which cases I directly copy the JPEG under the name folder.jpg in the music folder. While I think my problems are less prominent as I have everything in Flac.

+1 for eac with the flac plug in

+3

Dave

Mac -- XLD to rip, Metadatics to edit tags/metadata. 

Thank you Bart and Wat, I appreciate, grazie 

Thanks everyone for the replys!

I'll have a look DBpoweramp. I've downloaded MP3 tag and have started to use it on a few folders to see how it goes.

For info, I'm a PC user (Win 7), and have the album art jpeg named Folder. It comes through right about 95% of the time but is a bit frustrating when it doesn't, or has the wrong artwork for the album (confusing).

Good to know there's so much help here!

Cheers

John

Cheers John.  If the flac files have the right art embedded in them, and there is a file named folder.jpg in the same folder as the music files, and if the particular server knows to look for folder.jpg for art, then it SHOULD always work.

That said, I recently updated MinimServer on my nas.  MinimServer is a very good server.  The first time I went to browse albums after the update -- the art and some other info was a bit scrambled!  I clicked Joni Mitchell Blue, and got Elvis' Blue Christmas.  I re-scanned the library (which with MinimServer takes only about a minute; it's really fast!) and all was sorted.  What happened? Who knows.

Thanks Bart,

think the important word is "should" !

I'm try MP3tag at present and upto the Gs, will report later after re scanning.

Cheers

John

Are you clearing the cache on n-stream (or whatever its called now)? You need to do this every time that you go add a new file to the NAS or things can get thrown off very much like you are describing. Plus another for dbpoweramp on Mac. It's very fast and accurate, though sometimes it won't find more obscure things that iTunes will. 

I'm so excited, I downloaded MP3tag and worked through most of my ripped CDs, re-scanned the NAS and cleared the cache on the Naim app.

Art work now seems to be where it should be!

Thanks all for the advice.

Cheers

John

DBpoweramp (Beta) is native on Mac's, works perfectly, no real use for my virtual machine now...great