FLAC meta revolution

antmast posted:

Why do we have to make all flacs in the same album have the same artist in the artist field. This is so so unacceptable. We need a new field to create an album among flacs and leave the artist field, which is full of very nice information, alone. Who makes these standards? Who do we b to about  getting some improvements on these old standards written in stone.

Yes the metadata works but that is no reason to never improve upon it. Honestly we need a release schedule for the flac metadata changes. Make things more better,

I do not know who/what is forcing you to have all tracks of an album share the same artist value. Every decent UPnP server supports multiple artist values and artist values are file (that is, track) specific, not album specific. Indeed, I have a lot of albums with different artist values for different tracks, typically opera albums but also jazz albums and, of course, compilations.

You don't have. And yes you have a field named Album. FLAC file format only leave space for the metadata it doesn't rule what fields nor what the fields contain.

Like nbpf I have loads of albums with various different artists on different tracks.

I use the albumartist field to determine what artist name shows up in the Naim app when searching by artist (ie to get to the below example I search for Beethoven), and the per-track artists show up underneath the individual track titles.

IIRC this is how minimserver does things by default, but it should be doable with other server software. It's certainly nothing to do with the flac format itself.

Example screenshot from my phone:

If you state what upnp server are used this post would make more sense. My guess is that you are using Core or one of the old Naim servers. The old servers are really not that flexible about what tags are permitted in the flac files stored on the nas. However in the files stored on the servers at least  the old servers there are no problems.

Claus

antmast posted:

Why do we have to make all flacs in the same album have the same artist in the artist field. This is so so unacceptable. We need a new field to create an album among flacs and leave the artist field, which is full of very nice information, alone. Who makes these standards? Who do we b to about  getting some improvements on these old standards written in stone.

Yes the metadata works but that is no reason to never improve upon it. Honestly we need a release schedule for the flac metadata changes. Make things more better,

Bizarre - I don't think you are referring to file meta data - but more the presentation rules adopted by your UPnP server - what are you using. Remember the app/streamer can only show what the UPnP software sends it - and in turn that software reads all the metadata available on the file and makes a decision on how to display it.... the more FLAC file cant do much about that and even then it is reliant on what the ripper/publisher maps to it

Let's get a little bit of basic information from you, Antmast.

What ripper are you using?   What UPNP server are you using?  Asset?  Twonky? Minimserver?   Something else?

I suspect that you most likely don't understand the concept of how to set your metadata.

For compilation albums make sure you have the 'compilation' box ticked in your ripper.  Set 'Album Artist' to something that will describe the entire album, or just leave it blank, in which case your ripper will insert 'Various Artists' for you when it writes the metadata.  As an example of what I would set the 'Album Artist' field to, consider an album of music from a popular musical, such as the original London cast of 'Les Miserables'.   There, I would set the 'Album Artist' field to 'Les Miserables, London Cast'

Set 'Artist' for each individual track - using the correct artist's name of course!

Set 'Title' to whatever the album is called.

All a bit of a faff, but it makes life so much easier when you have a large collection.

I do this for all my new rips, as I don't like the standard ripper method of ripping using the artist field as 'John Smith', and always change this to 'Smith, John'.  Seems a bit 'anal', but with a very large collection, but IMO it's much easier to have the artists arranged by surname rather than first name.

Your UPNP server will then show you the album in various ways.  You will find it in artist/album as 'various artists', in 'Album' by its title.  If you search through the 'artist' part of the view, you will find the individual songs under the correct artist name.  Problem solved.

Personally, I just try to remember the name of the compilation album and search for it in the 'album' part of the UPNP presented view.   This is helped by my other 'anal' trait of keeping a text file with all my music included, so that I can just search that to find a song title etc and can see there which album it is on.   I've looked at the record album databases but the thought of re-entering thousands of albums is appalling.

 I like this site.

The old Unitiserve ripper/player/server in my setup services my Simaudio DAC with a Moon Mind Controller card inside for the store front display, Now the Unitiserve as long as I have been familiar with it, has this restriction of the artist field. You can't get an album unless you make all the artist the same. So what are you guys doing? Using a third party UPNP server? Is that the secret?  Aren't u sacrificing  sound quality by using the outboard UPNP?  And what field in the metadata are you using, you say? And what outboard UPNP?

antmast posted:

 I like this site.

... Now the Unitiserve as long as I have been familiar with it, has this restriction of the artist field. You can't get an album unless you make all the artist the same. So what are you guys doing? Using a third party UPNP server? Is that the secret?  Aren't u sacrificing  sound quality by using the outboard UPNP?  And what field in the metadata are you using, you say? And what outboard UPNP?

I use MinimServer and populate the fields "title", "artist" (typically with multiple values for a file/track), "albumartist", "composer", "conductor", "date", "ensemble", "form" and "genre" (also typically with multiple values), "work" (composition) and a few more. I do not know whether (how much) sound quality I am sacrificing but, bluntly said, Naim's UPnP servers are unusable for classical music. Classical music is my main interest. Thus, I am using a UPnP server that offers good support for classical music. You should be able to keep your files on the US and have them served by MinimServer or Asset running on a networked machine. A Raspberry Pi 3 is more than enough.

Please what are you using to get around the Unitiserve restriction? Is it the ripper?

You need a different server. I sold my Serve and bought a NAS, and it sounded better. A Synology with MinimServer or a Qnap with MinimServer or Asset will give you full control of metadata. Rip albums with dbpoweramp. Alternatively, keep the Serve and set all the tracks to the same artist. 

Interesting. I am have lots of operas, symphonies, and various artists albums also. Will experiment with this.

I did a side by side comparison of music streamed by Synology/MinimServer and the UnitiServe, sad to say,  a bit of the bass component of the music is missing on the MinimServer for my ears. I have no doubt the tag support is better. Can the MinimServer be configured to recognize the UnitiServe as a viable work around,  or is there another UPnP server.

Man, this is turning into a diary. MinimServer works fine. It seems the UnitiServer puts things out at a slightly higher volume. I moved my speakers a bit close for the MinimServer and it plays great. Thanks. Now for the monster retagging to 3000 albums. Fun, fun, fun

antmast posted:

Man, this is turning into a diary. MinimServer works fine. It seems the UnitiServer puts things out at a slightly higher volume. I moved my speakers a bit close for the MinimServer and it plays great. Thanks. Now for the monster retagging to 3000 albums. Fun, fun, fun

If you are interested in classical music and opera MinimServer is almost mandatory. It supports user-specific indexes and offers very flexiible renaming and sorting schemes. It is worth spending some time reading the user guide, in my view. If you go for MinimServer, do not forget to also install MinimWatch and MinimStreamer. The first application allows you to manage (upgrade, configure) MinimServer instances remotely. It works extremely well. MinimStreamer adds transcoding capabilities to MinimServer. I have set it to transcode my .flac files to .wav. Take it easy with retagging: it is an iterative process that virtually never ends. In the beginning, I have found it useful to have a text file in which I collect the most common values for my indexes. It took me a few months to get my collection tagged the way I like. But now browsing the collection is a pleasure and search paths like "period -> composer -> composition -> conductor" or "genre -> form -> ensemble" allow me to find the music I am looking for in a breeze. Do not forget that MinimServer meanwhile supports opening the booklet of an album in the control point if the latter honours this feature. BubbleUPnP does it and being able to access the liner notes on the fly greatly improves the listening experience, in my view. Have fun, nbpf