Flac Tagging

Hi Shing

I had a similar issue converting my iTunes library to FLAC on my NAS using dbPoweramp.  To get round the problem I filled in the ArtistAlbum field for all my albums and used this to create the folder structure. I set this to Various Artisits for the compilations. When I converted my compilations I also set the relevant compilation flag to true (which is easy to do in dbPoweranp).

I'm pretty sure this isn't the most elegant solution, but it worked for me!

Gavin

shing,

as Gavin already said, the Albumartist tag is the key to your problem. An album will be shown as 1 album if, all tracks have the same album tag, the same albumartist tag and are stored in the same folder. You can actually omit the compilation tag, the common albumartis will do the trick.

So for something like "The Concert for Bangla Desh," what would you select for the AlbumArtist tag?

Unfortunately one of the annoying quirks of the HDX. As far as I've been able to reverse engineer what is going on, the HDX uses the Artist tag to determine who the album artist is (hence 16 versions of the album) and doesn't look at the compilation tag at all. When the HDX rips a CD it will use the data on the lookup service to populate an XML file in the root folder containing the performer details ( the equivalent of the albumartist tag) and then uses this to get the details of the track artist into the HDX's music database, so you can search for tracks by performer and everything is neatly organised. However, if you have your own rips in any container format (flac, alac, etc) it does seem to be aware of the AlbumArtist or compilation tag. Interestingly if you buy a flac album from the Naim label, you get this xml file with all the meta data in it, so you can properly add the metadata to HDX's music database.

We've been promised improved meta data control on the HDX, which was in part delivered in the last release of the N-serve app. But I don't think it nearly goes far enough. The HDX's design seems to be primary for Ripping and storing your own CDs, and the handling of your other music media is a bit of an after thought, although it does seem to be improving with each release.

At one of the Naim event a couple of years ago I talked to TJ about the issue and he suggested that I rename the artist to Various on all the songs and put the artist in the song title.

Hope that makes sense,

Rich

Shing,

   An interesting thread. I have used an HDX for a few years now and all my music is ripped through the HDX in WAV format.

I have almost 4000 albums of which there are 600 various artist compilation albums.

Out of this i have only ever had the issue described with one lbum. All The others have ripped and catalogued fine

I keep the album albumartist tag empty for comps and just set the comp tag to 1. This works fine with Asset UPnP. Thanks!

It  would be "Various Artists", while the artist tags would contain the names of the track performers.

Thanks; I will try this!

Thanks for all the replies. I tried setting the using the mac program TAG

1) compilation flag to true

2) Album artist

all came to a big fat zero. Sure beats the heck out of me!!!!

Then I remembered, I have a TAG&RENAME under windows, I might as well try her. LO and BEHOLD it WORKS...i just set the button to "IT'S A COMPILATION" and save and BINGO!!!!

I have compared the metadata before and after change using TAG and TAG&RENAME - it sure looks the same to me...but I am no genius therefore YMMV

It's a shame I can't do this under MAC but have to resort to booting up windows to resolve this. Nevertheless I am still a happy chap!!!

on further investigation, the above reply does not work. My bad....RHR comment were valid, that HDX uses the Album Artist tag for "album sorting" which is a real shame. I mistakenly rename ALL the album artist to "test" and HDX shows it as a single album. I tried using the compilation tag but HDX still shows me 16 of the same album for all the 16 songs in that album. This is driving me nuts.

On another note, can someone recommend a MAC metadata editor for batch renaming of the TITLE tag to rename the TITLE tag to <artistname> - <song title> ? TAG does not have a batch utility. TAG and RENAME, I thought it had one but till this day, I only figured out how to rename physical filenames using metadata. Can't seem to figure out how to batch rename metadata tags using the metadata tags...eg rename the TITLE tag using the ARTIST NAME concatenate with TITLE. I am missing something?

Thanks for all the comments

Shing,

let me give you a specific example.

Albumartist: Various Artists

Album: Italian Love Songs

Title (track 1): Ti amo

Artist (track 1): Georgina

Title (track 2): Amore

Artist (track 2): Toni Leone

etc.

The key is the combination of albumartist and album tags. These will define what will be presented as albums. The compilation tag is only a workaround where the albumartist tag is not populated. In this case the complilation tag will treat the files as if the albumartist was filled with Various Artists.

dear pink hamster, the above framework gave me 7 albums. total songs in the album is 16 songs. Reason it only gave 7 albums, the whole album consist of 7 unique Artist. However when I change ALL the Artist to "test artist", Albumartist - "various artist", I will get a single album but alas, no real artist name. Therefore the suggestion to rename the title to <artist> concatenate with <title> really sounds good to me now. At least I am able to get a single compilation album with some sort of artist and title. And I am lost as to how to populate the TITLE tag with <artist>concatenate with <title> in a batches. I know i can do it one by one in TAG and TAG&RENAME.....but surely there must be an easier way to dig my way out of this metadata hell right?

Thanks for the example pink hamster...

Hmm, looks like the HDX completely ignores the albumartist tag. I really have no clue why Naim ignores the ways of the world in so many repects ....

I'm afraid I don't have any good advice re tagging under iOS. Under Windows there are Mp3tag and Foobar2000 and dbpoweramp and EAC and so many more. With all of them you can perform naming and tagging routines such as adding an artist's name to the title tag.

On the Mac, I have been using Metadatics, available from the App store.  Not free but I have found it covers 100% of my requirements.  It costs £5.99 but supports mp3, aiff, flac not sure about wav though.  Check it out.

It seems to be well supported as well, I had some initial questions and e-mailed the developer who responded pretty much immediately!

This is the blurb from the app store:

Metadatics is a powerful and advanced audio metadata editor. It supports batch editing of most common audio file types including MP3, M4A, AIFF, WAV, FLAC, APE, OGG, WMA, and more. Lookup metadata from online sources, rename files based on metadata, or manipulate metadata using one of the many built in functions. Metadatics provides all you need to edit metadata with ease and flexibility. 

Main Features:

• Batch Editing - Edit multiple files at once quickly and easily.
• Functions - Metadatics has a number of built in function to quickly manipulate data. Replace text, remove characters from the beginning or end of a tag, generate number sequences, copy from tag-to-tag, and much more!
• Online Sources - Search for album artwork and tags from sources including Amazon and MusicBrainz.
• Album Artwork - Metadatics supports reading and writing multiple images per file. Artwork can be extracted from files and saved as a separate image file. You can also search for artwork from online sources including Amazon.
• File Rename - Generate directory structures and rename files based on metadata.
• Support For Many Metadata Formats - Metadatics supports reading and writing ID3v1, ID3v2, MP4, Vorbis, APE, and ASF tags all from a variety of audio file types.

Share your frustration!  the HDX's poor handling or 'Artists' and 'People' has been cause for complaint for many years now and unfortunately Naim seem to have little interest in correcting same.

Its not just the HDX that suffers from the compilation issue have come across it on various software including my car audio system. It effects not only compilations but also albums which have various guest artists.  Thankfully as a Windows user I manage the problem with dbPoweramp in which I select all tracks and set the  'Artist' and 'Album name' to the same setting for all tracks. Unfortunately the HDX does not recognise individual track artists so if its important to you, you have to insert same into the track name which can be edited. The same policy from Naim is a major irritation when handling classical albums which often contain material from different composers/conductors/and artists as a norm but none of these can be edited on a track by track basis. Very shortsighted.

I think much of this is the perception that Naim have of HDX owners who they pigeonhole as follows

-We should only be interested in ripping CD's to hard disk using the HDX drive.

-We have limited or no interest in downloading music to store on the HDX.

-Downloaded music is nothing to do with Naim its 'our' music not 'theirs' so their support of same (On the HDX) is limited.

-We have little interest in backing up to NAS and accept that the internal hard disk might fail (which is why you cant backup the 'download' directory using the HDX utility)

-Editing the standard HDX Tag for internally ripped albums is of little interest.  

-Customers with any serious download interest will go for the NX0X series.

I may have taken some license with Naims comments over the years but I feel the essence of the above is correct and find the attitude utterly misguided.

When purchased my HDX, I like most HDX Owners had a huge collection of CD's which needed ripping and the HDX produced an immediate quick simple solution. As soon as I was able to set up a wired network I installed a NAS because working with PC's and a daily basis I know very well its not a question of 'if' a hard disk with fail but when. (Especially the larger capacity drives)

Now my collection of CD's is ripped I am looking more and more towards buying downloaded albums espcially with the availaibility of the HI Def formats I.E. the way I use my HDX is evolving as circumstances and technology change, Naim seem unable to grasp this fact.

Gradual development in both Naim Desktop and n-Serve in combination are improving matters but you have to use both utilities. would be useful if Desktop incorporated all the flexibility of n-serve as manging the music from a laptop/Pc is much easier then using an Ipad. 

Dont get me wrong I love the HDX and would not be without it, however with a few tweaks it could be so much more user friendly.

Afraid I may have wandered a little off topic but do feel that the root cause of the problem is Naim's approach to way the HDX is programmed and its treatment of individial tracks.. 

My view is that these points are how Naim may have started down this path many years ago -- the software and user interface have not (yet, hopefully) caught up.  Remember, the "Downloads" folder and ability to store ANY files not ripped by the HDX has only been a feature for less than 2 years.  Now typing that, I realize that that is STILL a long time. . .

I think that there always will be a trade off between utmost user flexibility, and having a system that is a bit 'locked down' so that a user cannot unintentionally screw it up to where it needs a factory re-set.  Naim clearly were aiming for the later when they introduced their server products, and probably always will be aiming them for customers who are not totally comfortable with running a server themselves.

These forums are populated with very knowledgeable customers who ARE comfortable with running a server themselves; thus, the arrows often are shot at the Naim approach.  Nevertheless, I think that Naim ARE a bit behind and do need to allow for more flexibility for the "power user."

Your quite right Bart, They are trying to protect the integrity of the data which is fair enough, but  to deny us the ability to assign 'artists' and 'people' on a track by track basis would I think do no harm, and make life so much easier on the HDX. No doubt inturn enhancing the way the HDX reads the downloaded material.

Bart & 'to old to rock',

I agree with both of you, owning a HDX shouldn't preclude you from being technical or wanting control over your music library.

The HDX's software is very close to being brilliant, however, it just misses a few management features that would give it a complete set of functionality:

• Ability to Manage the metadata correctly of external rips or downloads.
• Mirrored rips to formats other than WAV (for use on phones, etc.) (This has been promised for a while in future releases of the firmware)
• More control over transcoding when streaming to other UPnP devices.
• More control over the indexing of your collection

I can live with the limitations for the moment. However, I just think a few improvements to the usability would greatly enhance the experience and create a complete set of features. The product has consistently improved with the addition of iRadio, management of downloads, improved N-Serve app, etc. I just hope some of these will be addressed and soon.

Rich