"Unknown albums" in n-Serve.

Posted by: dave marshall on 14 August 2018

I've just discovered eight albums which are showing up as "unknown album" within n-Serve, I'm guessing that these escaped my notice, early doors, when I was initially ripping my entire CD collection en masse.

There's an album reference number allocated to each, but a Google search isn't coming up with anything, so I'm assuming these are somewhat random numbers generated by the Rovi database.

Any ideas as to how to identify these albums ................ though one could argue that if I can't recognise them on playback, then they can't be all that essential, and I might as well delete them! 

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by Eoink

Play a track, use Siri on IOS or Shazam/Sound Search on Android to identify the track, might work. 

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by ChrisSU

As a last resort, I guess you could use an app like Shazam, which can ‘listen’ to music and identify it. 

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by dave marshall

Thanks chaps, I've downloaded Shazam to my iPhone, and will have a bash later this evening .......... fingers crossed.

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by Mike-B

I had the same last evening but with my Synology NAS,  it might well be the same cause & worth a check. 

I've just moved over to Asset (beta) on my Synology,  but after years of no problems with Synology's UPnP Media Server,  Asset found a few "Unknown" Albums & unknown Artists.      I checked the metadata tags & all had either missing or errors in the Album title or Artist name lines.    I used dBpoweramp to edit & correct,  I could just as easily used MP3Tag.   

Dead chuffed that we can now load Asset on Synology.   

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by Eoink
dave marshall posted:

Thanks chaps, I've downloaded Shazam to my iPhone, and will have a bash later this evening .......... fingers crossed.

You can just use Siri, open Siri and say “Siri what music is playing?”: or similar, I’ve had some good hits much to my surprise.

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by dave marshall

I'll have a bash with Siri later, this is all looking quite promising.

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by Cbr600

I too have a few unknown albums, and I tried using Shazam. It did identify a couple, but if the ukknown albums are compilation, there's no chance of getting the details this way.

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by AndyP19

I had a similar unknown case that took me ages to identify. Shazam didn’t help but I eventually tracked it down via a search on the lyrics.

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by nbpf
dave marshall posted:

I've just discovered eight albums which are showing up as "unknown album" within n-Serve, I'm guessing that these escaped my notice, early doors, when I was initially ripping my entire CD collection en masse.

There's an album reference number allocated to each, but a Google search isn't coming up with anything, so I'm assuming these are somewhat random numbers generated by the Rovi database.

Any ideas as to how to identify these albums ................ though one could argue that if I can't recognise them on playback, then they can't be all that essential, and I might as well delete them! 

I frankly do not understand your problem: if you have ripped or bought the albums you will know what you have ripped or bought. If you have not ripped or bought the albums, then there is no reason to believe that you want to have them in your collection. In this case, just delete them. 

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by Timmo1341

I had almost identical scenario when ripping 2000+ albums after initial acquisition of UnitiServe a couple of years ago. It was compounded by fact I had just bought approx 250 new albums en masse via eBay, and hadn’t listened to any of them!! Took me a while, but like others above I primarily used lyric searches on Google. I’ve also noticed on quite a few occasions that on remastered albums with bonus tracks, Rovi fails to identify the names of the tracks. First World problems, eh?!

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by rjstaines
nbpf posted:
dave marshall posted:

I've just discovered eight albums which are showing up as "unknown album" within n-Serve, I'm guessing that these escaped my notice, early doors, when I was initially ripping my entire CD collection en masse.

There's an album reference number allocated to each, but a Google search isn't coming up with anything, so I'm assuming these are somewhat random numbers generated by the Rovi database.

Any ideas as to how to identify these albums ................ though one could argue that if I can't recognise them on playback, then they can't be all that essential, and I might as well delete them! 

I frankly do not understand your problem: if you have ripped or bought the albums you will know what you have ripped or bought. If you have not ripped or bought the albums, then there is no reason to believe that you want to have them in your collection. In this case, just delete them. 

Ahem... if you have ripped several hundred albums or more, NBPF and if, in oder to do this, you've left a pile of CDs with the missus with instructions: "When the drawer opens take out the disc and put it over there, then put in the next disc from this pile here"  (or words to that effect), I can assure you that you'll have no way of knowing which particular albums are now sporting the tiltle "Unknown", especially when this bulk ripping process has taken a couple of weeks. 

I still have 'unknown' albums dating back to my original HDX load back in 2008 (ish).   One day I'll be able to identify them with one of the suggested apps, but so far they remain stubornly anonymous.  So I've updated the metadata with words like "Guitar music",  "Rubbish vocals",  "Christmas stuff".

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by Guinnless
nbpf posted:
dave marshall posted:

I've just discovered eight albums which are showing up as "unknown album" within n-Serve, I'm guessing that these escaped my notice, early doors, when I was initially ripping my entire CD collection en masse.

There's an album reference number allocated to each, but a Google search isn't coming up with anything, so I'm assuming these are somewhat random numbers generated by the Rovi database.

Any ideas as to how to identify these albums ................ though one could argue that if I can't recognise them on playback, then they can't be all that essential, and I might as well delete them! 

I frankly do not understand your problem: if you have ripped or bought the albums you will know what you have ripped or bought. If you have not ripped or bought the albums, then there is no reason to believe that you want to have them in your collection. In this case, just delete them. 

He may have a large collection, or not played them before.   I own stuff I haven't yet played or not heard for a long time.   Indeed on Sunday I played an LP I'd not listened to for 25+ years.

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by dave marshall
nbpf posted:
dave marshall posted:

I've just discovered eight albums which are showing up as "unknown album" within n-Serve, I'm guessing that these escaped my notice, early doors, when I was initially ripping my entire CD collection en masse.

There's an album reference number allocated to each, but a Google search isn't coming up with anything, so I'm assuming these are somewhat random numbers generated by the Rovi database.

Any ideas as to how to identify these albums ................ though one could argue that if I can't recognise them on playback, then they can't be all that essential, and I might as well delete them! 

I frankly do not understand your problem: if you have ripped or bought the albums you will know what you have ripped or bought. If you have not ripped or bought the albums, then there is no reason to believe that you want to have them in your collection. In this case, just delete them. 

As explained above, these seem to be a legacy from the beginning of my ripping my CD collection, usually in marathon sessions, where the focus was simply on ripping the CD's with not enough attention being paid to the outcomes.

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by Guinnless

Dave: I assume that there was no option to create a sensible filename during the ripping process?

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by dave marshall
Guinnless posted:

Dave: I assume that there was no option to create a sensible filename during the ripping process?

No I don't think that option existed, and, to be fair, when faced with ripping a fairly large CD collection, as Roger correctly surmises above, the focus is simply on completing what is, at best, a fairly mundane task, so I probably wouldn't have noticed anyway. 

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by nbpf
dave marshall posted:
nbpf posted:
dave marshall posted:

I've just discovered eight albums which are showing up as "unknown album" within n-Serve, I'm guessing that these escaped my notice, early doors, when I was initially ripping my entire CD collection en masse.

There's an album reference number allocated to each, but a Google search isn't coming up with anything, so I'm assuming these are somewhat random numbers generated by the Rovi database.

Any ideas as to how to identify these albums ................ though one could argue that if I can't recognise them on playback, then they can't be all that essential, and I might as well delete them! 

I frankly do not understand your problem: if you have ripped or bought the albums you will know what you have ripped or bought. If you have not ripped or bought the albums, then there is no reason to believe that you want to have them in your collection. In this case, just delete them. 

As explained above, these seem to be a legacy from the beginning of my ripping my CD collection, usually in marathon sessions, where the focus was simply on rising the CD's with not enough attention being paid to the outcomes.

I see. I have ripped my CDs one by one, thus it never happened to me to run into this kind of problems. Still, I would expect a decent ripping software to require users to enter the missing metadata whenever lookups do not yield consistent results. Or at least to put the incriminated albums on a pending list.    

Posted on: 14 August 2018 by ChrisSU
dave marshall posted:
Guinnless posted:

Dave: I assume that there was no option to create a sensible filename during the ripping process?

No I don't think that option existed, and, to be fair, when faced with ripping a fairly large CD collection, as Roger correctly surmises above, the focus is simply on completing what is, at best, a fairly mundane task, so I probably wouldn't have noticed anyway. 

You shouldn’t make any changes to the file names, which you would have to edit on a computer, as this can mess up the database. You can, of course, edit the metadata using N-Serve if you need to - or can be bothered!

Posted on: 15 August 2018 by Meerkat

Do you still have those eight albums? If so, then re rip them using dbpoweramp, then check/edit the metadata.

Last week, I re ripped all my CD collection, having previously ripped them on a UnitiServe...which left loads of albums in a right old state. That's without the one's that the UnitiServe spat out!

Posted on: 15 August 2018 by dave marshall
Meerkat posted:

Do you still have those eight albums? If so, then re rip them using dbpoweramp, then check/edit the metadata.

Last week, I re ripped all my CD collection, having previously ripped them on a UnitiServe...which left loads of albums in a right old state. That's without the one's that the UnitiServe spat out!

Thanks, Meerkat,

Later today, I'll have a bash at the shortcut method, and try both Siri and Shazam.

If that doesn't prove successful, I'll drag the offending CD's out from storage and try re-ripping them, having downloaded dbpoweramp .................... no, wait, that's not gonna work, as I have no way of identifying them.

It's all fun, innit?

Posted on: 15 August 2018 by Meerkat
dave marshall posted:
Meerkat posted:

Do you still have those eight albums? If so, then re rip them using dbpoweramp, then check/edit the metadata.

Last week, I re ripped all my CD collection, having previously ripped them on a UnitiServe...which left loads of albums in a right old state. That's without the one's that the UnitiServe spat out!

Thanks, Meerkat,

Later today, I'll have a bash at the shortcut method, and try both Siri and Shazam.

If that doesn't prove successful, I'll drag the offending CD's out from storage and try re-ripping them, having downloaded dbpoweramp .................... no, wait, that's not gonna work, as I have no way of identifying them.

It's all fun, innit?

Are the CDs not in their original cover/cases, or are they copies on blank CDs?

Posted on: 15 August 2018 by ChrisSU

If the rip has no metadata, you’ll never know which CD it is, so short of re-ripping the entire collection......

Dave, have you tried looking at a folder view to see if the albums are in folders named by album or artist? N-Serve and the Naim app will not be reading this, it will be looking at the metadata, which in this case, seems to be what is missing. 

Posted on: 15 August 2018 by dave marshall
Meerkat posted:
dave marshall posted:
Meerkat posted:

Do you still have those eight albums? If so, then re rip them using dbpoweramp, then check/edit the metadata.

Last week, I re ripped all my CD collection, having previously ripped them on a UnitiServe...which left loads of albums in a right old state. That's without the one's that the UnitiServe spat out!

Thanks, Meerkat,

Later today, I'll have a bash at the shortcut method, and try both Siri and Shazam.

If that doesn't prove successful, I'll drag the offending CD's out from storage and try re-ripping them, having downloaded dbpoweramp .................... no, wait, that's not gonna work, as I have no way of identifying them.

It's all fun, innit?

Are the CDs not in their original cover/cases, or are they copies on blank CDs?

They are in their original cases, but to try and track them down amongst more than 3000 stored CD's would be almost impossible.

I should really have been paying more attention to the ripping outcomes at the the time, but as mentioned, this was during my initial intensive ripping sessions, where the discs were being chucked into the HDX, one after another.

I'm able to recognise the music on half of the offending eight, but the n-Serve database can't pick them up, so it does look as if something like dbpoweramp, as you suggest, may be the answer.

Posted on: 15 August 2018 by dave marshall
ChrisSU posted:

If the rip has no metadata, you’ll never know which CD it is, so short of re-ripping the entire collection......

Dave, have you tried looking at a folder view to see if the albums are in folders named by album or artist? N-Serve and the Naim app will not be reading this, it will be looking at the metadata, which in this case, seems to be what is missing. 

I see what you're saying, but no, in folder view, the ones I can recognise don't appear elsewhere under album or artist ............. though there were a couple of others which seemed to have been duplicated during the HDX rip, and they appeared normally under the above view, but additionally as "unknown album"!

I'll try the Siri / Shazam route later today.

Posted on: 15 August 2018 by dave marshall

Shazam!

Shazam has managed to identify the first couple of tracks from the first of the missing albums, and a track search over in Discogs was able to pin down the specific album, now successfully edited.

Great stuff, and thanks for all the help chaps. 

Posted on: 15 August 2018 by dave marshall

Ha!

It's looking as if I haven't been as lax as I was supposing, since four of these unknown albums now turn out to be duplicates of rips already correctly filed on the HDX.

So, it would seem that the HDX suffered a hiccup during the ripping process, creating an additional copy which the database was unable to identify, notwithstanding that it correctly found the first one!

Sometimes, just spinning the silver discs seemed a lot simpler.