Album (and songs) missing

[ewart7034]

Using Roku Soundbridge, Firefly (March 2006 Stable Build) on
HP MediaVault. Approx 16,000 tracks in library.

Has been working well since December ’06 but…

Went to play a song from an album, but the album doesn’t show up when I browse by artist or album. All other albums by the artist appear ok. Things I’ve checked:

– I can find the song using “find” and play it. The metadata for the artist is accurate. In this mode I don’t see album metadata so can’t check it.

– I point MusicMatch at the same fileset, and it’s library correctly displays the album under the artist. When I click on “show location on computer” it correctly navigates to the directory on the Media Vault.

– The directory for the album is arranged under the artist directory, same as the other correctly reported albums.

– The songs have the format song_name.mp3

– Windows Explorer correctly reports the metadata for the tracks.

Any suggestions?

Thanks, Norton

[rpedde]

@ewart7034 wrote:

Using Roku Soundbridge, Firefly (March 2006 Stable Build) on
HP MediaVault. Approx 16,000 tracks in library.

Has been working well since December ’06 but…

Went to play a song from an album, but the album doesn’t show up when I browse by artist or album. All other albums by the artist appear ok. Things I’ve checked:

– I can find the song using “find” and play it. The metadata for the artist is accurate. In this mode I don’t see album metadata so can’t check it.

– I point MusicMatch at the same fileset, and it’s library correctly displays the album under the artist. When I click on “show location on computer” it correctly navigates to the directory on the Media Vault.

– The directory for the album is arranged under the artist directory, same as the other correctly reported albums.

– The songs have the format song_name.mp3

– Windows Explorer correctly reports the metadata for the tracks.

Any suggestions?

Thanks, Norton

Do you have iTunes? That might be useful to see what the album metadata is.

It’s possible there is a problem with v1 versus v2 tags, or something of that nature. Whenever I see something like that, I strip the tags and re-apply them. Sometimes they were tagged with an old tag editor or something and it causes problems.

Almost always, though, stripping and re-applying tags works on something like that.

— Ron

[ewart7034]

@rpedde wrote:

Almost always, though, stripping and re-applying tags works on something like that.

— Ron

Thanks Ron – iTunes has the same behavior as Firefly for these files.

Are you in a position to recommend a specific tag version and tool (Windows-based) that would work universally across iTunes & Firefly, Musicmatch and Sandisk mp3 player?

Thank you,

Norton

[rpedde]

@ewart7034 wrote:

Are you in a position to recommend a specific tag version and tool (Windows-based) that would work universally across iTunes & Firefly, Musicmatch and Sandisk mp3 player?

Hmm… I’m not the best source, as I do my music management on the mac. I’d think that any new tagging stuff should work, though, so long as it’s id3v2.3 or better.

Anyone?

Seems like I used to use this back before I switched, but that’s been since before id3v2, so I don’t know if it’s any good any more.

[grommet]

Remember to stick to ID3v2.3 for MP3 tagging to stay 100% compatible. ID3v2.4 is less popular, and often implemented worse. Such is life with informal standards…

mp3tag is still pretty good, FYI. But if you use a good media player/library, a dedicated tagger is rarely necessary.

(My guess is Music Match, RIP, caused some grief with your MP3 tags.)

[ewart7034]

@grommet wrote:

(My guess is Music Match, RIP, caused some grief with your MP3 tags.)

Great inputs guys, thanks… I know how to proceed to fix my tags now. I also suspect MusicMatch caused the problem to begin with…. but while we’re on the subject, I would love to retire MusicMatch completely but can’t because of three use models I can’t find a way to replace – would love some guidance from anybody that has knowledge:

– It’s easy to create my Firefly playlists from Musicmatch – I simply export it as a text file, and do 2 search and replace operations to convert it to linux-friendly path names. How would I do this from, for example, iTunes?

– MusicMatch supports exporting my music and playlists to my Sandisk mp3 player. iTunes does not. (Nice to have the same playlists on Firefly that I use on my mp3 player)

– I like MusicMatch OnDemand – I often listen to individual tracks of artists, sometimes I even create playlists of them, and haven’t found a similar service.

Thanks for any suggestions you might have.

Norton

[rpedde]

@ewart7034 wrote:

I would love to retire MusicMatch completely but can’t because of three use models I can’t find a way to replace – would love some guidance from anybody that has knowledge:

Oof. I can’t think of a way to fix all three of those.

You can do the playlist thing by copying your iTunes Music Library.xml file to the server. Firefly will pick up the playlists and stuff in there when it scans the music library.

You’ll have to make a batch file or something (drag & drop, even) to get the file over there, but that’s not a big issue.

As far as the other two, it kind of sounds like musicmatch is the winner on those. Might be though that newer musicmatch versions are better at tagging. Or perhaps those particular files got into your library without being tagged by musicmatch. Not sure, really. Might be that it’s just simpler to identify badly tagged songs by remotely connecting to the library with iTunes and looking for files that are obviously badly tagged (missing artist, album info, etc), then manually tagging them (or even maybe retagging them with music match).

In any event, I wish you luck.

— Ron

[ewart7034]

@rpedde wrote:

[

In any event, I wish you luck.

— Ron

Thanks, Ron.

The problem was my ID3v2 tags after all – about 5,000 of my tracks had somehow lost the album info, though it was still ok in the ID3v1 tags. I’m not convinced anymore it was Musicmatch – more likely I fat fingered something last time I was in Dr. Tag.

I appreciate the support – Firefly/Roku/HP MediaVault have been a great addition to my music management and enjoyment.

Norton

[rpedde]

@ewart7034 wrote:

I appreciate the support – Firefly/Roku/HP MediaVault have been a great addition to my music management and enjoyment.

Norton

Just got my mediavault recently, and I hope start releasing binaries with the rest of my nightlies.

Time pending, of course.

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