Tagging for Squeezebox

[Clive]

I've been setting up my flac files ready for an SQ Touch entering the household. Cover art is done, at least for 400 of my 500 CDs, the classical artwork wasn't worth doing, it was impossible to find good matches.

I wanted to reset the genres for my music. I don't like the approx 40 genres I end up with if I take the defaults. So with MP3TAG I set genre to be Male / Female / Group / Jazz / Classical / Test. This works fine with Foobar 2000 but with SQ Server the software shows the original genre from when the music was ripped, or does it do a fresh search online (unlikely)?

I'm stumped by this unexpected behaviour, any ideas?

[Canetoad]

Have you rescanned all your music files in squeezeserver? If you make any changes you need to rescan. Do a complete rescan rather than just scanning for changes.

[Clive]

Have you rescanned all your music files in squeezeserver? If you make any changes you need to rescan. Do a complete rescan rather than just scanning for changes.
Just to be sure I've just now cleared the library and rescanned. I still have a lot of genres, 56 to be exact!

[Canetoad]

You've got me stumped now Clive. Sorry I couldn't help.:(

[Clive]

You've got me stumped now Clive. Sorry I couldn't help.:(
I've even cleared the cache and fully re-scanned again. Genre must be held in more than one place. MP3TAG must have changed one location, the one Foobar uses, but not the one SB use.

[TopBalcony]

Hi Clive

have a look here:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=71307

Looks like your problem is related

[Clive]

Hi Clive

have a look here:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=71307

Looks like your problem is related
Thanks! Indeed I was just coming to the same conclusion looking at http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Mp3tagGuide

[Clive]

Just in case anyone else hits this problem....I've sussed the 2 places where Genre is stored in flacs as read by SB and Foobar. Using MP3Tag you have to manually edit via Extended Tags the REM statement in the cuesheet defining the genre, this is just for SB, Foobar reads the main genre field which is much easier to set.

I now have to manually edit 433 tags :steam:

[Stratmangler]

Which ripper did you use Clive ?

I use dBpoweramp, and find that it goes way overboard with the genre tags.
I end up cutting most of them out before I rip any tracks.

[Clive]

Chris, I used EAC for WAVs then Foobar to convert WAVs to FLAC. It's one of those situations where if I'd known where I would end up I would have started someplace different. I'm just starting the H's now so I'm about 1/3rd the way through my edits.

[Stratmangler]

You do know that EAC can be set up to do the flac thing as well ?
Well it rips to wav, then applies flac.exe immediately afterwards, on a track by track basis.
Apologies if I'm asking/stating the obvious, but sometimes the obvious manages to slip past us all.

[Ali Tait]

Is that why I see .wav files looking at the HD contents on the laptop?
When I use Squeezebox Commander,the files are then listed as FLAC.

[Clive]

You do know that EAC can be set up to do the flac thing as well ?
Well it rips to wav, then applies flac.exe immediately afterwards, on a track by track basis.
Apologies if I'm asking/stating the obvious, but sometimes the obvious manages to slip past us all.
I made all my rips to WAV initially and then later converted to FLAC when I decided to use FLAC instead. Foobar was the easiest way to do the FLAC conversion, I just selected all the WAV and let it rip, so to speak.

It's great having genre in multiple places ....not. Standards are wonderful, just pick the ones you want and mix them all together.....

[Canetoad]

I use EAC for everything. It runs the conversions in the background as batch files. I'll have to check to see if I have the genre problems doing it this way.

[Clive]

It looks like what happened is that having set genre to what I wanted in MP3Tag, the cuesheet within the FLAC file wasn't updated. There are 2 options here, either delete genre from the flac tag, SB seems then to read the other genre tag, or edit the flac genre tag.

I expect it's much more likely to be correct if you stick to just one ripper/converter/tagger. It would help though if Foobar and SB read the same genre field in the first place.

[Canetoad]

Clive,
Here is my EAC setup:

2847

2848

Under menu EAC -> Compression options.

Just download the flac.exe execution file to your PC. Also I have a couple of profiles I have saved. One for FLAC and one for MP3 files. You can play with the ID tagging section to suit your needs.

[Clive]

Thanks Bernie, I'll configure it and when I next rip I'll check how the tagging works out.

[Clive]

It turns out I already had FLAC configured in EAC. I've just tried a rip, it's fine when I change genre, there's just one place where genre is tagged. But....EAC is ripping 1 track per file, all my existing rips are to 1 file per CD. Maybe it's this that's part of the confusion. It would be interesting to see what happens if I rip a CD to a single flac file with EAC, the trouble is I can't find an option for this, how do I set up 1 file per CD for FLAC in EAC?

[Canetoad]

I'm not sure you can unless you can get EAC to create a single WAV file. The process to create the flac files just runs a loop through all the wav files converting them one at a time.

You can create an image as a single WAV file but you would probably have to manually run flac.exe, feeding it the file name. I haven't tried this.

Have you tried changing the details of the CD songs when loaded into EAC from the disc BEFORE running the conversion?

I've never given it any thought as I don't bother with the genre field when backing up my music CDs. I usually play by album or artist. I can see it is pretty useless, though, if you can't configure it to your tastes.

[Clive]

I do create a single WAV normally, I'll play some more. I too find genre useless normally, I mean 56 genres was daft and usually with double CDs each disc has a different genre....so consistency is lousy This is why I use genre to split music into Female, Male, Groups, Jazz and Classical with a few in Christmas and Test. This makes browsing albums a little easier.

Yes, changing genre before converting the file works. I'm not sure that EAC has user definable genres, again I need to check. MP3Tag has this.

[Stratmangler]

The single file for an album & cue sheet is something that arose from CD burning programs in the early days being incapable of gapless burning, which is certainly not the case now.

My library is not structured in this way, although SBS will quite happily still play material in this format.

You can get the same to work for flac rips by using "Copy Image & Create CUE Sheet - Compressed"

You won't be able to write CDs using these files and cue sheets because EAC will not decompress flac for a burn.

[Clive]

I rather like the single files from an IT perspective, having loads of unnecessary directories with their associated pointers seems so pointless. The last thing I want to do is shuffle individual tracks as I only listen to albums....anyway that's my logic.:)

Presumably the benefit of 1 file per track is reduced network latency.

[Stratmangler]

Reduced network latency is an advantage of 1 file per track.
It also makes it easier to retag multiple disc sets, for example The Beatles "White" album.
I do not like to see CD1/CD2 appearing in the library, so I retag the tracks to run in order from start to finish. As a result The White Album has tracks 1 - 30 instead of CD1 tracks 1 -17/CD2 tracks 1 - 13.

[Clive]

I half buy that logic. It depends on the album. The White Album was originally structured as 2 discs so it makes sense to me to keep it that way. With double LPs I will often pull out the 2nd LP to listen to that on it's own. This is all down to personal listening habits built up over years.

[Clive]

Thinking more about 1 file per track vs 1 file per album.....network latency isn't helped with 1 file per track as SB Server streams data with around 16 sec of music being buffered on the players so whether there is a 30k file or 300k file containing music on the server isn't an issue.

The more I think about it the more it seems that 1 file per track is there for the majority of people far younger than me who listen to tracks, not albums. I don't need playlists either as I play albums. I know I'm old fashioned and my main source is vinyl so this says a lot about me!

[Stratmangler]

We're probably not too far apart in age, Clive, and I too tend to listen to albums from start to finish.

On occasion though I will just set my Squeezebox to random play, and often hear things that I've not played in a good while, and maybe never would have selected them to play otherwise.
So I end up rediscovering music in my collection that I'd forgotten about.
I've certainly been prompted to revisit albums I otherwise might not have bothered with.

That leads to something my entire collection does have - tags for replaygain.
If you play random selections you have to have them.

[Clive]

Chris, I wasn't suggesting you were a young'un and therefore prefer individual files......though you would no doubt be happy to loose a few years, I would anyway!

I appreciate what you're saying about random. I found that even just by using Foobar to list and play my albums means I play music I've not listened to for years. With CDs and records I find I always pick the same favourites, when it's a list on the computer I seem to make more random choices