I have been using dbpoweramp ripper for a couple of months now, and it is far better than what I had been using, Winamp. I had ripped about 1000 CD's over the last two years, and was very upset to find many (several percent) bad rips. Also, I had ripped to AAC only, for use on my Ipod (and when I heard a bad rip, I could never remember what album it was after I got back home...) Now I have added a large NAS and a very good quality reproduction system in my listening area, and the poor quality of AAC on some material was more than evident. So I decided to start over again, re-ripping everything to two formats, AAC for the Ipod, and FLAC for listening at home.
Now my issues, pretty much concerning metadata, the bane of my existence:
First, I have never been able to make either of the "Submit Changes To" choices work, they are always greyed out. I know others have them working, I must have something set wrong... Any ideas? I have no trouble obtaining metadata from any of the sources. I just can't submit what I have entered or corrected myself.
Second, the metadata entry system badly needs an "undo" button, particularly for the actions which change a lot of metadata with one (wrong) click. All too many times, after entering a whole album's metadata, I have accidentally clicked on the "Meta" icon at the top of the page, instead of the drop down arrow next to it, and had all my newly entered metadata wiped out! There are several buttons on the full screen metadata page that can also wipe out a lot of data.
Related to this, there is a box at the top of the page labeled "composer". It appears to be a duplicate of the composer box for the first cut, but it seems to wipe out all the entered composer data on all the tracks if you try to clear it, as there is often no album composer, usually the composers are different for each cut. There is also confusion in my mind about the difference between the boxes at the top of the screen labeled "Artist" and "Album Artist" I would presume that "album artist" is the overall artist, if there is one, otherwise if it is a compilation, it would be "various Artists" or something similar. What is "artist" then?
There needs to be some way to store entered metadata in a file, even if you don't rip the CD or abort the rip (because of a bad CD, for instance) and then be able to use that file to repopulate the metadata page from the file if you go back to rerip the CD. Many of my CD's are from the Caribbean, and either have no metadata available online, or what is online is seriously in error. It is a royal pain to have to enter the metadata more than once if you have a problem ripping a CD.
On a similar note, Many of my CD's already were ripped and are on my computer as MP4 files (in a different directory from where the re-ripped ones are going. As I said, many lack on-line metadata, requiring manual entry. But I already did this once, and while the rips may sometimes be bad, the metadata is already there, accurately, on the old files. I often uploaded it to Gracenotes in Winamp, but there is no straightforward way to load that metadata I typed in before into dbpoweramp's metadata page. I can either type it all in again from scratch, or, almost as inconvenient and time consuming, I can open the old MP4/AAC files in explorer, select "properties" and copy and paste the metadata into the dbpoweramp page. Boy, it would be nice if there was a button I could click that would bring up a browse window, and let me select the old file, click on it and have the metadata read from that file and entered in the dbpoweramp metadata page, like it reads CD Text and uses that if you tell it to.
A Spell checker for the metadata would be nice. Not a major point, but I usually discover the spelling/typing errors immediately after ripping the CD
Finally, if there were some way to start a search engine to find album art from within dbpoweramp, let us say when you click on the + above the album art image. Right now, I open Firefox, search within Firefox, and copy the JPG (or whatever) image to a folder I have called "temp album art", then go back to dbpoweramp, click on the "+" and click on "Load from file" to enter the art. Not a major issue, just a thought
Again the program is far superior to (horribly buggy, and inaccurate) Winamp. These enhancements would make it even better.
John Schmidt
Now my issues, pretty much concerning metadata, the bane of my existence:
First, I have never been able to make either of the "Submit Changes To" choices work, they are always greyed out. I know others have them working, I must have something set wrong... Any ideas? I have no trouble obtaining metadata from any of the sources. I just can't submit what I have entered or corrected myself.
Second, the metadata entry system badly needs an "undo" button, particularly for the actions which change a lot of metadata with one (wrong) click. All too many times, after entering a whole album's metadata, I have accidentally clicked on the "Meta" icon at the top of the page, instead of the drop down arrow next to it, and had all my newly entered metadata wiped out! There are several buttons on the full screen metadata page that can also wipe out a lot of data.
Related to this, there is a box at the top of the page labeled "composer". It appears to be a duplicate of the composer box for the first cut, but it seems to wipe out all the entered composer data on all the tracks if you try to clear it, as there is often no album composer, usually the composers are different for each cut. There is also confusion in my mind about the difference between the boxes at the top of the screen labeled "Artist" and "Album Artist" I would presume that "album artist" is the overall artist, if there is one, otherwise if it is a compilation, it would be "various Artists" or something similar. What is "artist" then?
There needs to be some way to store entered metadata in a file, even if you don't rip the CD or abort the rip (because of a bad CD, for instance) and then be able to use that file to repopulate the metadata page from the file if you go back to rerip the CD. Many of my CD's are from the Caribbean, and either have no metadata available online, or what is online is seriously in error. It is a royal pain to have to enter the metadata more than once if you have a problem ripping a CD.
On a similar note, Many of my CD's already were ripped and are on my computer as MP4 files (in a different directory from where the re-ripped ones are going. As I said, many lack on-line metadata, requiring manual entry. But I already did this once, and while the rips may sometimes be bad, the metadata is already there, accurately, on the old files. I often uploaded it to Gracenotes in Winamp, but there is no straightforward way to load that metadata I typed in before into dbpoweramp's metadata page. I can either type it all in again from scratch, or, almost as inconvenient and time consuming, I can open the old MP4/AAC files in explorer, select "properties" and copy and paste the metadata into the dbpoweramp page. Boy, it would be nice if there was a button I could click that would bring up a browse window, and let me select the old file, click on it and have the metadata read from that file and entered in the dbpoweramp metadata page, like it reads CD Text and uses that if you tell it to.
A Spell checker for the metadata would be nice. Not a major point, but I usually discover the spelling/typing errors immediately after ripping the CD
Finally, if there were some way to start a search engine to find album art from within dbpoweramp, let us say when you click on the + above the album art image. Right now, I open Firefox, search within Firefox, and copy the JPG (or whatever) image to a folder I have called "temp album art", then go back to dbpoweramp, click on the "+" and click on "Load from file" to enter the art. Not a major issue, just a thought
Again the program is far superior to (horribly buggy, and inaccurate) Winamp. These enhancements would make it even better.
John Schmidt
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