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Feedback on a big dMC session
I've just spent 5 days converting our wav library to HE-AAC (M4A), using dMC.
I wanted to feed back my thoughts on the conversion publically.
First, the good news:
dMC correctly converted 10,341 tracks in PCM (44.1k/16-bit) WAVE format to M4A (400kbps HE-AAC) in just under 14 hours, on a quad core system running Windows XP x64. No crashes, no hangs, excellent load sharing (I worked through the conversion as normal with almost no performance penalty). That's pretty good performance - 1.12Tb of PCM files to just over 100G of HE-AAC in 14 hours with no breaks.
And dMC successfully (!) parsed and tagged all the destination tracks in about 22 minutes.
Even more astonishing, it converted 30+ foreign language (unicode Cyrillic, greek, arabic, swedish, and other albums and tracks) flawlessly. That's unbelievably good. dMC is the first commonly available music software that we've found that even works with unicode filenames (apart from Musicmatch Jukebox, but that must be hand-edited, and that's no longer a working product). Neither Helium nor CatTraxx is able to handle unicode tracks without significant and time-consuming hand editing.
Now, the less good news.
All our files are in our AUFF ("Audiography universal filename format"
):
This naming format works perfectly (for us) for any album, artist, or track title - because of the format, they're all uniquely named. There's no possibility of duplication of names in any possible mix of files (even if they're all in the same folder, the names are always different), nor can any artist, album or title be confused with the separator characters (but it is a bit of a hassle dealing with the long filenames :().
The problem was, some album and track titles originally contained illegal characters (question marks, colons, asterisks, and so on), and the illegal characters were replaced with underscores or hashes in the filenames. These caused big problems with the filename-to-tag 'codec' (F2T), and that took me a day to sort out.
The F2T got really confused if there were more underscores in the filename than it expected, and using back-to-front made it even worse. Multiple unexpected underscores typically resulted in the first few underscores being "skipped", so we ended up with a lot of tracks like "The Fall Of Troy_Doppelganger" being listed as the track title instead of the artist and the album, because a 4th underscore was at the end of the filename.
And the F2T doesn't handle 'duplicate tags' in the parse string very well. Because we have the album title in the folder structure AND in the filename, the parser got really confused if I used a tag match pattern like :
because (I assume) of the duplication of information (the album title). So some tracks had 2 duplicate album tags inserted, while some had no album tags at all.
The workaround was to skip the album artist and album name, and just use the filename to provide the tags for the parser.
The f2t parser also doesn't work that well on wav destinations (as I found out the hard way), so I had to convert all the wav formats to M4A first, then run the parser on the "taggable" m4a files.
I guess it would be good to see some "dummy" tag fields we could use so we can parse complex source path/files without resorting to specifying a "dummy" tag manually, which then has to be removed from all the files once the parse pass has completed.
But apart from those minor annoyances (and the problem of codec and program folder installation that has to be done), the conversion went through extremely well.
I know the forum's here for questions, but I did want to pass my thanks on to the developers. We'll keep using the dMC tool in the future, simply because it works so well, unlike some other tools that I could mention but won't coughSwiftcough.
I wanted to feed back my thoughts on the conversion publically.
First, the good news:
dMC correctly converted 10,341 tracks in PCM (44.1k/16-bit) WAVE format to M4A (400kbps HE-AAC) in just under 14 hours, on a quad core system running Windows XP x64. No crashes, no hangs, excellent load sharing (I worked through the conversion as normal with almost no performance penalty). That's pretty good performance - 1.12Tb of PCM files to just over 100G of HE-AAC in 14 hours with no breaks.
And dMC successfully (!) parsed and tagged all the destination tracks in about 22 minutes.
Even more astonishing, it converted 30+ foreign language (unicode Cyrillic, greek, arabic, swedish, and other albums and tracks) flawlessly. That's unbelievably good. dMC is the first commonly available music software that we've found that even works with unicode filenames (apart from Musicmatch Jukebox, but that must be hand-edited, and that's no longer a working product). Neither Helium nor CatTraxx is able to handle unicode tracks without significant and time-consuming hand editing.
Now, the less good news.
All our files are in our AUFF ("Audiography universal filename format"
):Code:
\Album Artist\Album Title\Track Artist_Album Title_Track Index_Track Title.
The problem was, some album and track titles originally contained illegal characters (question marks, colons, asterisks, and so on), and the illegal characters were replaced with underscores or hashes in the filenames. These caused big problems with the filename-to-tag 'codec' (F2T), and that took me a day to sort out.
The F2T got really confused if there were more underscores in the filename than it expected, and using back-to-front made it even worse. Multiple unexpected underscores typically resulted in the first few underscores being "skipped", so we ended up with a lot of tracks like "The Fall Of Troy_Doppelganger" being listed as the track title instead of the artist and the album, because a 4th underscore was at the end of the filename.
And the F2T doesn't handle 'duplicate tags' in the parse string very well. Because we have the album title in the folder structure AND in the filename, the parser got really confused if I used a tag match pattern like :
Code:
\[album artist]\[album]\[artist]_[album]_[track]_[title]
The workaround was to skip the album artist and album name, and just use the filename to provide the tags for the parser.
The f2t parser also doesn't work that well on wav destinations (as I found out the hard way), so I had to convert all the wav formats to M4A first, then run the parser on the "taggable" m4a files.
I guess it would be good to see some "dummy" tag fields we could use so we can parse complex source path/files without resorting to specifying a "dummy" tag manually, which then has to be removed from all the files once the parse pass has completed.
But apart from those minor annoyances (and the problem of codec and program folder installation that has to be done), the conversion went through extremely well.
I know the forum's here for questions, but I did want to pass my thanks on to the developers. We'll keep using the dMC tool in the future, simply because it works so well, unlike some other tools that I could mention but won't coughSwiftcough.
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