Editing music Metadata

[AyJay]

I have saved on my computer a large music collection, most of it is copied from vinyl and saved in'.wma' or '.wap' format files, all as individual tracks in seperate folders for each album. My computer runs Windows 7.
Last year I purchased a network device for connection to my Hi Fi system and copied all my music onto an external hard drive which is connected into the network device via the USB connection.

The problem I have is that many of the albums copied from vinyl do not play in track order (music copied from CD is absolutely fine) . Some are fine, but most play either in the alphabetical order of track names, or no reasoned order to them at all. All a bit frustrating when trying to listen to an album which tells a story e.g. Jeff Waynes War of the Worlds.

I have tried right-clicking on the track names to go into the properties and have entered track numbers correctly. I have also used another suppliers package to edit the audio tags. But when I play them the problem is unchanged. Strangely though, the Windows Media Player on my computer plays my tracks in the correct order.

I contacted the manufacturer of my network device, Cambridge Audio, and they recommended that I install the free version of 'PerfectTunes' to break into the music metadata. I have installed release 1.7. However, I now wonder if this was the correct advice? The tool is not intuitive, I cannot see a user guide. I don't want to 'rip' or 'burn' material, neither do I want to delete corrupted/duplicated tracks; I just want to ensure that my albums are played in the correct track order. I did also look on the internet and found another forum discussing this very problem and the advice was very complicated and involved disabling security protections on the computer (highly suspicious, I thought)

Can someone please help before my other half goes mad with me for wasting all this time messing about with music!
Thanks

[garym]

Re: Editing music Metadata

PerfectTunes is not currently a metadata editor. But you're on the right track. Does the cambridge player use filenames or metadata? That is, my FLAC or mp3 music files show up as:

c:\music\The Beatles\Abbey Road\01 - Come Togther.flac
..............................................\02 - Something.flac

etc.

Those are directory and file names. but the metadata within each file would have these fields

ARTIST: The Beatles
ALBUM: Abbey Road
GENRE: Pop/Rock
TRACK: 01, 02, 03, etc.
TITLE: Come Together, Something, etc.
and it could have other things (Total Tracks, Disknumber, Comment, etc. etc.)

Do your Vinyl rips have Track numbers in metadata (the TRACK field) and/or do they have tracknumbers as part of "filename".

Open some of these in mp3tag (a tag editor that does more than just mp3) or use dbpoweramp "edit ID TAG" function to look at your tags (this is not part of perfectunes, but the ripper/converter product). For now, In mp3tag, right click and select "extended tags" to see all the tags in the files. Get mp3tag from here to get you started.

http://download.mp3tag.de/mp3tagv269setup.exe

edit. I've never heard of .wap format. Are you sure these are not .wav files instead. Are these the ones that don't seem to have track numbers. If these are wav files and you created them in wmp, and wmp plays them in correct order, I suspect the info related to these rips is contained in a separate WMP database that other players can't see. Alternatively, since WAV files have no standard tagging method, the WAV tags created by some programs are not read by other programs players. This is why you see so many recommendations to use other file types if you want LOSSLESS versions (which is what you want most of the time). You can use WMP Lossless, FLAC, Apple Lossless, etc. These filetypes are lossless, just like WAV, but have standard metadata (tagging) support across programs and players.

EDIT 2: one of the few filetypes that mp3tag won't edit metadata is WAV files. So if you have WAV files, you'll need a different tag editor.

[AyJay]

Re: Editing music Metadata

Thank you for that, unfortunately, I still cannot get it to work.
The music file format is WMA.
I started off by downloading the dbpoweramp package, but when I tried to open a folder to view the tracks, what I got was "No items match your search". I note that when selecting the 'All Audio Files' pull-down in the bottom right corner, WMa is not listed. It made no difference whether I opened the tool from the wallpaper icon, or right-clicked on the filename and selected 'Edit ID-Tag'.

So then I downloaded the MP3tag tool. This looked a lot more hopeful. I soon worked out how to navigate to a folder and displaying the files inside. Down the right hand side of the window is the Track numbers for each track. In a few instances , I did find incorrect numbering, so I corrected this and after highlighting all tracks, hit the save button. That made no difference.
Then I decided to try renumbering those tracks 1 to 9 as '01' to '09', since in some instances track 10 followed track 1 and then track 2. That also made no difference.
In some albums, the file name has the track number as a prefix, e.g. "01. Strawberry fields forever.WMA" In other albums, there is no number prefix. But it makes no difference as far as I can see.

So, I am still stuck. ???

[garym]

Re: Editing music Metadata

Sounds like your tags are a mess. Not sure why things are not working. Opening in mp3tag, manually editing tags, then saving them should be very simple. Not many ways to do it wrong! But do be clear here: there are tags (the metadata) and then there are file names. "01.Strawberry fields forever.wma" is a file name not the tags. If you want to change the tags in mp3tag and then also change the FILE NAME too, then do this:

1. Open files in mp3tag. edit the tags to get them the way you want then hit save.
2. In mp3tag, highlight all the files you are working on, then choose, "convert > tag to filename" and in the format string enter:
$num(%track%,2). %title%

This will change the file names to match the metadata tag names you changed.

[Spoon]

Re: Editing music Metadata

For WMA you need to install the WMA codec, from codec central (linked above).

[AyJay]

Re: Editing music Metadata

Well this has me throughly flummoxed. To recap in case I've missed anything.
The recordings were made using a tool called 'Spin it again', on older PC running Windows XP. Files then transferred to my current Windows 7 machine. This morning I carried out this test on one album stored on my PC:
1. Right click album folder > Properties > Security > Edit > Ensure that full permissions is enabled for Administrator & User.
2. Go into folder, highlight all 13 tracks. Right click. Select Mp3Tag from options.
3. In Mp3Tag, highlight all tracks, remove tags.
4. Re-write tags, copying titles from filenames with the Convert > Filename - Tag option. Manually enter Album, Artist and track number information . Save.
5. Copy album across to external drive, connect to Cambridge Audio network device and inspect running order.
The tracks are in this numbered order: 13, 11, 1, 10, 12, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

It would make sense if the running order were 1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, for then I would just prefix numbers 1 to 9 with zero.

Thanks for the hint garym, I did ensure that the filename matched the title in a previous test. I also tried removing the track numbers from the filenames.
Sorry Spoon, I don't know what you mean by a codec and did search around.

If I right click the filenames ands select 'Edit Song Information' another package, 'Roxio Edit Audio Tags' opens. This shows that the tracks do have the correct track numbers in their tags.
I have tried to be consistent with all of my albums, but it is strange that some are OK and others are not? Can anyone see something that I have missed? Not quite ready to give up on this one, so I'll also go back to Cambridge Audio and see if they can shed any new light on this.

[garym]

Re: Editing music Metadata

Well this has me throughly flummoxed. To recap in case I've missed anything.
The recordings were made using a tool called 'Spin it again', on older PC running Windows XP. Files then transferred to my current Windows 7 machine. This morning I carried out this test on one album stored on my PC:
1. Right click album folder > Properties > Security > Edit > Ensure that full permissions is enabled for Administrator & User.
2. Go into folder, highlight all 13 tracks. Right click. Select Mp3Tag from options.
3. In Mp3Tag, highlight all tracks, remove tags.
4. Re-write tags, copying titles from filenames with the Convert > Filename - Tag option. Manually enter Album, Artist and track number information . Save.
5. Copy album across to external drive, connect to Cambridge Audio network device and inspect running order.
The tracks are in this numbered order: 13, 11, 1, 10, 12, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

It would make sense if the running order were 1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, for then I would just prefix numbers 1 to 9 with zero.

Thanks for the hint garym, I did ensure that the filename matched the title in a previous test. I also tried removing the track numbers from the filenames.
Sorry Spoon, I don't know what you mean by a codec and did search around.

If I right click the filenames ands select 'Edit Song Information' another package, 'Roxio Edit Audio Tags' opens. This shows that the tracks do have the correct track numbers in their tags.
I have tried to be consistent with all of my albums, but it is strange that some are OK and others are not? Can anyone see something that I have missed? Not quite ready to give up on this one, so I'll also go back to Cambridge Audio and see if they can shed any new light on this.

2 things.

1. Are you sure that the mp3tags have only one type of tag (ID3v2.3) and not multiple tags (ID3v1, ID3v2.3, and APE). Some programs read only some tags, so Roxio may be reading ID3v1 tags, but your Cambridge may be reading ID3v2.3 tags. You can use mp3tag to remove the extra tags.

2. If tags are correct after all, are you sure that cambridge is reading the tag track info or interpreting the order of the files its seeing in the folder as "track number". Is the running order perhaps alpabetical by track name. If so, you should make the FILENAME itself contain the track number as the first part, e.g., 01 - Come Together.mp3, 02 - Something.mp3, etc.

[AyJay]

Re: Editing music Metadata

I've just noticed something which may be significant.
The user instructions on my network music player specifies that it only supports the FAT32 file system. All of my external drives are to the NTFS system.
I remember when I purchased the player, I also purchased another drive from Seagate for this purpose, yet it could not be read, the player just gave error messages. So I tried an older drive which I had and it worked, despite it also being Seagate and also being NTFS. I have contacted Seagate and Cambridge Audio to ask if this could be the cause of the problem and can I reformat to FAT32 and then reinstall from another drive (also NTFS).
Is it possible that the file system can be interfering with the Metadata?

[garym]

Re: Editing music Metadata

seems unlikely, but given what you've said, I'd reformat a drive to FAT32, copy your files over to that drive and have the player read from there. Easy enough to test.