Several questions

[sculen]

Regarding files, with a large CD collection, the files as stored on the drives (which are by artist, then by album within, and the of course by track within each album) quickly become overwhelming. To keep it more manageable, if I create 26 folders (A, B, C, etc.), and place all artists that begin with those letters in to their respective folders, does that mess anything up?

[garym]

That's exactly what I have been doing. I name both the Artist tag and the AlbumArtist tag the exact same ... Various Artists. Then in each track, I update the Song Name by adding on the artist's name for that song. Bit time consuming, but needed if you want to know the artist of each song within a Various Artist album. Many of these, for me, are tributes to a particular artist but covered by different artists.

Sorry, I think you're missing the point. You shouldn't put VARIOUS ARTISTS into the ARTIST tag. For each track's ARTIST tag you should enter the actual artists for that track. You only put VARIOUS ARTISTS in the ALBUMARTIST tag. Then you don't need to add the track artists to the title of the song.

You are ignoring the power of the tagging and its use by music servers/players. They way you propose to do this (Various Artist in both the ALBUMARTIST and ARTIST tags) is the equivalent of buying a new car and hooking it to a brace of mules to pull the car down the road because you don't know how to use the engine. ;-)

[sculen]

Learning. But how do you add the artist for each song in the Artist tag when it only allows one per album? I must be missing something

[garym]

For example, this is the album, "Best of Mountain Stage, Vol. 1". This is a compilation album because every track is a different ARTIST. So when tagging, each track has the same ALBUM name and the same ALBUMARTIST name (Various Artists). But the TRACK tag field is unique to each song, the TITLE track field is unique to each song, and the ARTIST track field is unique to each song. (p.s. also note that in dbpoweramp, I can have multiple artists in the ARTIST tag by simply putting a semi-colon with space afterwards between the artist names as I've shown in track 03 below.


ALBUM: Best of Mountain Stage, Vol. 1
ALBUMARTIST: Various Artists
TRACK: 01
TITLE: Such A Night
ARTIST: Dr. John
-----------
ALBUM: Best of Mountain Stage, Vol. 1
ALBUMARTIST: Various Artists
TRACK: 02
TITLE: Hell I’d Go
ARTIST: Dan Hicks & The Acoustic Warriors
-----------
ALBUM: Best of Mountain Stage, Vol. 1
ALBUMARTIST: Various Artists
TRACK: 03
TITLE: Twilight
ARTIST: Rick Danko; Garth Hudson
------------
ALBUM: Best of Mountain Stage, Vol. 1
ALBUMARTIST: Various Artists
TRACK: 04
TITLE: Bill of Goods
ARTIST: Loudon Wainwright III

[garym]

Learning. But how do you add the artist for each song in the Artist tag when it only allows one per album? I must be missing something

Don't select all album songs at once. Use your mouse to click on a single song. Then enter the artist at the top of the page in the artist block for that particular song.

[garym]

Regarding files, with a large CD collection, the files as stored on the drives (which are by artist, then by album within, and the of course by track within each album) quickly become overwhelming. To keep it more manageable, if I create 26 folders (A, B, C, etc.), and place all artists that begin with those letters in to their respective folders, does that mess anything up?

Yes, some people do that. Works fine. As schmidj pointed out the file and folder names don't actually have anything to do (in most cases) with how your music server and player access your music files. You can have a million files, all with a random name using letters and numbers (e.g., sfhe1895u79XYz) but as long as the tags are correct your server can locate the music.

That said, I have 3,425 artists and 8,760 albums in my collection. And it doesn't cause me any issues to use a folder structure like this:


/music
.............../Artist
............................../Album
................................................/01 title
................................................/02 title
etc.

I can find anything I want quickly. And as we keep noting, you are rarely accessing your music via the folder structure. Instead, you are accessing your music via your music server which is using the tags for browsing and searching. In my server, I can see the letters of the alphabet on the side of the artist listing and click on "S" to go straight to the artists starting with 'S'. Or I can see years on the side of the list and go to certain years (e.g., 1971). That's the beauty of a music server and properly tagged music.

[garym]

And why are you manually typing in all the artists. Assuming your computer is connected to the internet, dbpoweramp should offer up the album name, artist name for each track, title of each track, etc. all filled in for you. Sometimes you have to edit, but most of the time the info is already there from the online databases and correct.

[sculen]

Obviously I am missing something. I see no place where you enter an artist for each of the individual tracks. I know Album Artist is for the entire album, but so is Artist as far as I can tell because there is only one entry along the top rows of tags for Artist and it pertains to the entire album as far as I can tell. This is why I see no other way than to just manually type the artist inside each individual track. The example in the picture shows a CD that I just popped in and typically after fixing the tags (not sure why there are < and > before and after Various Artist, so I get rid of those, deselect Compilation, correct the genre, check the year, art, etc.). This CD's artist will be Various Artist. Album will be Alive In The 90s. The 10 tracks are all by 10 different artists. How do I put 10 artists in the Artist tag along the top as it only pertains to the full album as far as I can tell? This is why I then proceed to manually type it in along each line/track - e.g., Track 1 would end up being Can't Stop Falling In Love - Cheap Trick. Track 2 would be Here Comes The Hotstepper - Ini Kamoze. And so on. I know I am missing something, just don't know what or where. Probably starring my in the face.

[garym]

no, no, no. You've gone terribly off course. The <various artists> you see at the top, is because each of the tracks has a DIFFERENT artist tag. Then if you are looking at the entire album, it shows <various artists> for artist because there is no single artist for the entire album. When you click on a single track in that view, you'll not see <various artists> and instead you'll see the artist for THAT PARTICULAR TRACK. first right click on the column headings where it shows "title", "length", "rip status" etc. and then choose ARTIST as one of the columns it will show. Right now your columns are not even showing ARTIST. Then post a picture like above.

[sculen]

Wow. Hiding in plain sight. So now I get it (photo below). Also added a few others while I was at it. My concern is that I don't ever want to the album to become undone as 12 separate albums with all these various artists. So as long as the Album Artist stays as one single thing i.e Varuois Artist, then ok, correct. Then this begs the question, if these various artists in the Artist tag are not in the track along with the song, where in the heck do they show up. Players are limited to:
Artist (or Album Artist in dbpa terms): Various Artists
Album: Alive In The 90s
Track 1: Can't Stop Fallin In Love

Where in the heck do these various artists (Cheap Trick in ths example for Track 1) show up. There is no place for it on playback. This is why I was typing it into the track. But believe me I'd love to avoid that

[GBrown]

Where in the heck do these various artists (Cheap Trick in ths example for Track 1) show up. There is no place for it on playback. This is why I was typing it into the track. But believe me I'd love to avoid that

What music program are you using? Some are better than others at managing your library and what is displayed when playing.

[garym]

My concern is that I don't ever want to the album to become undone as 12 separate albums with all these various artists. So as long as the Album Artist stays as one single thing i.e Varuois Artist, then ok, correct.

Correct. As long as you have ALBUMARTIST = Various Artists, this album should show up as a single album (not 12 albums). (and of course ticking the COMPILATION item for this album will also make sure it shows up as a single album. But for some reason you don't want to use the COMPILATION tag for multiartist CDs. Remember that I said this, as in the future this will likely come back to haunt you. ;-)

Then this begs the question, if these various artists in the Artist tag are not in the track along with the song, where in the heck do they show up. Players are limited to:
Artist (or Album Artist in dbpa terms): Various Artists
Album: Alive In The 90s
Track 1: Can't Stop Fallin In Love

Where in the heck do these various artists (Cheap Trick in ths example for Track 1) show up. There is no place for it on playback. This is why I was typing it into the track. But believe me I'd love to avoid that

Yes, there is a place for it on playback. All these different artists in the ARTIST tag do in fact show up in music servers/players along with the song. Any player I've seen since 1990 has the capability of showing the actual track ARTIST in an album with "Various Artists" as the ALBUMARTIST.

Please let us know what music server/player you are using (iTunes? Something else running on your computer? an iPhone? And what player are you using? a player on your computer? A networked music player? or what?) Many of your questions make me think that you have yet to load any of your ripped albums on your music/server to test out how things show up in your library, in your now playing screen of the player, in the browsing of your library. You need to test things out before you rip too many CDs. You will learn a lot for seeing how things you've ripped show up in your playback system. If you haven't done this yet, that will cause you MAJOR headaches in the future. We learn by seeing how things show up in our system.

[sculen]

You are correct, not yet for what I am currently now ripping. Basing it all on past experience with the Escient unit, as well as how this previously ripped music shows up on my phone, and current streamers - WiiM Pro Plus, Bluesound Node Nano, and Cambriodge Audio MXN10. This is all stuff I ripped almost 20 years ago which I no longer want. That's why I'm starting over.
Right now I'm ripping loseless to an external hard drive because the NAS I want isn't available yet. Once that arrives, I'll move what I've ripped from the external drive to the NAS and pick up the ripping directly on the NAS. Then the streamers (WiiM, Bluesound, Cambridge) that are in my various hifi systems will retrieve from the NAS.
As much as I hate to do it (because I have the time now), I may stop ripping anything at this point until I'm ready to test playback of my new rips on the NAS to these streamers. Too many rookie mistakes.
Couple of other questions. I'm ripping in AIFF. You mentioned that it's easy to convert to FLAC. But if FLAC has more extensive info than AIFF (if that is true) then when converting from AIFF to FLAC will it pick all that up? Seems like it would not if the original rip from the CD was in AIFF.
Also, your compilation comments concern me. What's the significance of having the compilation box checked vs unchecked. Being particular about things, I am always concerned about tools/software systems doing things I don't want them to do. On the other hand, I don't want any regrets. This is my last opportunity to get all this done right.

[schmidj]

Two things: First, you can (and should) add the ARTIST tag to the list of tracks under where you see Title, Length, rip status, etc. If you right click (on a PC, I'm not sure what you do on a Mac) on that heading field, you'll get a list of all the fields you can display with check boxes. Add the ARTIST field (and any other you want to see by track) and they will now have their own column. You can also drag the columns around if you want to change the order, and shrink or expand the columns as you desire. (for instance, to make more space you could shrink your length column as it is far wider than needed.) If you rip a CD, it should save the new layout so you only have to do this once, unless or until you decide to change the layout again.

But there is a another useful way to enter (or see what is entered) metadata. Click on the red thing that looks like a shipping tag at the top of the page. It will open a new screen which shows what each metadata provider has for that CD and what it has chosen. Play around with that page to understand how it works. At the top are entries for the artist for the first track, the album title, the album artist (with a place to click to apply it to all the tracks), the genre, the year, disk (X) of (Y), the composer of the first track. Below that are two check boxes, one for setting the compilation flag and one to change the track display below to also show the artist and composer for each track. The left hand column has what dBpoweramp currently has chosen as the data. You can type over it to change/correct any of the entries, and if you think it has chosen information from the wrong metadata provider for any entry and you see the entry you want under a provider in red, click on it, you'll see that one now entered for that entry. When done with this page, click on the close (or is it OK?) button at the bottom of the page and you'll see that data updated on the screen. A couple of provisos. This page only inserts one (set of) genre(s) to all the tracks, and the same year. But back on the main entry page, you can give each track its own genre(s) and year.

On the main page (the one you showed in the photo above) if you click on one (or more, control click on a PC) tracks, the data at the top will display and allow you to change just the selected track(s) Very useful for the album with half the tracks by one artist and the other half by another No need to type the artist one by one for each track, select all the tracks that have one of the artists, type the name in the artist box at the top. Then select the other tracks and type that artist name in. You can also enter individual genres, years, etc on any track after selecting it by clicking on it.

When you see <Various Artists> in the top artist box or <Various Genres> in the top genre box, that means that not all the selected tracks have the same data, which is what you want for those compilation albums. Select any track and you'll see that at the top. To select all the tracks again, click on the empty space under the last track.

Note, this selection doesn't control what tracks get ripped, that is set by the checkboxes on the far left of the screen.

One thing to understand about these tags. They are stored in the same file the audio is for each separate track, once per track, not per album. There is no way of storing tags for an album except by including it with the track tags. This means that for instance if you enter a different album name on one track (either on purpose or by mistake), it will be different in the stored track file which in that case may well mess up what folder the track gets stored in, depending on your naming string, On your player, if you sort for a particular album with that mistake, the track will be missing, but if you for instance sort by the artist you'll see that album name as entered. The dBpoweramp ripper makes it hard to make that mistake by only providing one place to enter the album name at the top, which it uses in the tag for each track, but it is easy to mess this up if you correct tags using the tag editor or mp3tag.

I hope this helps, not confuses you. It may help if you play with a "fake" rip. Put in any CD you haven't already ripped. Play around with selecting tracks and entering your own tag metadata, both in the main page you photoed and in the page that comes up by clicking on the shipping tag. Once you understand what ends up getting entered, just close it before actually ripping it, or if you want to rip it and look at the tags as they were entered in mp3tag, then delete the files when you are done.

One of the best ways to learn how software woks is to pound on it, try something and see what happens. Many of the fields on the dBpa pages hav question marks which if you click on them will take you to a help page or brief description of the entry.