Asset UpnP is not showing all my music files

[Watson]

I have found the tracks under All Tracks. So Asset UPnP has importet them but was not able to parse correctly.

How can this be fixed?

[mville]

I have found the tracks under All Tracks. So Asset UPnP has importet them but was not able to parse correctly.

How can this be fixed?

By tagging the files correctly, hence all my previous questions.

I am trying to establish what options you've got, based on your setup. I can't help you otherwise.

[Watson]

What do you mean by "correct tagging" and which program should I use (on a Mac) to view the tags?

Sorry for asking, but I am only a consumer not a hacker.

Thanks for your help

[mville]

What do you mean by "correct tagging"

You are probably aware of most of the following, but I'll explain anyway.

Most audio servers/streamers/players/clients use metadata tags to 'describe' the digital audio files in an audio library.

Asset UPnP Premium is a DLNA compatible audio server which uses these tags to build it's database. The data is served to the client software, using the DLNA protocol, so the client can select, search and play tracks.

If any important/descriptive metadata is missing, Asset is unable to adequately tell the client about the tracks. Asset has a work-around for this, where you are able to use File and Folder Browsing to access the tracks based on their file and folder location. However, this option is only available in the paid version of Asset.

At the moment, it is unclear what metadata is contained in your wav files. It is possible there isn't any. So, by correct tagging, I mean the basic metadata tags which need to be populated e.g. Artist, Title, Album, Year, Genre, Track Number, Disc Number, Comment, etc., to get a basic, usable user experience with Asset.

which program should I use (on a Mac) to view the tags?

Regarding a tagging application for the Mac, that supports the tagging of wav files, I cannot comment as I am a Windows only user, due to the lack of software/tools available for the Apple platform and the inflexible attitude Apple currently imposes on it's users. Hopefully, some Apple users will chime in here to help and advise you.

Sorry for asking, but I am only a consumer not a hacker.

It is absolutely fine to ask questions. This is a support forum and we are all consumers here, not hackers (well, there might be one or two, but I think you know what I mean)

[Watson]

Here is was I did and the result but unfortunately not the solution of my problem:

I have copied my wav files to the first directory - no changes
I have converted the wav files to FLAC - no changes
I have added the missing tags to one album and now it appears as it should.

The bad thing is that I do not want to add tags to all my files (app. 300 albums containing app 3500 tracks)

We have now found the problem but I do not have a solution for my problem.

Any ideas how this tags can be added in an automated way? All files tracks are sorted in folders: Artist/Album/Tracknumber Artist - Title

Needed information is there but not in the needed format.

[garym]

Here is was I did and the result but unfortunately not the solution of my problem:

I have copied my wav files to the first directory - no changes
I have converted the wav files to FLAC - no changes
I have added the missing tags to one album and now it appears as it should.

The bad thing is that I do not want to add tags to all my files (app. 300 albums containing app 3500 tracks)

We have now found the problem but I do not have a solution for my problem.

Any ideas how this tags can be added in an automated way? All files tracks are sorted in folders: Artist/Album/Tracknumber Artist - Title

Needed information is there but not in the needed format.

If your directories/subdirectories and file names have useful info, then you can add tags in a giant batch, very easy. Convert WAV files to FLAC first, keeping same file names/directory structure. Then install mp3tag from here:
http://download.mp3tag.de/mp3tagv271setup.exe


Then within mp3tag you can select all the files, then "convert", filename to tags option, then use the appropriate listing. For example, if your files are named:

c:\music\The Beatles\Abbey Road\1. Come Together.flac

You would use this in the "convert filename to tag" option:
\%artist%\%album%\%track%. %title%

(may need a "\music" in front, as in:
\music\%artist%\%album%\%track%. %title%
..you'll need to play around with this first to get it what you want).

Then you'll end up with these tags automatically:

ARTIST, ALBUM, TRACK, TITLE

if there's stuff in filename you don't want in tags, you put in placeholders like %dummy%, etc.

All this is doing is reading the info from filename/directory and writing that to the FLAC tag. It is not changing the audio stream. You will probably want to treat regular albums differently from Compilations, etc. But you get the idea. Actually quite easy. Obviously, play around a bit first to make sure you know what it is doing. And I'd make sure I had a backup of everything before doing anything (which is what one should always have in any case).

ps I helped a friend do this with >50,000 tracks with no tags but good organization and filenames and it worked very nicely.


.

[mville]

If your directories/subdirectories and file names have useful info, then you can add tags in a giant batch, very easy. Convert WAV files to FLAC first, keeping same file names/directory structure. Then install mp3tag from here:
http://download.mp3tag.de/mp3tagv271setup.exe

This link is for the Windows version, try here for info on running MP3Tag, Apple OSX and Wine:
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/mac-osx.html

If you can get MP3Tag running on your Mac, garym is correct and you'll be able to populate Album, Track, Artist and Title automatically from the directory name and filename.

[Alepsis]

We have now found the problem but I do not have a solution for my problem.

You have two options.

(1) Add tags to WAV files.

Problem: There isn't a wide consensus about tagging the WAVE format. Best bet would be ID3 tags, but I don't know (and AFAIK we're not told) if Asset reads ID3 tags in WAV files. (I assume it does.)

(2) Convert your WAV to another format and tag it.

IMHO, there's no good reason to keep your files in the WAVE format (or AIFF for that matter). There may have been, in days of yore, when there wasn't a lot of processing power available; but that hasn't been an issue for years.

(2.1) So, convert it to what? You have various options -- FLAC, ALE (Apple Lossless), APE (Monkey's Audio), WavPack, etc. (We're serious people here, so I won't even mention lossy compression.) There are pros and cons for each. For instance, you can manage and tag ALE with iTunes. If you have AirPlay devices, you can stream ALE from iTunes to these devices, while controlling it remotely from iOS devices. But ALE is a proprietary Apple format, and some devices don't handle ALE (Asset does). I also am a Mac user, but I prefer FLAC. I can't manage it, tag it, or play it with iTunes, but there is other software to do these jobs.

(2.2) If you decide for ALE, then the tags are going to be ID3 tags. You can use iTunes for converting and tagging. I don't know if it can do what you need automatically, but, on the Mac, iTunes is highly scriptable. Doug's Scripts

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php

by Doug Adams is a handy collection of such scripts, especially if you can't write your own.

A useful ID3 tag tool is kid3 by Urs Fleisch

http://kid3.sourceforge.net

it's free, open source, and also available for OS X. It can populate some tags automatically, and you can use it for ALE, as well as FLAC and others. You can also use it if you choose option (1).

(2.3) If you choose FLAC or APE, then you need to encode your files. One such tool is Scott Brown's xACT

http://xact.scottcbrown.org

which converts to/from various formats.

If you choose FLAC or APE, you can tag it with kid3, or use Stephen Booth's Tag

http://sbooth.org/Tag/

Tag can populate tags from the file hierarchy, which may be close to what you want.

(The standard FLAC distribution includes an encoder -- flac -- and a tag editor -- metaflac -- which can be compiled on the Mac, but I infer from your posts that you're not comfortable with the CLI.)

The software tools I mentioned above are by no means the only ones available. I could also mention XLD (can't live without it, myself) or MusicBrainz Picard; you just have to search, look and test until you find what you're comfortable with.

[Alepsis]

PS: One little detail I forgot about. Don't waste your time trying to tag WAV files with iTunes. Yes, iTunes can be used to manage WAV files; but, on the Mac, iTunes doesn't write tags in the WAV files themselves (as it does with other formats); it only writes them to its internal database.

[Watson]

Guys,

Thanks a lot for your help. It is now working. And I learned a little bit about tagging.

- I have copied the directory with all my WAV files
- Then I have converted all WAV files to FLAC by writing in the same directory. It did not work to write in a different directory (if files are not tagged). Might be a bug.
- Deleting all WAV files in this tree was also not an easy one rm -rf *.WAV did not work as expected.
- Then I used kide for tagging. Great tool and must have for large music collection

All in all I am happy now.

Thanks again

[Alepsis]

All in all I am happy now.

Good to hear that. It's what counts.

rm -rf *.WAV did not work as expected

I don't think you received here any advice on using rm.

It seems to me that what you wanted to do was delete all WAVE files from a directory hierarchy, irrespective of where in the hierarchy they were. If so, rm was not the best tool for the purpose. (I assume you already know that the CLI is case-sensitive, hence, in Terminal, ".WAV" is not the same thing as ".wav".) You should have used find in the top level of your hierarchy, thus:

find . -name "*.wav" -type f

This gives you listing of every file with the name extension ".wav" in the current directory, recursively; it allows you to review the list of files which are going to be deleted, to make sure it doesn't include any files you wish to keep. Then,

find . -name "*.wav" -type f -delete

will delete those files.