Beginner question on dynamic naming

[GBrown]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

Result: Audirvana shows the artist as Dexter Gordon and sort as Dexter Gordon. Augh! I tried it with artist sort, same result. I don't know which metadata tag Audirvana pulls its sort info from. I guess that is the question.

I don&*8217;t use Audirvana, but a quick search on their forum yielded this issue.

https://community.audirvana.com/t/sorting-artists-and-album-artists/18384/2

I think the problem lies within the player, not your tags from dBPoweramp. To be sure, you can check them in mp3tag as well, to see if the files have consistent tag info. I&*8217;m betting they do. Perhaps another player will suit your needs better? Foobar and MusicBee come to mind.

[Johnnyb]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

Gary - It places Dexter Gordon under D. I would like it to show me Dexter Gordon and place it under G.

I think Gbrown is entirely right. That thread you referred to is exactly the problem I am having. I don't think Audirvana reads the sort tags. Otherwise, it would work the way I want it to. I like the quality of sound I get from Audirvana, so I may bight the bullet and correct the sort manually.

Do you guys think I need Artist Sort in my dynamic naming string, or is Album Artist Sort sufficient? If the file has the tag, is it required that it be in the naming string? I guess I am having trouble understanding the relationship between tags and the elements of the naming string. I would greatly appreciate it if someone would explain that to me.

I think I will play with mp3tag a little bit.

[simbun]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

Gary - It places Dexter Gordon under D. I would like it to show me Dexter Gordon and place it under G.

I think Gbrown is entirely right. That thread you referred to is exactly the problem I am having. I don't think Audirvana reads the sort tags. Otherwise, it would work the way I want it to. I like the quality of sound I get from Audirvana, so I may bight the bullet and correct the sort manually.

The "solution" in that thread sounds like you're adding metadata to Audirvana, which if you're all in might be ok, but you're locking yourself in a bit there.

If I was trying to confirm how it's being sorted, I'd have copied 4 albums to a temporary location and tagged them as follows:

ARTIST			ARTISTSORT
ArtistA DDDDDDD		FFFFFFF, IIIIIII
ArtistB CCCCCCC		EEEEEEE, KKKKKKK
ArtistC BBBBBBB		HHHHHHH, LLLLLLL
ArtistD AAAAAAA		GGGGGGG, JJJJJJJ

and maybe have done something similar for Album Artist, then pointed Audirvana to that location and see what it looks like.

Do you guys think I need Artist Sort in my dynamic naming string, or is Album Artist Sort sufficient? If the file has the tag, is it required that it be in the naming string? I guess I am having trouble understanding the relationship between tags and the elements of the naming string. I would greatly appreciate it if someone would explain that to me.

Good software should be using tags, so where and how (the naming string) you store the music shouldn't matter, it just needs to make logical sense, and should provide a unique location for each album. In the string I provided before I included '[GRAB]1,4,[year][] - [][album]' because I have multiple copies of the same albums (original and remasters) so this helps keep them unique, but there's no one right way of doing this.

[GBrown]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

The naming is only really helpful for your file browser, and it makes for good housekeeping. But in the player itself, the metadata tag fields are far more important. The more info you have completed for each file, the better the software can do for display of the Now Playing page, library browsing by any available lists, and of course any search features.

The sort fields are generally invisible, but play a big roll in the background. Many players still do not use these fields, as you have found. If having Dexter Gordon appear grouped under the G's is important for you, then maybe a different player needs to be considered. I mentioned a couple for Windows earlier. On Android, only GoneMAD has sort support. And of course for IOS you can use the native Apple Music player (and the various iTunes applications at home). If you are really hung up on using Audirvana, perhaps some effort on their forum may get them to add sort capability to their player?

[garym]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

Do you guys think I need Artist Sort in my dynamic naming string, or is Album Artist Sort sufficient? If the file has the tag, is it required that it be in the naming string? I guess I am having trouble understanding the relationship between tags and the elements of the naming string. I would greatly appreciate it if someone would explain that to me.

Again, you only need ONE artist related item (artist, artist sort, album artist, or album artist sort) in your naming string (and that's just to tell it which folder you want the files in). In my string, I have an IF statement that looks for ALBUM ARTIST and uses this if in the metadata. But if no ALBUM ARTIST then it uses ARTIST for creating the folder. (I only use ALBUM ARTIST in certain limited cases. For example, the ARTIST may be Miles Davis Quintet, but I use ALBUM ARTIST as Miles Davis, so that all of his work shows up in a single artist folder called "Miles Davis". Again, none of this has to do with the player or the metadata, just the name of the folders and files so when I look at a file browser, everything is in a logical place.

Regarding understanding the relationship between tags and the elements in the naming string, the short answer is that there is NO relationship between them. I could use "Chicken Soup" in the naming string for all my Miles Davis albums, and they would all be stored in the "Chicken Soup" folder. But the metadata (tags) has the correct Miles Davis info and my player would show and play Miles Davis. Of course, we'd like our file structure to be somewhat logical and clear to our human brains when looking at our files in a file browser. Accordingly, most people tend to use file/folder names that are related to the metadata (tags). That is, my artist folder for Miles Davis stuff is called "Miles Davis" so that I can see where all his albums are located. There are some folks that simply have one flat music file (that is, no subdirectories for artist or albums) and have many 1000s of individual files in that single folder. But their player still allows them to browse by artist and album, BECAUSE THE METADATA IN THE FILES HAS THIS INFO. The latter is not recommended, as it is too confusing to look at your list of files and intepret what is what from the folder and file names.

[Johnnyb]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

Simbun~I don&*8217;t believe Audirvana is adding metadata to the file, right? I may give you suggestion a try and see what Audirvana does with it. I really like the sound of Audirvana, so I may stick with it even if I have to do a little bit of a work around. I&*8217;m using elements from your string at the moment.

Gary~thanks a lot for you explanation. I realized the irrelevance of the folder names when I changed one in my directory and Audirvana still sorted it by the artist. Cd ripper now shows all four artist tags in the metadata box on the main screen. I think I have that covered.

I am going to try and rip a box set today and I may give your box set string a try. Do I add that to my present string, or should that be a new string on its own?

Thanks

John

[garym]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

Gary~thanks a lot for you explanation. I realized the irrelevance of the folder names when I changed one in my directory and Audirvana still sorted it by the artist. Cd ripper now shows all four artist tags in the metadata box on the main screen. I think I have that covered.

I am going to try and rip a box set today and I may give your box set string a try. Do I add that to my present string, or should that be a new string on its own?

Thanks

John

John, this box naming string should be a separate naming string. And then be sure to save the profile in which you are using the string under a different ripping profile. In fact go ahead and create a new profile named BOX SET before you change the naming string.

[Johnnyb]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

Got it! Thanks! I&*8217;ll let you know how it goes

[Johnnyb]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

Simbun - I conducted your experiment and ripped 4 discs to a temp folder using the letter strings and ... Audirvana didn't use either tag to sort the artist.

[simbun]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

Simbun - I conducted your experiment and ripped 4 discs to a temp folder using the letter strings and ... Audirvana didn't use either tag to sort the artist.

So the Artists were shown in the order:
ArtistA DDDDDDD
ArtistB CCCCCCC
ArtistC BBBBBBB
ArtistD AAAAAAA

Doesn't that fly in the face of:

Result: Audirvana shows the artist as Dexter Gordon and sort as Dexter Gordon.

And https://community.audirvana.com/t/so...-artists/18384 where it implies it used the second word in Artist to sort.

I was going to install it into a sandbox to have a play but I downloaded it and it was a Windows store app! Never installed one of those before, I might pass :-)

[Johnnyb]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

I guess it does contradict that thread. They were sorted in the order of their first names. The artist and artist sort tags didn't make a difference. Go ahead, download the trial version. Give it a try!

[simbun]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

I guess it does contradict that thread. They were sorted in the order of their first names. The artist and artist sort tags didn't make a difference. Go ahead, download the trial version. Give it a try!

I didn't need much convincing, and the store apps are sandboxed so it shouldn't leave any remnants behind.

I tested it with AlbumArtist and AlbumArtistSort just set to 'AlbumArtist' and then Artist values set to:

ARTIST			ARTISTSORT
ArtistA DDDDDDD		FFFFFFF, IIIIIII
ArtistB CCCCCCC		EEEEEEE, KKKKKKK
ArtistC BBBBBBB		HHHHHHH, LLLLLLL
ArtistD AAAAAAA		GGGGGGG, JJJJJJJ

and the listing I was presented with was:



Which means it was sorted by ArtistSort!

To confirm I changed to the values:

ARTIST			ARTISTSORT
ArtistA DDDDDDD		GGGGGGG, IIIIIII
ArtistB CCCCCCC		HHHHHHH, KKKKKKK
ArtistC BBBBBBB		EEEEEEE, LLLLLLL
ArtistD AAAAAAA		FFFFFFF, JJJJJJJ

And refreshed the database (at least it looked like it did) and this resulted in, no change whatsoever, but if I selected an Artist and clicked 'Show Metadata' it showed that the original value of sort was set:



So I deleted the library in Audirvana, closed it all down, restarted, set up a new library and the new sort order was working:



So it seems that it does reference ARTISTSORT (at least with flacs) but that it may be sticky, so if you want it modified then you need to do it manually or start the library from scratch.

[Johnnyb]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

Mmmm. I'll have to look at my sample files again. I'll probably just change it manually in Audirvana.

I like your naming string and have been using it. I like how it puts multiple CDs in the same folder. Do you ever use the Album Sort tag?

[simbun]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

I like your naming string and have been using it. I like how it puts multiple CDs in the same folder. Do you ever use the Album Sort tag?

I think it's a pretty standard configuration. I originally had all the discs under a single album folder, but I found that using an external folder.jpg was more compatible than using embedded artwork, and in order to have a different image per disc (for box sets containing albums) I opted to change my layout to one disc per folder.

I don't use the AlbumSort tag, but I do have album prefixed with the release year in my folder structure so that I can have multiple copies of an album without causing a conflict (original vs remaster), and I have album prefixed with the original release year in my music server so I can view an artists albums chronologically.

EDIT: I guess I should probably explain that. I use MinimServer, and it lets me configure how I want to sort my Albums, so I use the tags OriginalDate and then Album (it's actually much more complicated than that because I want Various Artist Compilations sorted by just Album name and Artist Albums to be sorted by OriginalDate and then Album). If this weren't available however (and the software I was using did support AlbumSort) then I defintely would use AlbumSort.

[garym]

Re: Beginner question on dynamic naming

I think it's a pretty standard configuration. I originally had all the discs under a single album folder, but I found that using an external folder.jpg was more compatible than using embedded artwork, and in order to have a different image per disc (for box sets containing albums) I opted to change my layout to one disc per folder.

I don't use the AlbumSort tag, but I do have album prefixed with the release year in my folder structure so that I can have multiple copies of an album without causing a conflict (original vs remaster), and I have album prefixed with the original release year in my music server so I can view an artists albums chronologically.

My naming string also puts multidisk albums into separate subfolders. I also like the ability to have different "cover.jpg" files into each folder, so each disk can have different album art.