FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

[Tom Swaman]

I am certain this is an old, repeat subject, but I have not been able to find a viable solution for my music.

I, unfortunately have many FLAC albums containing out-of-sequential order tracks. Clearly, these albums do not play properly. Is there any simple way and/or user friendly software that will renumber the tracks in sequential order so the entire album will play correctly?

Thank you for your help,

Tom Swaman

[simbun]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

I mixed up the track numbers of an album, loaded it into MusicBrainz Picard, clustered the tracks then told it to Scan and it did identify the correct track ordering. Whether you could do that in batch is another thing.

[garym]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

I am certain this is an old, repeat subject, but I have not been able to find a viable solution for my music.

I, unfortunately have many FLAC albums containing out-of-sequential order tracks. Clearly, these albums do not play properly. Is there any simple way and/or user friendly software that will renumber the tracks in sequential order so the entire album will play correctly?

Thank you for your help,

Tom Swaman

Clarify a bit more. For example:

1. Do all the album tracks contain the correct track number, but they are just sorted in the wrong order (1, 4,5,8, etc. instead of 1,2,3,4,5,....)
a. related to 1. are you talking about the metadata tag track numbers or the FILE NAME numbers?

2. Is this related to leading zeros. For example, tracks are listed as 10,11,12, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 instead of 1-12.

3. and what are you playing on. Some car players ignore track numbering and play tracks alphabetically!

perhaps show us an example of what you are talking about.

[thexfile]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

You could try Mp3tag to correct them.

[Tom Swaman]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

Thank you all. Please know that I am a classical music geek and not a techie. So this stuff is hard for me.

I ,have a number of commercial music that was sold as a composite of multiple albums, eg Shostakovich's Symphonies composed of 1 separate folders pasted into one master folder without renumbering the tracks from say 01 to 70 in proper sequence. I need to fix this numbering in order to play the entire album.

What is the best thing for me to do and how do I learn to do this?

Thanks again,

Tom

[simbun]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

It sounds like you've bought the individual releases that make up a box-set. In order to play the box-set from beginning to end a player first needs to know that it's a related sequence of tracks, and then be able to determine the order.

There's a lot of ambiguity here, perhaps you could you find a link to the release on Discogs/MusicBrainz/Amazon?

What software are you using to play the tracks, as this will determine the solution e.g. AssetUPnP & BubbleUPnP, foobar2000 e.t.c.

[Tom Swaman]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

Simbun,

I believe you are correct except U=I did not buy a box set. I actually bought downloads from a major supplier of truly high quality recordings. I am trying to not mention names here to not be commercial. At this point I do not know what to do as the downloads need renumbering in order to play.

I am currently using BluOS as my player and this is truly wonderful.

Thanks fo helping me.

Tom Swaman

[simbun]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

Whilst I've heard good things of BluOS generally its local metadata support isn't one of them, and because it doesn't support UPnP you're a bit stuck.

The only documentation I've managed to find about its tag support is here, please someone correct me if I'm wrong.
I also looked to see if they supported box-sets in anyway, but this link appears to show they don't.

With this in mind, the only way you'll get the box-set to appear as a single playable item is if they all share the same album name! Is losing the individual disc names ok with you, as it wouldn't be for me? It might be worth asking this question in the BluOS forums.



The following instructions assume you want to merge all the discs into a single album, and that each folder represents a disc.

Please take a backup copy of this boxset before making any changes.

For simplicity I've chosen to use Mp3tag, so download and install it (a portable installation is fine).
You then need to drag each folder onto the Mp3tag window in the order they appear in the box-set. NOTE: By default, dragging a folder onto the Mp3tag window will replace any existing files so hold down Ctrl when dragging.

Once all the discs are in Mp3tag and in the correct order, choose the menu item 'Convert > Auto-numbering wizard', then configure the options as follows:



Finally click OK.

You should now have DiscNumbers of 1-X and TrackNumbers 1-X within each disc.

If you index your files they should now appear as a single playable item.

[garym]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

Simbun, I use mp3tag as well. For your instructions to work, I think each album would need to be in a different directory. Track renumbering for a disk starts over with each separate directory. I could be wrong. Not at home to test.

in any case, after fixing track tags, I would also fix filenames. CONVERT tag to file name. I would use something like
$num(%disk%,2).$num(%track%,2) - %title%

this would produce a filename like
01.01 - trackname.flac
01.02 - trackname.flac

the $num() part is to make these 2 digits. So when sorting by filenames 01, 02 comes before 10, 11 etc. can change to 3 if you have hundreds of tracks.

[simbun]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

Simbun, I use mp3tag as well. For your instructions to work, I think each album would need to be in a different directory.

I did state that in my assumptions:

The following instructions assume you want to merge all the discs into a single album, and that each folder represents a disc.

I took the following to mean that each album was a separate folder and it had been copied into a master folder, but I suppose it could have meant that all the tracks were copied into a single master folder too.

I ,have a number of commercial music that was sold as a composite of multiple albums, eg Shostakovich's Symphonies composed of 1 separate folders pasted into one master folder without renumbering the tracks from say 01 to 70 in proper sequence.

I'm hoping he's gone to the BluOS forum for advice on how best to deal with box-sets as I don't like the single album approach myself.

[garym]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

Frankly I am still confused as to the exact problem. Showing us a specific example of what things look like now and then what he would want them to look like would be helpful. And Tom, nothing wrong with mentioning actual company names and specific album or box set names.

ps. When I buy album download files I almost always (actually ALWAYS) have to clean up tag metadata, numbering and naming before I add to my collection.

[GBrown]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

When I buy album download files I almost always (actually ALWAYS) have to clean up tag metadata, numbering and naming before I add to my collection.

I'm in the same boat. More and more I have been purchasing music online, and I find the quality and consistency of the metadata can vary. I use the sorting tags pretty extensively as well, and the are almost always either blank or simply a duplicate of the matching original tag. A quick run through mp3tag before I add them to the library is just a part of the routine for me.

Back to the issue for the OP with box sets. I use the actual name of the box set itself for the Album tag, as well as the release year for the set. This is what defines this as a distinct grouping of tracks for most players. The disc*-track* and title that @simbun and @garym mention is also used. There is a separate tag field that I use to identify each of the individual album names called ORIGALBUM (as well as ORIGYEAR). But very few players can use or even display these (try MusicBee or Foobar if you want the flexibility for this). With this method, all tracks can reside within the same folder if you wish.

[simbun]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

If you're not bound by BluOS another option is to use DISCSUBTITLE.

Personally I prefer to store them in Album and use BoxTitle to hold the box set name, primarily so I can see all the albums alongside each other (not just the ones from the box-set), and use OriginalDate to hold the initial album release date (which albums are sorted by).

With some of the better servers you can then index to get a box-set view and an album view.

[Tom Swaman]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

Simbun,

To try to clarify, a FLAC folder called Music Man's Complete Symphonies is sold containing the four symphonies of Music man consisting of 20 flac tracks not numbered in consecutive sequence from 01 to 20, Since the tracks are not sequentially numbered, the folder will not play Sym. 1, 2, 3, 4 in order. I need to learn how to renumber the 20 tracks so as to play the four symphonies in proper orfer.

I hope this helps and again, my sincere thanks.

Tom Swaman

[simbun]

Re: FLAC Track Numbering Sequentially for Accurate Playing

The easiest way to do this is to download Mp3tag and follow this guide.

You firstly need to make sure that all the tracks have the same Album, AlbumArtist and DiscNumber. This is so that BluOS will recognise it as a single playable item.
Once you've done that, you need to update Track number for each track so they're in the correct play order.
Once that's complete a re-index of BluOS should do the trick.

Make sure you keep a backup of the tracks until they're loaded into BluOS and working as expected.