question about JRiver media center... user friendly?

And I'm so busy, I can't look at it for a day and a half.

The playlist trick works.

 

I also took the plunge.....15 year Winamp user..... I cannot find anything that lets me use ReplayGain, though? It gives me some crap about R128 algorithm... I don't care about that, I want to use the RG values I have attached to all my files. How do I turn that on??

 

it embeds album art into the files through the media player??? ARRRRGH

 

A couple of observations

It crashed 4 times trying to import my libary.

Once I got the import to complete, it didn't import 5000 songs because the file names are too long and 500 because they're bad files. I tried 5 of the bad files in both foobar and iTunes and they play fine.

For the life of me, I can't find a field for the codec. It's got to be there, but I can't find it.

The playlist definition that Ham Sandwich posted is very odd. It appears random, but it can't be. I have 10,300 albums and 350 opera albums. I've refreshed 30 times and the fewest opera albums I've gotten in the refreshed playlist is 2 out of the 10. The most is 7 out of ten

 

I think JRiver is special enough that it should be on a computer with little else. It should be a music server computer. If you have tons of other software and an old installation of windows, I could see conflicts being common. Start fresh and clean and everything should be fine. If you are still having issues, go to the JRiver boards and read everything until it makes sense.

I have just a few CDs that did not load into the library out of zillions. A Johnny Cash DCC title does not load, how odd. I will simply re-rip those.

Usually when I've had files that come up odd, or no tags, whatever, it's because they were downloaded from sketchy sites. All of my own dBpoweramp rips loaded beautifully and even the ones with crazy long file names. JRiver never seemed to mind long names, or symbols used in names where you are not really supposed to use in Windows for naming files or folders. dBpoweramp and JRiver have been very forgiving in my experience. However, my music folders/files throw a Mac into total confusion with the way things are titled and tagged.

 

When I imported my 3000 disc collection, I got error messages on less than 20 tracks. Re-ripping them into iTunes did not seem to help, but I was able to rip them directly into JRiver. The only problem was inconsistent file location.

For the CODEC, are you looking for file type?

 

ALAC and AAC have the same file type

 

For the playlist problems it may be because JRMC isn't seeing some of your albums as complete albums. That can be due to tagging oddities. JRMC has a set of rules for determining if a set of files is a complete album or not. See the following wiki articles for some info:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Album_Artist_and_Album_Artist_(Auto)
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Multiple_Artist_Albums
There's another wiki article that's relevant, but I can't seem to find it. It listed the rules for determining when a set of files is a complete album or not.

Basically, all the files need to have the same album name.
Need to have either the same "artist" or same "album artist (auto)" name.
Need to have tracks numbered from 1 to n with no missing tracks
Should all be in the same directory (but that is not absolutely necessary)
Need to have the same Disc #
There are some other rules as well

You may need to do some tagging updates to get all of your albums to actually be seen as complete albums. JRMC does its best to try to group all related files as an album, but sometimes it needs some help by manually fixing the tags and/or file locations so they're less ambiguous.

 

Look at Old Listener's post #219
http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threa...ter-user-friendly.335254/page-9#post-11074049

The part circled in blue. Select a single file. Click on the top line in that area (it's in the Action Window Tagging pane). That will display a text dump of file info. Including the file format JRMC sees and all the tags that are stored in the file.

 

Out of curiosity I downloaded the 'Hi-Res' version of 'Love You Live' from the Stones website for $10. Turns out its 44.1/24 but it was remastered and sounds decent. My problem is that it downloaded as Disc 1 and Disc 2. I renumbered all the second disc tracks to make it play as one continuous album. I've done the same thing with other multi disc sets like 'Quadrophenia' and it worked fine. With this one, even though the tracks are numbered properly and the 'Disk 1 and 2 titles have been removed they are out of order. They are all under one album heading now, but the second disc tracks are listed in order in front of the 1st disc. Tracks 11-18 are listed on top of tracks 1-11. Other than the numbering of each track, what would cause this?

 

Easy fix, just click on track# in the title bar above the tracks. Two choices will come up, click on "Sort Inside Groups by Track #"

Gotta love JRiver, there is so many ways to organize your library. I can understand the pain at first, especially when importing a large library for the first time. Will take time to get all those meta tags in order.

 

Here's a common problem I've had in retagging files from other sources. Once the files are imported to JRiver, which I do automatically from my library sources, I need to retag the file information to my tastes. But if you try to retag any information you get an error pop up, and you are unable to permanently change the meta tags on your drive. Here is the fix.
One needs to change the property features of each file or the whole drive so that "Read only" feature is unchecked. For some reason Jriver is blocked from making any changes without Windows being free of this protective attribute. Once unchecked, you are free to tag away without any errors. I find this very handy for SACD/DSD.

 

How about the compression field?

 

Thanks, I'll give it a shot when I get home.

 

On the Mac side I constantly make metadata tag changes in JRiver. Since both JRiver and iTunes are pointed to the same library files each is updated in either direction.

 

I like the software Tag and Rename. Just so powerful and cuts across artists folders swiftly, making standardization and consistency fairly effortless in the tags. If you are good at cut and paste or control C and control V, then it's so fast I am not as upset things were not right originally.

Some song tags are just not out there and you must do it all yourself from scratch. If I must work under that circumstance then I would rather use Tag and Rename than the JRiver pane editing.

 

JRiver is on a PC and iTunes is on a Mac, but they both point to music on a NAS. I'm pretty sure the Windows version is choking on the Mac names, which is why I had so many files not import. I had a similar problem with names generated from dbPowerAmp and software that I can't remember off the top of my head. With dbPowerAmp, I could tell it to name files with just the first 20 characters of the track name. I can't do that with iTunes. Some of my classical tracks have very long names.

I'm not going to worry about that while evaluating. I am concerned about JRiver not recognizing albums and I'm not really sure that's the case. In the navigation panel, when I expand through Audio and Albums, it says I have 10, 408 albums.

BTW, when I just went to look for the number of albums, JRiver had crashed again.

Edit: It can't deal with having ALAC and AAC in the same directory. The only album marked as complete albums are ones that I originally ripped to AAC or MP3 and haven't gotten around to reripping yet. That includes a lot of my complete operas. That's why they keep coming up in the shuffle by album list.

 

Anyone?

 

I figured out how to not embed the art in the files when adding to the library...but now what it is doing is changing other metadata....namely the track number. Instead of it being 1/12 like I have set up, it automatically changes it to just "1". Anyone know how to shut this off?

 

I assume 1/12 means track 1 of 12. A quick look in tools->options->libraries & folders->manage library fields indicates that the track# field expects an integer. If I had that issue, I might try experimenting, but the first thing I would do is pose the question in the JRiver forum.

 

The latest version of Media Center (V19 and v20) have ditched the old outdated RG algorithms in favor of the new R128 standard. RG gains values DO get calculated on files processed by MC - but you will need to commit to running Analyze Audio on your whole library. V19 and beyond ignores all prior RG tags - so you either re-analyze your library or not.

R128 is vastly superior to the old RG - I have had nothing but excellence in converting all my files to the R128 standard.

Cheers,

VP

 

I do not know of a way to "turn it off" - but have never seen 1/12 used with MC - I am certain that is not a valid value for track number.

That said - there are some things you may need to compromise on if moving to MC. I can't see how a Track number of 1 vs 1/12 is going to make or break your enjoyment but each to their own.

There are a number of other ways to have MC "show" what track is playing out of how many in total.

VP

 

Thanks. Like RG, can you edit the values it ultimately comes up with? For example, I have not always agreed with RG's volume leveling.....I usually end up adjusting albums by 0.5 or 1 dB based on what I hear when I play the song/album back.

Are other media players switching to this? Or is this sort of like MP3 vs. FLAC - RG is the "standard" and this is hard for the masses to yet accept?

 

Another question - if I let JRiver run the R128 on all the files - are they tagged as well with this standard? Does it overwrite the RG metadata, or simply add to the metadata?

 

No editing of any values within Media Center after analysis that I am aware of.

For me RG "was" the standard (if one could even call it that) from a consumer standpoint - but MC decided to roll to the professional realm and implement R128 standards - which are the same standards used by broadcast all over the world now. I am not sure iof any other players use it or plan to use it since I do not use any other players.

All analysis on any file will completely replace the data - so if you are planning on working your library - be aware that there is no going back - unless you want to "re-do" the old school RG value using some older RG tool.

FWIW: I had 55000+ FLAC files with old RG data when I moved to MC v19 and wasted no time dropping all the old values and adopting new ones. The new R128 standard is just so much better at making the library conform with respect to volume leveling, I would not have it any other way over here. EVERYTHING is leveled with R128 prior to entry into the library.

Cheers,

VP