question about JRiver media center... user friendly?

I don't question it works. I have no criticism of the method. It just seems easier to me to use the tools available within the library management software than to manage two separate libraries. It just a matter of personal choice and preference.

 

That's what is great about JRiver. There are many ways to categorize to your liking. I did go back and change into Genre separation into only one library. It was easy to do, except for the iso files (SACD) that have yet to get side car, had to retag them. Thank goodness I don't have to many at this time.

 

It does make JRiver a bit of a challenge at the start - so many options (and IMO not the most intuitive interface). For me - I learned the aspects of the program I needed immediately, and I expect to learn more over time.

 

Note: A quick way to sort by genre and correct the meta tags in a specific genre, is to use explorer (inside Devices and Drives) in JRiver. If all your music files, like mine, are sorted properly into genre files on your hard drive, then your golden. You can correct and rename the genre tag for all those files in one fell swoop with JRiver. I love JRiver for these very capable multi tasking meta tag editing features. (Also make sure that you have allowed Windows properties, read only feature to be unchecked, just right click on a folder and uncheck this feature in properties, Windows will go thru and uncheck all files within the folder, this will allow JRiver to physically change the metatags within your files and not just store them on JRiver)
Main thing is that you know where to find the music quickly and grow in size, that is what a good library organization can do.

 

I am thinking of letting JRiver reorganize my music library (which has grown rather messy). I'm talking tens of thousands of files. Organization would likely be genre/artist/album, which is how I think about my music. Any major considerations before I begin?

And yes, I do have back-ups.

 

JRiver doesn't need to have your in any particular organization of folders and file names. If you have accurate tag values in your music files, the folder / file name organization doesn't matter.

You can create views in JRiver using whatever tags you want.

Do your music files currently have useful tag information embedded in them? If so, JRiver should recognize those tag values when you import the files. You should check the imported files to be sure that the tag values are accurate.

If your music files don't have tags in them, do the folder and file names for those files contain genre, artist and album information? If so, you can use a JRiver command to build tags using folder and file names. (Rename, move and copy files). You should check the resulting tag values to be sure that they are accurate.

You will have a much better experience if you learn a bit about tags and how JRiver uses them and experiemtn on a few files before you plunge in and import all your files.

 

Think about potential name collisions in the directories. For example, if you have multiple disc albums you probably want each disc in its own directory. You could add the disc# to the naming rule to do that.
For example: [Genre]\[Album Artist (auto)]\[Album]IfElse(!IsEmpty([Disc #],1), -PadNumber([Disc #],2))
Will add the Disc # to the end of the directory if the Disc # tag is not empty.

For the file names you'll want to make sure the generated file name for each track does not end up too long. The Windows file system is rather limited and can't handle long names. The limit for NTFS is around 250 characters. You're not likely to hit that. But classical music can have some very long names. I don't like really really long filenames so I add a rule to trim the generated filenames to a reasonable length.
For example: PadNumber([Track #],2)-Mid([Name],0,60)
Will create a filename that pads the track # to two digits, then adds a dash, then up to 60 characters of the track name.

There's lots you can do. The expressions can get more complex if you need to.

Be sure to test your naming rules on a multiple artist album as well as a normal single artist album before committing to renaming and relocating a lot of albums.

 

I've done a lot of tagging in JRiver, so I'm relatively comfortable with that (including some simple expressions). And I know the benefits of experimenting. And asking questions even before that.

I'm doing this primarily to try solve some issues when I use my Squeezeboxes. LMS seems to be rather inconsistent when indexing my files at present, especially with regard to multi-artist albums, where LMS will break some, but not all, into separate albums on an artist by artist basis and multi-disc sets, where LMS seems to treat some multi disc sets as separate albums, although I have checked the box to treat them as a single album.

Given my druthers, I would love to examine JRiver's underlying database to see if I can identify differences in the way the data is being stored, but I know of no way to do that.

 

Actually, let me pose my main problem in detail to see if anyone here can solve it.

I have my own system for naming artists for classical music - which, when it works, is perfect for me. The artist is an amalgam of the composer and the principal performer. So if I have an entire album of Heifetz performing Beethoven, the artist would be Beethoven Heifetz. If the album has some music by Beethoven and some by Mendelssohn, the artist for some tracks would be Beethoven Heifetz and for others would be Mendelssohn Heifetz. JRiver would then insert (Multiple Artists) in the Album Artist field (automatically most of the time - it seems to hiccup occasionally, but I can force the issue).

Switching over to Squeezebox/LMS, when I drill down to select music, I almost always go through genre/artist/album. This gets me where I need to go for single album artists. Sometimes it does for multiple artist albums as well. If, for example, I only want to listen to the Mendelssohn concerto, I'm there. But often, I want to listen to the entire album.* In that case - when things go right - I can go to the information screen for a particular track of the Mendelssohn where it lists the album. By selecting that I get the entire album. In other cases, I do the same thing, but I still only get the tracks related to the particular artist - Mendelssohn Heifetz in my example.

* A workaround is to drill down through albums, instead of genres, but this has drawbacks for me, outside the scope of my question.

Edit - All right, now that I've posted my question, the problem seems to have vanished.

 

I've never used Squeezebox. My guess is that Squeezebox is looking for the Album Artist tag to help it determine files are in the album. JRiver doesn't write the Album Artist tag unless you do it yourself. JRiver uses its own "Album Artist (auto)" tag if the Album Artist tag is empty. That works well for JRiver, but doesn't help other software.

The solution is to fill in the Album Artist tag for all albums. For multiple artist albums I fill in the Album Artist with "(Multiple Artists)" for most multiple artist albums. For some soloist albums I'll use the soloists name, like for Yo-Yo Ma albums I fill in the Album Artist as "Yo-Yo Ma". And for tribute albums I use the name of the band being tributed. So a tribute album of Queen songs will have the Album Artist set to "Queen".

 

I do that too. But it needs to look at something more than that. I had assumed it was the album title, and I made a point of giving albums with multiple artists unique titles (not simply "Violin Concertos"). When I was having the problem, I wondered whether it also looked at directories, so that if files from a single album were stored in different directories they would be treated as separate albums. (This happened with the two Time-Life Legend albums, and once I moved them to the same directory, the Squeezebox software knew what to do.)

For broad compilation including tribute albums, I'll usually use "Various" plus the name of the album, but if I have multiple related comps (e.g. my various Motown comps) I'll use "Various - Motown" as the artist.

As I said - when my system works, it is perfect, and right now it seems to be working.

 

I'm having a lot of trouble with burning discs on JRiver... I am (most of the time) getting an "error writing pre-gap" message. Anyone know what may be causing this, turn off pre-gap if possible or... any ideas I'll try 'em!

Thanks!

Jeff

 

Great thread here! I didn't see this brought up here, but I quickly scanned through all the pages so I apologize if this is a repeat. I'm thinking of trying JRiver, and I was just curious what kind of artist sorting flexibility it has. I'm currently using Musicbee to manage my FLAC library, and it has dedicated "Sort Album Artist" and "Sort Artist" tags so that I can have Bruce Springsteen listed with my "S" artists. Musicbee has also implemented these in a way that's compatible with iTunes because when I convert them to mp3, iTunes automatically recognizes the tag so that the albums are listed with the "S" artists in iTunes with no intervention on my part.

So my questions are:
* Does JRiver recognize this tag as well and have the ability to display the library using this Sort tag?
* If not, does JRiver provide its own means of for me to customize how the artists are sorted?

 

Sorry no one replied, Jeff, but I would suspect that hardly anyone burns discs anymore if using JRiver. For most folks, once your onto HDD, your home free, writing CD's or DVD's was so yesterday, using a USB data key would be better. Check out the JRiver forum for detailed information on writing.

 

Thanks... there have been "upgrade" notifications and I have installed them, restarted computer... I have since burned the new HD McCartney EP "down" to CD... and that worked fine.

Now I'll try to do the "Multiple Disc" Beach Boys 1964 burns... I'm sorry I'm still on physical media. If I knew how to get this ASUS X750J to my Sony SACD player (old)... or even my BRK receiver.. that would be magic. Truly "magic" since I don't even know the first thing about the rear of the receiver (except I dust it and clean it every month).

My speakers are well placed though - I know that!

Jeff

 

Awesome, glad to hear you figured it out. Yeah, those older stand alones probably don't have the ability to stream external data drives. No loss, might as well use up those remaining discs, there's always tomorrow for newer components, when necessary.

 

JRiver doesn't support the "Sort Album Artist" and "Sort Artist" and "Sort Composer" tags out of the box in its default setup. JRiver can be set up to recognize and read and write any tag and to sort on any tag. So it can be done. It just requires some manual work on your part to get JRiver to read those tags and to change the views to sort by that tag.

I've been meaning to do that with my own library for the past couple years. I'm lazy. My Bob Dylan is still sorted in the B's. One of these days I'll get to it. I'm not sure how much work it would actually be to do this and how well it would all work out in JRiver Media Center. I'll know after I do it. My problem is that I don't have any of the sort tags already filled in. So I'd need to add the sort tags to every album and artist and composer. And that would take time.

JRiver Media Center is very flexible in being able to modify the views and sorting. It has a powerful expression language and powerful database filtering.

This is one thing that I wish JRiver would add support for in the default setup. Many people already have the Sort Artist and other sorting tags filled in from iTunes. And there are other media players that support the same sort tags. It would be convenient for JRiver to also support that in its default setup.

 

Thanks! So when you bring in a library into JRiver do those tags show up in a "Custom Tag" field so that I don't have to re-enter the proper Sort name? It's just a matter of "finding" the custom tag ID against each track? I don't mind manually configuring the software to use custom tags for sorting, but I'm more leery of having to re-type the names I want it to sort under.

 

JRiver can read in the tags and any data that is in the tags. You won't have to re-enter any data.

You can add new tags and get JRiver to recognize existing tags in the "Manage Library Fields" dialog
Tools >> Options >> Library & Folders >> Manage Library Fields...
You'll need to enter the tag with the same name as it is in the metadata in the files. You may need to use a tag editing tool that lets you see the raw tag field names to get that info. You can get help in the JRiver forum. Or here if I happen to know the answer.

 

Cool, thanks for the help!

 

I use JRiver to burn discs! I've never had the error message that Jeff has had though.

 

When I began ripping my collection I decided early on that I needed to organize the music in a way that made sense from back of the house as I call it. The folders you see in windows without JRiver even a part if the picture. I created genre folders that I've dragged albums into. I have had the standard genres like everyone Rock, Jazz, Blues, Country, Various Artists, Soundtracks, etc. I just created a couple more, Christmas, Spoken Word, Gospel, etc.

So no matter how screwed up tagging could get, everything is in it's proper place on the hard drives. If I go looking to fix something, I start at the drive level very often.

Metadata and file/folder names are not one and the same thing. I was slow to grasp that.

 

iTunes has an option that lets you set the start time and stop time of a specific track. Does JRiver have a similar feature?

 

Bump

 

Not that I know of. Out of curiosity - how/why would you need this?

VP