Metadata

[Steve Crook]

A couple of questions about metadata put into generated tracks. I can see three tags created by Vinyl Studio, CONTACT, GROUPING and LOCATION, the first says Vinyl Studio, the others both say (in my case) 'Ripped LPs' so I'm assuming this root directory specified for generated tracks. Couldn't see anything anywhere about them in the help or here. Can you say more about them? First is self evident, but the other two?

Also a suggestion. I'd want to record the date, time and equipment used for each rip in a custom tag. There's no way to create custom tags in VS (that I've found) so I'm using the COMMENT tag via the Album Details panel. At some point I'll write something around metaflac to shift those comments into a custom tag. But it would be nice to be able to create user tags within VS and have values (like recording date & time, and custom strings) automatically included.

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

Hi,

What player app are you using please and what file format are you saving your tracks in?

We will add custom tags to our wish list.

[Steve Crook]

I have an android player I'm partway through writing for myself, but also using BubbleUpnp until I can start to send to Upnp renderers and Chromecast from my own app. Generally, content is either on the phone or served from a Minimserver instance. Renderers are various, but mostly Moode, occasionally Kodi or chromecast audio pucks.

I record LP's directly to flac 24/192 and put onto my main server as flac. I've written a program that uses MetaFlac to calculate replay gain, then mirrors out to backups & transcodes a complete copy to ogg and maintains portable subsets for phone, car, wife.

I've been using a program called Metatogger to edit missing/inconsistent meta on ripped CDs that I've found through an analysis program I've written with the metadata retrieved via MetaFlac. Missing years, genre missing or inconsistent, all sorts, from years of ripping CDs and not paying much attention to the metadata.

Metatogger showed me the tags you're adding.

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

OK, thanks.

To answer your question about the GROUPING and LOCATION tags, the GROUPING tag is set to the name of the current collection unless you specify something in the Edit Album Details or Edit Track Details dialogs, in which case these take precedence (track takes precedence over album, if both are set).  The LOCATION tag is always set to the name of the collection.

What tags would you use for date, time and equipment?  Anything else you are thinking of?

[Steve Crook]

> What tags would you use for date, time and equipment?  Anything else you are thinking of?

I'd like to be able to specify the names of tags and give them format strings. For instance %date, %time to include the date/time of the recording as well as a %userData to represent a string supplied to Vinyl Studio somewhere. A typical string would like like this: "%userData_1 recorded on: %date at: %time" I'd use the fixed string to hold the details of the equipment used to make the recording.

This isn't information I'd want to display in a media player so I'm happy with custom tag names I specify rather than picking from a 'well known' set.

I'd also wondered about other meta about the denoise, declick settings (where appropriate). Nothing complicated, but if I decide I don't like the settings I've been using, it would be nice to be able to go back and quickly identify all the recordings with those settings to be able to adjust them and regenerate tracks

Would it be possible to generate a set of REPLAYGAIN tags when the tracks are output? I can do this through oggenc2 and metflac, but it would be much nicer to have it integrated in VS.

I can't think of anything else

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

Hi,

We have implemented this (apart from REPLAYGAIN) in VinylStudio V11.8.0 Beta 10.  You can get the software here:

https://www.alpinesoft.co.uk/VinylStudio/VSInstall_Exe_Beta.exe (Windows)

https://www.alpinesoft.co.uk/VinylStudio/VinylStudio-Installer-Beta.pkg (Mac)

Feedback welcome.

[Steve Crook]

I finally got around to looking at this and I have to say it's excellent and everything I asked for. I particularly like the ability to specify both at album and track level and have the track details override or add to album details.

The ability to automatically include the recording date is really neat too.

A couple of points:

• A future enhancement perhaps, an option to specify the date format or just one of a range of formats. I've been using YYYY-MM-DD through all of my recordings and have server settings that rely on it so change would be... painful.
• There's a minor cosmetic bug. Click on a line and the droplist symbol appears at the end of the row. But when the width of the dialog is changed the symbol doesn't move. So either disappears from view or sits partway along the row.
  

But, otherwise, all round awesome.

Sorry I didn't get around to trying this earlier in the year.

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

OK, thanks, we'll look into that.

[Steve Crook]

A few additional points:

When adding items, it's not possible to paste directly into the test part of the metadata. So, click the 'Add' button type the name of the variable, press TAB and the text section looks selected, but won't accept a paste, but starting typing is recognised. Small, but it would be handy to paste into it without having to click first.

It would be nice to be able to set default album metadata at application level (or collection if you think it more appropriate). I record information about how the LP was physically cleaned, what equipment was used when it was recorded as well as the settings used when the recording was cleaned up. It's there so that I can quickly search through my recordings to pick up on cases recorded with an older phono-pre or amp or something. Obsessive? Probably but, you know... The metadata variables are always present and the values don't change often, so global defaults would be helpful. Then, all I have to do is edit the few values that have changed. Definitely a nice to have, rather than something that's essential....

I noticed it's possible to create ARTIST, COMPOSER and other standard tags in this dialog. Which could be useful. But if I do, they're passed verbatim into the output flac, and semi-colon separators are ignored. I could create the individual tags (which works) but using the separators would be a nice shorthand way of achieving the same thing. The reason for doing this is that I like to supply artist names at track level and it's been handy to supply defaults at album level and then override or append at track level, then us a post processing program to do this. But the custom tags feature so very nearly lets me do this easily and entirely in VS.

[Steve Crook]

That stuff about ARTIST tags and separators. I'm not sure what's happening at the moment. I thought custom tags were passed through untouched, but I'm seeing the separators being processed. So don't take anything I've said so far on it too seriously....

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

> When adding items, it's not possible to paste directly into the test part of the metadata.

Click in the box, then you can paste.  That's probably as good as it's going to get, for now at least.

> It would be nice to be able to set default album metadata at application level

I'm not sure quite what you mean by this, but there are two things you can do:

1.  You can define a set of default tags to be applied to newly created albums.

2.  You can apply a set of tags to an arbitrary set of albums in the Batch window.

Hopefully, one or other of these things (or perhaps a combination) will do what you want.

> semi-colon separators are ignored

I hope not, I would be grateful if you could check.

[Steve Crook]

S:\Music\flac>..\Encoding\metaflac.exe --show-tag=ARTIST "Joni Mitchell\Blue\01 - All I Want.flac"
ARTIST=Joni Mitchell
ARTIST=Joni Mitchell
ARTIST=One; Two; Three; Four

Attached a screen print of the custom tags dialog showing them in a single ARTIST field '; ' separated.

Also, I set the dialog to add to the default set at album level, and seem have ended up with two ARTIST tags with Joni Mitchell...

[Steve Crook]

It might be handy to have an indicator somewhere that there are custom tags set either for the track or album because (modified 'Custom Tags' button text?) otherwise it's down to my all to fallible memory...

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

Thanks for this.  With regard to tag separators, these will be written out to the saved tracks as separate tags, if that's wat the file format dictates.

As for your other point, I think I agree, I will see what can be done.

[Steve Crook]

I think I completely misunderstood what the "Set As Default" button does, which probably explains my confusion the earlier post.

For Album level tags it sets the default album level tag information across VS for all new recordings, but doesn't modify anything for existing recordings? If this is the case, then it's exactly what I wanted, I just didn't realise it was what I'd got :-)

But I'm uncertain what "Set As Default" does at the album track level. Could you explain?