Proper Tagging and the Log File for Newbie

[MichaelHiFi]

This is depressing. I had spent a very long time building my library using MediaMonkey, MP3tag and just plain manually editing my music files. When I pull up my log file, I swear every file has a problem. I'm scared just to print it!

I wanted to play my DSD files last night but couldn't find them. May not be related to the tagging but I really going through some newbie pains. As a group we couldn't figure out how to play an album beginning to end!

The very fist offending files are errors in artist file name. How could it fix for instance "Willie & Lobo" or, "King and Taylor"? It seems that it only wants to see one artist name.

I've pulled up the log file and the MP3tag editor side by side. Now what? Should I batch run the entire catalog or try to pick'em off album by album?

Are the settings in MP3tag that relate the the structure of Minimserver?

Thanks for your help with these newbie questions.

[simoncn]

(15-03-2015 16:21)MichaelHiFi Wrote:  This is depressing. I had spent a very long time building my library using MediaMonkey, MP3tag and just plain manually editing my music files. When I pull up my log file, I swear every file has a problem. I'm scared just to print it!

I wanted to play my DSD files last night but couldn't find them. May not be related to the tagging but I really going through some newbie pains. As a group we couldn't figure out how to play an album beginning to end!

The very fist offending files are errors in artist file name. How could it fix for instance "Willie & Lobo" or, "King and Taylor"? It seems that it only wants to see one artist name.

I've pulled up the log file and the MP3tag editor side by side. Now what? Should I batch run the entire catalog or try to pick'em off album by album?

Are the settings in MP3tag that relate the the structure of Minimserver?

Thanks for your help with these newbie questions.

It would be very helpful if you could post the exact message that you are seeing. Without this, I need to guess at what the message is, and I might guess wrong.

It sounds like you might be seeing a message telling you that you can't have multiple ALBUMARTIST tags (not ARTIST tags) for the same album. To fix this, you would need to have a single consistent ALBUMARTIST tag for all the tracks in the album. You can have as many ARTIST tags as you like.

If there are other problems as well as this, please post the exact messages that you are seeing.

[MichaelHiFi]

Most of the errors are illegal characters or incorrect value for date. Others are conflicting album artist values and still others are just plain errors.

   
   
   

Looking at many prior posts it looks like one better be savvy at understanding tagging code. I thought I was years ago. I was wrong.
Thanks for your help.

[simoncn]

(17-03-2015 01:33)MichaelHiFi Wrote:  Most of the errors are illegal characters or incorrect value for date. Others are conflicting album artist values and still others are just plain errors.

Looking at many prior posts it looks like one better be savvy at understanding tagging code. I thought I was years ago. I was wrong.
Thanks for your help.

The illegal characters and date errors are caused by a bug in older versions of JRiver that wrote tags into FLAC files in an incorrect format with a NUL (0x00) character at the end of the tag value. If you have a recent version of JRiver (19 or 20), you should be able to fix this by gettng JRiver to rewrite the tags in your FLAC files from its library metadata. Alternatively, you can run these files through a file converter such as dBpoweramp.

MinimServer doesn't support having more than one ALBUMARTIST value for the same album. You can tag multiple artist names with the ARTIST tag instead.

I'm not sure what's causing the playlist errors. Either the referenced files don't exist or there was some previous error that prevented MinimServer from reading them. Do you see any previous error messages for these files?

[DavidHB]

I agree that finding a huge number of errors in the MinimServer log is depressing. One way of making things a bit easier is to do the job progressively.

You can make a new music folder, which is separate from 'My Music' or whatever you are using at present, and change the MinimServer contentDir setting to point to this new folder. (If you are using Windows 7 or later, this new folder can still be referenced in the Music Library and be accessed from there.)

You could start with a single album to check your methodology, and work on from there. As you clean up your files, you can progressively move them to the new folder, and have MinimServer do a rescan after each addition. If you have the log window open while you are doing the scan, you can check that the errors have been corrected.

As you are already using MP3Tag, you could check whether just opening and re-saving problem files in MP3Tag clears the illegal characters. If it does, it as easy to manipulate large numbers of files in Mp3Tag as in dBpoweramp. MP3Tag also makes it easy to deal with the ALBUMARTIST issue an album (or more) at a time. Just make sure that you don't put semicolons in the ALBUMARTIST entry, as MP3Tag interprets these as instructions to make an additional tag, which, as Simon explained, MinimServer does not allow for ALBUMARTIST.

I hope this helps.

David

[MichaelHiFi]

(17-03-2015 11:11)simoncn Wrote:  The illegal characters and date errors are caused by a bug in older versions of JRiver that wrote tags into FLAC files in an incorrect format with a NUL (0x00) character at the end of the tag value. If you have a recent version of JRiver (19 or 20), you should be able to fix this by gettng JRiver to rewrite the tags in your FLAC files from its library metadata. Alternatively, you can run these files through a file converter such as dBpoweramp.

MinimServer doesn't support having more than one ALBUMARTIST value for the same album. You can tag multiple artist names with the ARTIST tag instead.

I'm not sure what's causing the playlist errors. Either the referenced files don't exist or there was some previous error that prevented MinimServer from reading them. Do you see any previous error messages for these files?

Long time Jriver user. So that explains some of it.
How does one tag multiple artists? Just use artist instead of album artists?

I'm using MP3tag just highlighting the offending material and performing a web search having MP3tag rewrite the tags. Hope this works.

Thanks for your help!

[simoncn]

(18-03-2015 00:55)MichaelHiFi Wrote:  Long time Jriver user. So that explains some of it.
How does one tag multiple artists? Just use artist instead of album artists?

I'm using MP3tag just highlighting the offending material and performing a web search having MP3tag rewrite the tags. Hope this works.

Thanks for your help!

I'm not sure why you need to do a web search. You should be able to fix the NUL problem by rewritig (saving) the tags that are already there in the file.

For best results with MinimServer, there should be a separate ARTIST tag for each artist on the album (separated by semicolon in Mp3tag). For ALBUMARTIST, you can use:

1) the name of the artist, if there is one artist
2) for albums with a main artist and other artists, the main artist
3) for a compilation, Various Artists or Compilation (or any other value)

[MichaelHiFi]

I've spent considerable amounts of time trying to lose those minimserver error messages with 0 results. I've tried MediaMonkey tagging, MP3tag., Jriver 20 (keeps crashing when it does the YADB lookup). I rescan and nothing changes. I even tried to delete the tags in Jriver20 and error message says it failed to delete tags.

I tried the cleanup file property tool too in Jriver 20. That didn't affect I thing that I could see. Same extremely large log-file.

I've burned my library largely using DBpoweramp on default settings. I don't think though that a lot of the offending files are from DBpoweramp, rather from some unknown files I got from my buddy.

All these files worked through Win media and MediaMonkey players, I know I tested them too.

The only other play is deleting half the library and starting over.

Is there a way to see where one's DSD files are? We've looked for a lookup on just file types inside Minimserver but couldn't come up with a tool to perform that function.

Also, before update that is, you could only play 1 track at a time. I haven't seen if there's a fix for that yet.

[simoncn]

(21-03-2015 21:45)MichaelHiFi Wrote:  I've spent considerable amounts of time trying to lose those minimserver error messages with 0 results. I've tried MediaMonkey tagging, MP3tag., Jriver 20 (keeps crashing when it does the YADB lookup). I rescan and nothing changes. I even tried to delete the tags in Jriver20 and error message says it failed to delete tags.

I tried the cleanup file property tool too in Jriver 20. That didn't affect I thing that I could see. Same extremely large log-file.

I've burned my library largely using DBpoweramp on default settings. I don't think though that a lot of the offending files are from DBpoweramp, rather from some unknown files I got from my buddy.

All these files worked through Win media and MediaMonkey players, I know I tested them too.

The only other play is deleting half the library and starting over.

I presume you are referring to the messages about NUL characters. I think the best way to proceed is to start by making a small test library with one or two of these problem albums and run them through dBpoweramp Media Converter using FLAC to FLAC conversion. This should rewrite the tags in the correct format.

While you are doing these experiments on the small library, it might help to set the startupScan property to 'full' to make sure that the files are being rescanned after your changes. If a file is rewritten with the same timestamp and the same size, MinimServer won't rescan it unless startupScan is set to 'full'.

When you have established a process for successfully fixing the problems using the small test library, you can apply the same process to your main library.

Quote:Is there a way to see where one's DSD files are? We've looked for a lookup on just file types inside Minimserver but couldn't come up with a tool to perform that function.

You can add #AudioFormat to indexTags and this will show index categories for your DSF and DFF files.

Quote:Also, before update that is, you could only play 1 track at a time. I haven't seen if there's a fix for that yet.

This isn't related to tagging. It sounds like a problem with your control point and/or renderer.