Messages

1

Plugins / Re: Additional Tagging & Reporting Tools

« on: May 15, 2022, 11:15:07 PM »

I use additional tagging tools so much that I forget that it's a plugin and not part of MusicBee. In fact, I was close to ditching MusicBee until I found it. The stuff that works is <Chef's Kiss>. To answer the questions;

I'm never certain about anything, so I removed and reinstalled the latest version.
I think my most recent successful backup was in the beginning of 2021, so it worked at one time.
I use the other features of Advanced tagging constantly. Especially "Advanced Find and Replace," "Reports," and "copy / Paste tags."

I was poking around and created a temporary library to test with. That one worked perfectly. I must be running into a limit based on my library size. It would explain why it worked just fine for a while; my library continues to grow.

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Plugins / Re: Trying to backup my tags and get a system out of memory exception

« on: May 15, 2022, 02:14:23 PM »

I would have sworn I put that in there. I'm using the "Additional Tagging Tools" Backup and restore. I'm trying to create a new baseline.

I was a bit panicked because I could not find my database files. Turns out my Database files are in the Windows "Music" special folder, which maps to C:\Users\<Me>\Music. I now have that backed up to my OneDrive using "MusicBee/File/Library/Backup Library."

3

Plugins / Trying to backup my tags and get a system out of memory exception

« on: May 15, 2022, 05:32:04 AM »

I've been having trouble backing up my tags for a while, but I just had a bit of a scare and feel like I need to fix it. I get this message when I try to backup my tags; (My current signature has been updated to reflect my current setup.) I can't believe my library is too big. In my search I didn't see anything specific to my issue.

5/14/2022 11:56:54 PM - 10.0.22000.0 - 3.4.8033.18564D - System.OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type 'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown.
  at System.Text.StringBuilder..ctor(String value, Int32 startIndex, Int32 length, Int32 capacity)

I have been unable to run a full backup for quite some time, but this is my current status. I was trying to clean up my file structure, and ran into an issue where MuscBee wouldn't start at all. I may not have a fully standard setup, but damned if I know what's really different. I restored an older version of my ini file and I don't see any lost information. I fully admit that I may have caused most of these issues on my own trying to customize file locations, but damned if I can remember doing anything out of the ordinary.

I'm sure I've done something odd but for the life of me, I can't figure out what. Any pointer on where to look are most appreciated. Am I just hitting raw system limitations? I've been looking for an excuse to upgrade, but I am hoping to limp along for at least a few more months so I can buy at least second gen new OS. Thanks, y'all rock!

4

Questions / Re: Can anyone help me with “Best Practice” for Tag Separators….?

« on: October 26, 2021, 12:17:23 PM »

Spend some more time on MusicBrainz Picard. Once I got all the scripting straight, there was no reason to use any other Tagging program, unless the release wasn't in MusicBrainz, and I had to revert to Discogs. Once you embrace the MusicBrainz system, everything else falls into place.

I believe all of your issues are solvable through scripting, or a more thorough understanding of what MusicBrainz is and does. I found that most of my problems were my own creation, because I didn't understand the metadata, or I scripted badly. The genres are a nightmare, but no one has those figured out canonically. I think I finally settled on Artist genre, or only the top genre per song. Anything more than that, and it becomes just about useless.

You might also check into some other apps like TagScanner, and kid3 to make sure you aren't dealing with residual tags from the original source. Might also be issues with the difference between APE, ID3, and Vorbis, depending on your source files.

Good luck.

5

Questions / Re: Can anyone help me with “Best Practice” for Tag Separators….?

« on: October 26, 2021, 02:15:02 AM »

Just my $0.02.

MP3Tag says that the universal separator is " / " (Note the spaces, they are important.) I use Semicolons and I've not seen any issues. Possible they are there but when I play outside of MusicBee I just don't care as much about my tags because when I'm portable, I only care about Album, Artist, and Title. All of the players I can remember playing with either had an option to specify your delimiter or it was just fine with my semicolons. Whatever you use, don't double it up. If you end up missing one of the pair you may not notice the issue until well down the road.


For the love of GOD, do NOT use different separators for different tags. You will very quickly hate your life if you ever try to do any kind of tag based scripting.

On a side note, I've travelled the road you are now on. After a good 15 years of playing around, I started using MusicBrainz Picard for all my tagging needs. With a couple of minor scripting tweaks and ignoring genres, I accept all the tags it wants to give me, without any other checking. In fact I also update them from time to time as the MusicBrainz database is updated. I don't manually manipulate tags anymore.

6

Questions / Re: Specific files don't play in MusicBee, and I can't figure out why

« on: July 16, 2020, 09:14:53 PM »

After much experimentation, I finally found the culprit, and fixed another problem I didn't know I had along the way. The problem was the SkipOverSong plugin. This was causing my Error log to fill up because it was triggering errors every time I started playing a file, or playlist. It was also causing problems with plugins. Removing / configuring plugins did not work consistently, but it worked well enough. I mostly only use the Tagging Tools Plugin, and that was flawless so I didn't care as much as I should have.

* I ran the installer for 3.3.7491, after deleting the offending Dll. This got me to functional in 3.3, and no more errors.
* I ran the update to 3.4.7499, and everything is still fine.

In my Post mortem, I remembered that I had done a restore from local backups a while ago, and according to the errorlog, that was about where my troubles started. If I got popups or errors, I ignored them because everything seemed to be working other than the popups. I just kept rolling with it. All errors should have been resolved, or verified benign.

I had focused on the files as the source of the problem, and kept running into dead ends. Once the Player was identified as the issue, It was easy to find the cause, and implement a solution. Good troubleshooting includes making sure you are trying to solve the correct problem. I got caught with my blinders on again.

I'm not a big deal like psychoadept or phred, but I will concur that the transition from 3.3 to 3.4 was painless.

Nonsense, you're a big deal too. Psychoadept and I just have some history. I don't know exactly what it is, but I know it was positive. I think I remember them leading me away from media monkey.

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Questions / Re: Specific files don't play in MusicBee, and I can't figure out why

« on: July 16, 2020, 03:55:09 AM »

No sarcasm;

If Psychoadept says it's OK, I'll do it tomorrow.

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Questions / Re: Specific files don't play in MusicBee, and I can't figure out why

« on: July 16, 2020, 03:02:33 AM »

I updated to 3.3.7491 when I first noticed the issue, and I have now upgraded to 3.3.7499. (I forgot about the latest versions in the forum, and went to the download page for update.)

* I have some other files that are tagged at ID3v2.4, and they play.
* I stripped out ALL tags from the suspect files, and MusicBee has no problems with it.
* I'll play around with the files to see if I can find anything specifc, but in the meantime, I'll probably just re-encode the tags to 2.3 or something. (They aren't part of my core listening library, just some files I use for background noise)

I'll upgrade to 3.4 in a while. I'm not ready emotionally to jump in on the ground floor of a new version.

I always love that I get better support from a free software package than the multi-thousand dollar software I support at work.
Seriously, Thank you. All the love.

9

Questions / Re: Specific files don't play in MusicBee, and I can't figure out why

« on: July 15, 2020, 11:15:31 PM »

I would really appreciate it if you would.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vlFB3CTf4uI4vDIdMX1PQtVdDoHrWD2L?usp=sharing

I'll be curious to know what tools you use. I'm always looking for new tools.

10

Questions / Specific files don't play in MusicBee, and I can't figure out why

« on: July 15, 2020, 10:33:43 PM »

I've tried a few things, and I'm out of ideas. Looking for some troubleshooting direction

Files are all MP3 320K. When I try to play, I get a very short burst of the first note, then nothing and playback stops. I cannot seek to any portion of the file. The time reported appears to be at least close to accurate.

* These files all play with no issues in a couple of other players
* MP3 Diags 1.02.3 reported problems with a tag stream, stripped out the offending string.
* Audio Tester 1.7 reports all files passed.
* All of my other tools are focused on tags, or FLAC, but they have no issues either
* Converted from MP3 to MP3
* Checked that all files are listed as "Not Hidden" and that everyone has Modify access to the files
* Was able to Volume level entire folder with no errors
* Discovered more, and all appear to be from the same source
* Tried different output devices and settings.
* Files that work, continue to work, Files that don't, continue to don't

Suspect some issue with encoding, but I have run out of tests, or potential solutions.

11

Questions / Re: Question about working with the Album Artwork Manager

« on: August 03, 2019, 01:23:04 PM »

I never seem to remember to update my signature.

Thanks! I totally blew by the "Rescan Artwork" button. That was what I forgot.

Still curious about only being able to save the first entry as an organized file in the Artwork manager, though.

12

Questions / Question about working with the Album Artwork Manager

« on: August 03, 2019, 02:32:01 AM »

I've finally decided that I've had enough with weirdness in my artwork, so I'm slogging through my library to fix everything. I'm using the Album Artwork Manager to identify albums that don't meet my standard, and things are going mostly OK; I'm about halfway through my 10k+ albums after a couple weeks of off and on work.

My first few batches would have the embedded artwork at the top of my list so that I could easily identify it, and save it as an MBCover.jpg, I think I tweaked a setting or two, and now embedded shows at the bottom of the artwork list. I thought I rearranged my album artwork retrieval filter to have "Embedded" at the bottom, so I moved it to the top, but that wasn't it. Ideas on what I did, or is this a function of something else, and the artwork is ordered based on another criteria, and it just works out this way now?

I notice I can only save the first picture as organized cover art. It would be much easier to fix my cover art if I could set any picture as organized art. As it is, if I don't want the first picture, I have to edit the album, and set the cover art from the artwork tab. I'm curious to know the reasoning behind this interface decision, or ideas on how to fix it if it's a problem on my system. I suspect that understanding of the first question will make this question irrelevant.

For the record, I've decided that I don't want any artwork embedded in my music files, so I'm going through each album, removing the embedded artwork, and saving the largest cover art image as an MBCover.jpg to display in MusicBee. I plan to embed the image when I sync a device, if I need it.

TIA for input on my wall of text.

13

Questions / Re: How to configure "Send To" an external application

« on: February 02, 2018, 05:01:21 PM »

Thank you kindly. That makes things so much easier.

14

Questions / How to configure "Send To" an external application

« on: February 02, 2018, 04:07:04 PM »

I'm trying to configure "Send To" to send albums to MusicBrainz Picard. I want to be able to send an entire album, or group of albums  to Picard for tagging. Everything I configure sends each file to Picard so that I end up with multiple instances of Picard, with one track listed in each. I'd like all tracks selected to open into a single instance of Picard so I can tag the entire album.

15

General Discussions / Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz

« on: January 28, 2018, 11:18:00 PM »

I have my compilations separated from my studio albums in my folder structure. My first level of folders under my Music folder looks like this;
- C (Classical music; have to maximize the number of characters for files.)
- Christmas (Any Christmas music album)
- Compilation (Includes Various artists, and greatest hits albums)
- Live (Anything album that is all live recordings)
- Separates (Any single track that I did not get as part of a full album, or doesn't fit anywhere else. Kind of my "Untamed section," that gets sorted through half-heartedly now and then to remove tracks I've since got the whole album for. Everything here has an "Album Artist" of Separates to keep it separated from the rest of the library. This one will suck to "Picard.")
- Singles (Anything labelled as a Single in Wikipedia)
- Soundtracks (Currently including single artist soundtracks and scores, but I'm rethinking that.
- Studio (Albums recorded in studio as a single work, with above exceptions. This also includes EPs) The full path to music is; Studio\<Album Artist>\<Album>\<Track#> - <Artist> - <Track>

(I use a custom tag in MusicBee for <Album Type> that I set when I add the music from the Inbox. This corresponds to the first level so I can automate file organization.

I'm doing all my retagging in Picard outside of MusicBee. This is the reason I designed my folder structure the way I did. I can work with one type of album at a time. I also have the advantage of finding music easily outside of a Media Manager. For my Studio albums; I only deal with full albums. If a single track is off, I'll come back to it later. (I now keep my library entirely software agnostic. I use my Media Manager for playing, and other software for tagging. And never the two should meet. Media Monkey taught me that one.) It's way easier for me to work with Explorer shortcuts to get to single albums that may need to be entered in the database. So far there is only a handful.

I hadn't really considered the ramifications of release date until you mentioned it. I had to go through some gymnastics to get the "original year" to be the release year, because I don't care when the media was made; I care when the work was released. If I'm honest though, I never used the year, only the decade. It doesn't seem like much of an issue for the studio albums I'm processing now, but I will certainly need to deal with it for compilations. Lucky for me, I have a while before I'll get there. Glad I can avoid your trouble with compilations and Box sets.

Truly sound advice to keep everything, and add more later. Once you have the basics, it's really easy to go back through. The only reason I'm not following that is that Media Monkey really monkeyed with my tags, and they are a mishmash of versions, and the "Involved People" tag was pretty much hosed. The patch Steven did for Involved people worked great on almost all of my tags, but the tags where the Monkey wrote really weird stuff I have no hope of fixing. I liked the idea of stripping everything out, and starting fresh with good frames. I may have lost a few good bits of information in some of my tracks, but for the most part, I haven't lost anything I really use. (I'm also taking the opportunity to strip out the embedded lyrics. All of my lyrics will be separate files from now on.) Really, my only regret is not using Picard when I found it a few years ago.

I've found that this first pass is only taking as long as it has is because I'm getting album art. My second pass on Picard Processed tracks is way quicker, and I can do way more than several hundred tracks at a time.

I appreciate your insights. And as always, Thank you for your support.