Messages

121

Questions / Re: Syncing music library to android - relative playlists

« on: June 01, 2018, 03:10:03 PM »

You can export MB playlists with either relative paths or base file mapping (see Preferences | Library).  One of those might meet your needs.

You can also export MB playlists in XSPF format, which by definition is SUPPOSED to be independent of the underlying file structure - in my testing so far, I do not think XSPF is implemented correctly in MusicBee, but I am not sure.  If one of the first options does now work for you, I would suggest you see if your android player can import an XSPF playlist, then give that a try.

122

Questions / Re: Want to Share Playlists Only by Album/Track info and NOT File Name

« on: May 31, 2018, 03:09:35 PM »

The XSPF playlist format was SPECIFICALLY developed for exactly this purpose - to share a list of objects, such as audio tracks, between unrelated software or machines where there can be no meaningful reference to the underlying file structure.  The sharing issue is the germane point here.  This quote is directly from the xspf.org web site:  "The guiding design principle was to separate the functionality of a catalog of files from the functionality of a list of songs."

MusicBee supports exporting and importing XSPF playlists, so the problem seems to be a failure in the way it handles this format - perhaps simply lacking an option to ignore file names or something similar.  It would seem to be a rather simple option to provide a switch on the import of an XSPF playlist to resolve the file names from the Library based on the Organize Files naming template.  Or possibly a switch on the export function to omit file names (perhaps as simple as setting the Map Base File Path as "*.*" to [blank] ) - that would depend on how MusicBee currently deals with the import of an XSPF playlist that does not contain file names.  

Since the file name is an optional extension in XSPF, theoretically the capability to handle this issue is already built into MusicBee.  This is what the XSPF design team refers to as a "content resolver".

I have much more to learn about MusicBee, so I was hoping someone else already knew how to deal with this issue (if it is even possible).  Maybe I'll just have to submit an enhancement request and hope for the best?

123

Questions / Want to Share Playlists Only by Album/Track info and NOT File Name

« on: May 30, 2018, 08:43:30 PM »

I keep two copies of my Library - One machine has everything in Lossless format on a RAID array; this is my "Source" library, but I rarely use that machine to play any of the music.

Everything is the source library is converted to a "Player" library on my NAS in standard quality MP3 format, and all other devices access that player library for general playback.  In addition, I use playlists to copy/sync these smaller MP3 files to various portable devices.

I want to be able to export those playlists from the player library and add them back to the machine that maintains the source library, but I have not found a way to do this with MusicBee yet.  It seems that this should be possible by using playlists in XSPF format, but everything I have tried results in MusicBee stubbornly insisting on dragging the old file names along with the playlist when it is imported to a different machine.

Using relative file paths or mapping base file paths is not a solution in this situation, since virtually all of the actual file names use different file extensions.  So I need a way to move a playlist based on some combination of Album/Artist/Track#, etc.  Does anyone know how this can be done?  Thanx

124

Questions / Re: sorting playlists individually?

« on: May 30, 2018, 08:22:35 PM »

Every playlist has a "natural" order - this is initially the order in which the items were originally added to the list.  Sort on the # column will always return the list to the natural order.

You can change the natural order of any specific playlist by simply starting with the display in the natural order and then dragging tracks up or down to a different order - this is great for relatively simple order changes. 

For more drastic changes, you can use any combination of re-sorting on individual fields, dragging tracks, deleting and re-adding, etc.  Once  you have the new displayed order exactly how you like it, just choose the menu option to "Update Play Order" to make this the new natural order.  This makes it very simple to do any temporary sorting you like, but always immediately return to you preferred sort order with just one click.

125

Questions / Re: MusicBee on Multiple Computers Accessing same NAS Music Files

« on: May 18, 2018, 05:16:40 PM »

Interesting . . .

Thanks for you quick response, but something's not right in whoville.  You said "Starts with 3.2+, I think...", but the most current version I can find is 3.1.6590.

And on my current version of MusicBee, the Edit menu has nothing like "Saved settings" available.

126

Questions / MusicBee on Multiple Computers Accessing same NAS Music Files

« on: May 18, 2018, 04:35:43 PM »

I keep my music files a NAS drive so all computers in the house can access the same files.  I want to run MusicBee on multiple computers, and my initial testing seems to show this works just fine.

But is there a way to easily copy all the MusicBee setup customizations to a new computer instead of having to manually enter it all again?  I'm talking about things like screen formats, preferences for artwork displays and genre groupings, etc.

I do not care if each computer is eventually customized differently by each user, I just want an easy way to start off the same.

127

Questions / Re: Missing Albums/Tracks

« on: May 15, 2018, 05:31:53 PM »

I do not know much about MB yet, so I do not expect to be of much help.  But, have you checked your Group By and Filter options yet?  I have already been puzzled once by seemingly missing tracks inside albums, where the actual files did still exist on the hard drive.  Turned out that if a track has a different genre assigned than other tracks in the same album, it will NOT be displayed with those other tracks if they are affected by group or filter settings.

128

General Discussions / Re: Seek Advice / Discussion re File Formats: .flac, .mp3 and .m4a

« on: May 14, 2018, 05:56:25 PM »

Yes I am.  Why shouldn't I?

129

General Discussions / Re: Seek Advice / Discussion re File Formats: .flac, .mp3 and .m4a

« on: May 14, 2018, 04:16:12 PM »

Here is the process I have evolved to over the years.  My main music player for many many years has been Windoze Media Player, simply because it always seemed the most intuitive and easiest to use when organizing my music library.  I have looked at other players over the years, and found all of the ones I tried to be lacking SOOooo much of what was important to me, so I just quit looking at anything else except WMP.  But now the idiots at M$ have started jacking around with WMP under Windoze10 - does not even run on some computers anymore!  So I just found MusicBee in the past few days, and I think I am going to like it.

Now to the real subject of your post - what format to use.  I have made some dumb decisions over the years, and I have evolved there too.  I used to be bit of a real audiophile - huge expensive systems back in the 70s before modern electronics wiped out so many of the quality differences.  When I started moving all my music to the computers for ease of access and organization, I insisted on going totally lossless, but I always struggled with the extra large files and lack of available players for my preferred formats.  I hated all things MP3 (for mostly irrational reasons), and I eventually decided to just stick with WMA lossless since I was married to WMP.  In hindsight, it was not a very good decision.  Now that I am getting old, I do not listen to music the same way I used to, so I have revised my entire plan.

First of all, I finally decided that I just had to let the evil M$ empire go and get totally away for as much of their proprietary BS as possible (the same way I have felt about Apple for 30 years).  And when I reconsidered how and when I listened to music these days, I decided that only rarely did the full lossless quality make any real difference.  Furthermore, as long as I had the original CDs in my possession, I could always access the full lossless format if I wanted it.  Vinyl album rips are a different story, both in ease of access and available quality, but I'll leave that for another time.

So here is my current process:  Where I have the original CD, I keep either a medium or high quality MP3 rip in my library (depending on the type of music and inherent complexity of detail).  If I no longer have the original CD, I seek out and keep a FLAC copy if possible, or at worst a highest quality MP3. 

It is taking me a very long time to slowly work through all my old WMA format files to replace them, but even that is getting easier with MusicBee's ability to convert all the formats without having to re-rip them.

130

Questions / Re: Where are Genre Categories Specified?

« on: May 14, 2018, 05:30:01 AM »

Never Mind - I figured it out (sorry for the waste of time y'all).

Just in case anyone else does a search on "Genre Category" like I did, here is the answer:

Under Preferences, Tags (2), select "group genres: [Categorise...]", then select the Genre Category button.  Now scroll all the way to the bottom and you find a blank line where you can type in a new category map in the same format as the ones you find already there.

131

Questions / Where are Genre Categories Specified?

« on: May 14, 2018, 05:15:08 AM »

I have notice the ability to group lists by "Genre Category", and the description of this in the help pages sounds great, but I cannot figure out how to assign a genre category.

For example, I let MusicBee auto-tag the album Bone Against Steel by 38 Special, and it assigned the genre "Album Rock".  This is not a category I have ever used, and it would be totally pointless to have this one album hanging out there all by itself.  But that genre should roll up to a Genre Category of just "Rock", but it does not; when I group by Genre Category, I see that this album is grouped as "Unknown Genre Category".  So how do I define "Album Rock" to roll up to the larger category of just "Rock"?

132

Questions / Re: Cover Art - Sometimes there, but mostly NOT

« on: May 13, 2018, 03:42:22 PM »

THANX, that did the trick!

133

Questions / Re: Cover Art - Sometimes there, but mostly NOT

« on: May 13, 2018, 01:55:37 PM »

Thanx for the reply - it sounds promising, but that change did not seem to help anything.  But I'll so some more reading and poking around in that area to see if I can come up with anything else.

134

Questions / Cover Art - Sometimes there, but mostly NOT

« on: May 12, 2018, 10:40:46 PM »

I am brand new here - did some searches and could not find any appropriate references - I am sorry if I ask something already covered . . .

I just started testing MusicBee.  I have a decent sized music library (about 10,000 tracks) that was virtually ALL created by CD rips from Windows Media Player, including downloaded album info and album art.  In WMP, they ALL show good thumbnails and album art. 

Almost every album folder has four .jpg files for album art (one called "Folder.jpg" and the other three file names start with "AlbumArt...").  After scanning the entire library of media files into MusicBee, only a very small percentage of albums are shown with cover art - I find this very odd, since I would expect all or none.  Note that I did not import library information from WMP, as that program will not run on this particular W10 computer at all.

So my question is, what actually causes Cover Art to show up in MusicBee?  Is there a specific file type or file name in the album folder that will generate it?  If not, how do I get all these many hundreds of albums updated?