Author Topic: New Version 3.3.7491 Still Not Identifying CD Tracks Correctly  (Read 1115 times)

gehring621

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I have been trying to get MB to work thru the last several versions and am starting to run out of patience with it after spending more time than should be required to get my music library scanned in and ID'd correctly.  My setup is Win10, current MB version, entire library of ~400 CD's is ripped to .wav files by album on internal HDD.  I have a solid 100MB business class Internet service  I am also a systems engineer with some programming experience.  I have edited the Tags2 preferences to use MusicBrainz and Gracenote, unticked the ignore files smaller than x option, created new small test library with about a dozen albums scanned and after a quick scan, MB typically fails to ID track 01 and creates multiple duplicate albums where the dups have one unknown track.  It typically does correctly ID tracks 2 thru x and retrieves the album artwork.  I previously used Windows Media Player and while there were other problems, for a long time it did a pretty good job of ID tracks until the freedb/CDDB started to unravel.  I have fiddled with MB enough to understand how to rescan/auto-tag tracks and so forth, but the initial scan makes me start off with such a mess it's just not worth the hours of time it would require to simply get each album listed correctly.  No, my collection is not full of Hungarian polka dances, it's just good old US rock and country mainly.  I am open to working with support to find a solution. 

frankz

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I'm confused about your post, and not just because it's a wall of unbroken text.

Initially scanning to create your library has nothing do with tagging.  If your library is 400CDs ripped to wav and was previously accessible in another program, are these files not tagged or denoted as to what they are in any way?  Musicbee should be able to read the existing tags (or cue sheets) and get some sense of what's there without auto-tagging at all.  

Even if they're not tagged, but are named something predictable like Artist - TrackNo - Title, MB should be able to figure out what they are. Unless your library is a mass of files that are not identified in any way, auto-tagging is like step 2 or 3 in creating a library, not step one.

Are they individual songs files, or one file per CD with a cue sheet?

That said, if you're dissatisfied with the results tagging through MB, my advice would be to tag your files directly in MusicBrainz Picard, which works quite well at scanning and identifying through sound signature, before trying to import them into MB.  Don't know if it works with cue sheets, so if that's the case with your library it may or may not be an option.

Some of us have been working for years on building and correctly tagging our collections, so complaining that it might take you hours to do this is not going to gain you the sympathy you think it will.  :)   Even working perfectly, yes, it will take you hours.

And there is no "support" to work with. The program is developed by one man, and "support" is this group of enthusiasts you've found.
Last Edit: September 11, 2020, 10:45:59 PM by frankz

psychoadept

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Just to add to frankz' information, WAV files are notoriously bad about tagging, because there's no defined standard. Just because you saw tags in Windows Media Player, it doesn't mean that they're formatted so that MusicBee can read them (or they may have been saved in WMP itself rather than in the files).

However, you say it's really just the first track in the albums that are giving you trouble. Duplicate entries are often indicative of a cue sheet, so I too would like to know if you're using cue sheets.

You might want to check out these pages for more help:
https://musicbee.fandom.com/wiki/Tagging
https://musicbee.fandom.com/wiki/Auto-Tagging
Last Edit: September 11, 2020, 11:24:19 PM by psychoadept
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The Incredible Boom Boom

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I eventually replaced my WAV files with FLACs, because the tag information would randomly disappear.

gehring621

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I appreciate the quick responses from a group of passionate supporters of this product and will try to answer the questions raised as best as I can. 

>>>Are they individual songs files, or one file per CD with a cue sheet?
All CD albums were physically purchased and ripped onto PC HDD as WAV files as originally sold.  To the best my knowledge no cue sheets are in use.

>>> . . .  WAV files are notoriously bad about tagging, because there's no defined standard.
While I know it's not the popular thing to do, I chose WAV files since it's the standard uncompressed, full bandwidth format which is most easily converted into all of the popular formats.  (FLAC's are also full bandwidth, but not quite so universal)  However, I did not realize there was such a tagging problem.

Boom Boom, I began to consider your approach to this problem and realized that my entire collection has already been tagged to the extent it contains Album/artist name, all track ID's in order and track time.  If all I really want to do is create playlists and export subset libraries to other players as mp3's or iTunes or whatever, then maybe MB is overkill for me. 

Having purchased my CD collection legally where the desire is to simply to make playlists and move portions of the library around to my different devices, I would think MB should have been easily able to accomplish that.  However, its plethora of features appears to have made this challenging, so I will likely move on and use VLC instead.