Author Topic: Moving WAV files from MusicBee to Apple Music  (Read 2039 times)

chrismeraz

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I just moved from PC to Mac. I love MusicBee but I can't get it to play smoothly on Mac, there are always glitches in the audio stream. I've been working on this for weeks. Either I'm a moron or this is an exceptionally difficult task.

All my audio files are WAV. I tried running MusicBee on both Parallels and Crossover. I have an M1 Max MacBook Pro 32GB RAM 1TB SSD Mac OS Monterey 12.5.1.

I will pay $100 to the first person who can give me exact, precise, step by step instructions that will fix this on my computer in one of two ways:

Option A.
Make it so MusicBee plays back smoothly through Crossover.
 - I've already paid for Crossover, I don't want to pay for Parallels.
 - I don't want to hear more than two glitches in a one-hour listening session. I currently get dozens of glitches per song.
 - All firewalls, anti-virus software and cloud backup software are disabled on my Mac.
 - Output hardware is the Grace m900 USB Headphone Amp.
 - I use SoundSource to modify the output with an equalizer before output to the m900.

Option B.
Convert all my WAV files to ALAC or AIFF files with metadata and album art working properly in Apple Music.
 - I prefer ALAC in order to save space.
 - All my WAV files are stored in a file structure with folders in this format: Artist/Album/Song Title.
 - All required metadata is embedded in the WAV files, but Apple Music won't read it.
 - I tried converting to ALAC from within MusicBee but couldn't get the ALAC codec properly installed even though I tried many different codecs and methods found online.
 - I was able to convert to AIFF from within MucisBee, but no metadata or folder structure was included in the new AIFF files.
 - Each folder has several album art files (albumart.jpg in several sizes, folder.jpg in several sizes, and cover.jpg). Cover.jpg is usually the preferred file, I don't know where all the other ones came from.
 - Compilation albums must retain their properties, i.e. all songs stay together under that album and under that same cover art. I don't want a compilation album to become 10 different one-song albums each with different artists and covers.
 - Double CD albums (i.e. The Wall) should show up as one single album cover in Apple Music album view (with disc numbers and track numbers for each song).

I'm an expert with PC (I've built dozens of computers for my own studio over the years). New Mac user but I'm getting the hang of it.
Last Edit: September 15, 2022, 12:02:46 AM by Steven

chrismeraz

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Someone in another forum found the solution for me. All I had to do was convert from WAV to ALAC using Switch by NCH Software. Select "Save to Source File Folder" and "Delete source file after successful conversion." Of course make a copy of your library before you start this process, just in case you make a mistake. All the album art files are not converted, but are left in place as they are. That's it!

Switch transferred all the metadata and album art to Apple Music in one step!

hiccup

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I'm mostly curious about what the guy who you have sent the $100,- to is going to do with it?
Don't keep us hanging on that?


chrismeraz

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I'm mostly curious about what the guy who you have sent the $100,- to is going to do with it?
Don't keep us hanging on that?
He's a gearslut, so I guess he will buy more plugins!

chrismeraz

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Here is the solution from the other thread:

Here’s how I do things now. Its as easy and hassle-free as possible since I also needed to have my collection work properly with my FiiO M11 Plus DAP which uses Android 10 so I needed to take basically three different things into account.

I’ll do this step by step showing you how I do it, assuming I have an album in FLAC (or in your case, WAV) and want to convert it to ALAC (my preferred format), embed the cover art, keep the metadata, and literally press one button to have it sent to a pre-designated Music folder that is then (manually) scanned by Apple Music to have everything show up properly and be sorted correctly.

First, you’ll need two apps:

XLD (freeware, stick this in your toolbar). This app is about 10 times faster than all other music file conversion apps.
https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html

Mp3Tag (it's not free but trust me, it's worth it!)
https://mp3tag.app

Open Mp3Tag preferences, and open the folder where your music lives. Make sure 100% of your metadata is in order and all files have album art attached.

I don’t focus too much on the compilation flag, choosing instead to manually change the ALBUM ARTIST to “Various Artists” for any album that has various artists. I mention this because if you choose to let Apple Music automatically manage your Music library, it will dump all “compilations” into a designated Various Artists folder anyway which is annoying.

For example: I prefer Music/Genre/Album Artist/Album

But if you let Apple Music organize things, it will create one large music folder in the hierarchy of:

Music/Album Artist/Album/

This means if you have, say a Jazz album and a Deep House album both with the compilation flag, both will be put into “Various Artists”. This drove me nuts so I eventually decided to buy Mp3Tag so I could manually sort my own Music folder like I did on Windows with MusicBee.

So lets say you want Apple Music to be your main player (as I do), but you want to be able to go into a neatly organized Music folder and not have your OCD triggered. Do it this way:

Once your album is tagged how you like it, and if you want to order your folder hierarchy by ALBUM ARTIST (like I do), select all the tracks and press CMD+3 and select FIELD = ALBUM ARTIST and Formatstring = select “artists”. This will pull the Artist field into the Album Artist field in the metadata for all selected tracks. This is where I will then manually adjust any compilations to “Various Artists”, but again, adjust according to your preferences.

Next, highlight all tracks and press CMD+1 in Mp3Tag and enter this string:

~/Music/Music/!!_library/Music/%GENRE%/%ALBUMARTIST%/%ALBUM%/$num(%track%,2) %title%

(As you can see that’s the zany location of my Music folder, change it to wherever you want yours)

If you use this string, this is what will happen.

Mp3Tag will first rename each file according to its metadata with a file name as follows:

01 Song Title.m4a

For albums with disc numbers, I sort and rename them separately with the string:

~/Music/Music/!!_library/Music/%GENRE%/%ALBUMARTIST%/%ALBUM%/%DISCNUMBER%-$num(%track%,2) %title%

To get…

1-01 Song Title.m4a

(You can adjust these to your preferences inside Mp3Tag)

It will also simultaneously move the files from the CONVERTED directory into the Music directory Apple Music will read from, with the folder hierarchy being…

[Music Library Folder]/Genre/Album Artist/Album/01 Song Title.m4a

Next we’ll set up XLD. Open XLD and go into the settings.

Select Apple Lossless for the output format. In the options, keep the bit rate and sample depth set to Same As Original (unless you want to specifically downsample a file or album)

Output directory = set a custom directory for where your converted music (WAV —> ALAC) will always end up at. For example, mine goes to a “Converted” folder here (/Users/[USER NAME]/Music/Music/Converted)

Next page, keep the “format of filename” set to Default.

Next page (Batch) = check “Preserve directory structures”. But this won’t be as important later on once we start using Mp3Tag.

On the Metadata page, I have “Add tags to the output files if possible” checked. Also check “Embed cover art images into files” (do NOT check “Scale large images when embedding cover art” unless you want to ruin all your hi-res album art in one fell swoop…like I did).

Check “Load following files in the same folder as a cover art” and specify the cover art file names you’ve designated (cover.jpg, folder.jpg and so on).

(NOTE: I manually embed all my album art so I have no experience on whether XLD will auto-embed the cover art correctly from a file in the folder. In theory, it should work just fine but you should test this with a single album first and make sure Mp3Tag shows the embedded album art before dragging and dropping your entire library into XLD).

Also check “set the compilation flag automatically” and “preserve unknown metadata if possible”. Again, test any albums and make sure they converted properly before dumping a hundred compilation albums into XLD.

This is all I use for XLD but adjust any other settings according to your needs.

Next, lets test a folder. Lets say you have an album set up like this:

Artist/Album/Songs + cover.jpg (for the album art).

Drag and drop that whole folder into XLD in your toolbar. It will convert the WAV files to ALAC, embed the album art (theoretically), and preserve the metadata (assuming its setup correctly in the WAV) and output the result to the “Converted” directory, with the same folder hierarchy intact.

Once you confirm everything converts properly with Mp3Tag in the next step, you can batch drop however many files you want onto XLD and it will auto-convert everything according to your settings. After I got my M1 MacBook I had XLD running for like 3 hours straight as I re-encoded my library into ALAC.

Next, go into Apple Music.

Select Preferences, direct it to your Music folder, and UNCHECK “Keep music folder organized”. (Unless you want Apple Music to take care of this for you).

Next, its just a matter of going into Apple Music > File > Add to Library and then select your Music folder. The album will then show up in Music completely tagged with album art (assuming that was all correct beforehand). On top of that, you have an OCD worthy Music folder neatly sorted according to your preferences.

Note: every time you add a new song or album to your Music folder using this XLD>Mp3Tag method, you will have to manually tell Apple Music to scan for Music to get it to show up.

Once this is set up you can then batch convert all your WAVs into ALAC via XLD, fine-tune the metadata in Mp3Tag, and then send them all to the Music folder with CMD+1 and your custom strings to sort your library as you see fit. This way both Apple Music and the folder itself is as neatly organized as possible, the rest is up to you to fine tune according to your preferences.

hiccup

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That's probably very useful info for some other users, so thanks for this write-up!
But the title of this thread is quite silly and doesn't describe the content at all.
Perhaps you could ask a moderator to change it?

chrismeraz

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That's probably very useful info for some other users, so thanks for this write-up!
But the title of this thread is quite silly and doesn't describe the content at all.
Perhaps you could ask a moderator to change it?

I agree but I don't know how to contact a moderator!

hiccup

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I agree but I don't know how to contact a moderator!
You could send a PM, but since they very likely will also be reading these posts, you could probably just write here what topic title you would like it to be changed to.

(Or maybe you could change the title by replying here, and changing the subject title before you press 'post'. I think that also might do the trick. Not completely sure though.)

chrismeraz

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Sure I'd send a PM but I don't know any moderators' names...

The thread should be called "Moving WAV files from MusicBee to Apple Music"
Last Edit: September 14, 2022, 07:07:05 PM by chrismeraz

Zak

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(Or maybe you could change the title by replying here, and changing the subject title before you press 'post'. I think that also might do the trick. Not completely sure though.)
You can rename a thread you have started yourself by editing the first post and changing the Subject field.
Bee excellent to each other...