Using MP with wave-files (1 Viewer)

[dicsv]

There seems to be only a few of us using wave-files in MP.
I have finally managed to add all data into the database for my wave-files.
They were all listed as "unknown" and a lot of missing data.

Everything works OK in the Artists and Albums lists, but when I switch to
"Now Playing", the database data is only visible for a fraction of a second.
Then it is replaced by the original filename and no artist, album, track etc.
Album and year are also missing from the heading of albumart and no albumart
are showing.

I'm using MP 0.2.3 RC1 with Bass engine and BlueTwo skin.
I don't have "Use ID3 tags / autoadd file to music database" ticked.
(I don't want everything to be added to the database automatically,
I would rather see a setting for "Always use database".)

Is there something I can edit in the skins xml-files to fix this,
or change something in the settings?

---

I would also like to have my Albums sorted by year for each artist,
with the year listed in front of the album name. I have tried the
Music Views settings, but there are no SortBy=Year for Albums.
Maybe it's because the Year data is only listed in the Song table,
and not in the Album table.

I assume the Year is in the Song table to handle "Various Artists".
Then maybe there would be a AlbumYear entry in Album table
(and a YearIndex for multiple releases/year).

 

[hwahrmann]

Well, we heavily rely on tags.
Now Playing does not only use the database entry, it tries to read the information from the file.
because of wav files don't contain any tags, you'll get the "unknown" information.

 

[dicsv]

Thanks for your answer.

I can understand the difficulty in generating database data
from wave-files (as there are no tags). But once it's in there,
I would prefere it being used, instead of the tags.

Is it possible to use data from the database if it is available?
It seems to work that way in the different views from "Views Menu",
but not in "Now Playing" and "Playlists" containing wave-files.

 

[hwahrmann]

Well there's an old song from the Rolling Stones: "You can't always get what you want"

"Now Playing" reads the Tag from the file, as we found that the db sometimes contained garbage and we don't have always all songs in the db, especially if we haven't scanned it yet and you start playing from the shares.
So you need to live with that limitation or you convert your wav files with a lossless codec, like FLAC, which allows tagging.

 

[dicsv]

"... but if I try real hard ... I might get what I need" ;-)

I tried a conversion to "lossless wma", but seemed to get problem with the tracknumbers.
Sometimes they showed up and sometimes they didn't. Have to do some more testing.

Thanks, anyway.

 

[jellybeard999]

FLAC is truly lossles, and perfectly fine once properly tagged.

I'd go with a more usable multimedia format tbh.

 

[dicsv]

I didn't know that "lossles wma" was "not lossless".

My reason for using wma is that it is playable from any PC
or Windows Mobile, without installing additional players.
Is FLAC really more usable on a standard PC?

I listen to my music over the internet, when I'm at work or driving my car.
And when I'm visiting friends there's always a PC at hand.

 

[Symphy]

I switched from WAV to FLAC because of this same issue. And it works perfect within MP. Converting my entire music collection was quite a job though. I ended up writing batch routines to convert folder- and filenames to tags.

Regards,
Sieds