Comments on clasical music metadata, Tidal and supported file formats

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Having many problems importing cds from the Artur Rubinstein Complete Album Collection. Albums get split up (I can’t figure out a way to combine them). I’m trying to be consistent in tagging, and as simple as possible. The identification feature is hopeless, and even using file data is not working. Of the 8 albums imported there are 4 separate 2 cd “albums” with some tracks from a particular album stuck in different “album” and unable to move to the correct album. CD numbers within the collection are also often incorrect. I love your program when it works, but when it doesn’t, as happens often in these big classical collections there’s way too much work to try and fix the issue. I’m left with using Kodi and and their iPad remote in order to have any hope of seeing all items in folders correctly.

The lack of ape file support and cue sheet reading and decoding are other inconveniences, as I’m having to split many items and keep 2 copies on HDs.

Tidal has its own issues. Classical tagging is a disaster within Tidal, of course. But aside from cross searches working a ton better in Roon, one is still left with many items not showing up with any kind of logical performer based search.

IMHO, Tidal is so mismanaged, with so many defective tracks, and NO reaction from them except to report problems one by one (which never get fixed, so what’s the point?). I got a snippy answer here once that DG tracks that are defective in great numbers were to be re-imported and that they were at the mercy of the label…great, but am I supposed to spend all day reporting every track afflicted with flutter? Isn’t that the job with SOMEONE who has ears at Tidal, or is there such a thing? They REALLY need to address this.

The more CDs I rip from my large library, and the more HD content I purchase, the less I feel I want to spend $30 a month for Tidal and Roon. Discovery is a great thing, but one can’t fix a broken system with existing methods… and classical tagging on digital files throughout the industry is an unmitigated disaster!

Thanks for reading.

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(You veered off course from the original thread, perhaps a mode like @carl might feel the need to chop up my answer and start a new thread(s).)

[quote=“Tatifan, post:22, topic:3050, full:true”]
Having many problems importing cds from the Artur Rubinstein Complete Album Collection. Albums get split up (I can’t figure out a way to combine them). I’m trying to be consistent in tagging, and as simple as possible. The identification feature is hopeless, and even using file data is not working. Of the 8 albums imported there are 4 separate 2 cd “albums” with some tracks from a particular album stuck in different “album” and unable to move to the correct album. CD numbers within the collection are also often incorrect. I love your program when it works, but when it doesn’t, as happens often in these big classical collections there’s way too much work to try and fix the issue. I’m left with using Kodi and and their ipad remote in order to have any hope of seeing all items in folders correctly.[/quote]
I also own the Rubinstein Complete Album Collection (c.2000) and have all but one album within it identified - each volume (1-3CDs) of the collection being (by my preference) identified as a separate item. Rovi does not have the track lengths for many of them, which means you have to do it manually using the identification tool. Important here is to use the exactly correctly Rovi album title, otherwise they are impossible to find, because Roon finds so much other stuff which is wrong. The correct details are:

Artist: Arthur Rubinstein
Album: Rubinstein Collection, Vol. x

As in http://www.allmusic.com/album/rubinstein-collection-vol-60-mw0001827473

I have also a few discs from the new (c.2014) Rubinstein collection, and these are also fully identified. Let us know how you get on and which edition it is you have, and we can perhaps help you identify them.

Can’t really comment on that. I never used a system which wanted cue sheets, nor have seen much mention of ape files. I do know though that they require higher processing power to unpack than FLAC+CUE so if you’re going to use a cue based system, it doesn’t seem the best choice, unless you really like to stress your computer.

Tidal classical tagging is indeed, poor. Roon are working hard to try to improve matters but it’s a complex job affecting millions of tracks, and any large changes have to be done carefully.

The flutter on Universal (DG, Decca, Philips etc) tracks on Tidal is watermarking, I understood. See here: http://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark
Personally it’s just another reason why streaming services can only be a secondary source of music. I prefer to buy mine so that I am in control of it. YMMV.

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[quote=“Tatifan, post:22, topic:3050”]
The lack of ape file support and cue sheet reading and decoding are other inconveniences, as I’m having to split many items and keep 2 copies on HDs
[/quote] this has been covered many times over, ape is not mainstream and is easily transcoded to FLAC or other mainstream lossless codec without losing any metadata.

Whole album FLAC files are also not mainstream and there’s nary a valid reason not to split the files into a FLAC file per track.

The only reason to continue with these inconveniences is because you choose to.

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Yes, well in my case the “many times over” is having to spend hours operating on old rips of items in my collection from years past. With about 3000 cds this is not merely an “inconvenience”. And Roon does NOT always deal well with single track Flac rips where track points are musically continuous. There are often audible blips, and that long standing problem why many of us prefer cue sheets and single tracks.

I’m sorry you don’t find this important. As mentioned, if I CAN get playback from cue and single track files in Kodi and even Audirvana, Roon is not a complete solution for me, and it seems to be a point of arrogance in some cases to deny the importance of these issues.

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Thanks for the information. I apologize for combining several issues that may be OT, and would be happy to continue in the appropriate place.

I do have the more recent Rubinstein collection from 2012, and I suspect the problem is that Roon often finds the older c. 2000 set instead. I don’t know, but I’m just going to exclude my rips from Roon on this for now, it’s simply not worth the time.

As far as that article about Universal’s watermarking, wow…that is a bombshell to me! I have met only excuses and lying from everyone I’ve managed to get any response from. Or is it ignorance? Inability to hear the problem? Well, that makes me wonder why we accept that Tidal’s “HI-FI” is really what it claims. I’m not advocating mp3 quality, far from it. But I compared a number of fluttery tracks between Tidal and Apple music back when I had the trial, and the flutter was not audible on their versions. Perhaps the lossy aspect masks some of the effect, but I doubt all of it is due to that.

The fact that Tidal shrugs the problem off, yet charges us for “HI-FI” is absurd. I was lied to on this forum by someone from Tidal, who claimed that they were “awaiting redelivery” of much of the DG catalogue. Perhaps they were just ignorant? If this has been going on since 2012, then obviously they don’t give a damn about the actual end result and product. I’m not going to pay another dime to them. And this is not meant as a threat, because I DO love many aspects of Roon, but without Tidal the integration element is lost. And without the ability to play much of my personal library of rips without redoing them, retagging them, or splitting many files, I’m probably better of doing my own indexing and searching from within my computer’s file system.

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@Ludwig, Unfortunately I can’t split a post’s content into separate new posts, so I’ve have moved out this whole multifaceted discussion to its own topic.

@Tatifan, One structured topic per subject is the way to go … otherwise it just becomes messy and quickly gets lost in time.

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Sorry about that…a multipronged rant based on some extreme frustration at the moment, and confusion about the direction(s) to move forward with Tidal, my digital library…pretty much the whole shooting match!

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[quote=“Tatifan, post:4, topic:14822”]
There are often audible blips, and that long standing problem why many of us prefer cue sheets and single tracks.
[/quote]i have many albums of this nature…live albums or one track leading into another. All play back gapless sans audible blips. Seeing as you’ve not even tried it (it would seem you’ve not split files) how can you even begin to claim it’s problematic?

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I’ve been trying various approaches over the past 6 months, and have converted at least 400 albums. It’s hit and miss (and this is true of downloads I have purchased as well). Some titles with continuity required are ok, others display audible blips. I’m sorry I’ve not kept notes on it. For whatever reason operas seem most prone to issues.

Please, Evan, I really don’t want to get involved in a rancorous debate, but you’ve now made several comments making assumptions about what I’ve done or not done, and how much time I’ve put in to this whole endeavor before making my post. I’ll try to be more patient and explain where I’m coming from if you would please not assume that I’m somehow trolling here. I’ve got about 3500 cds that I’m trying to eventually digitize, and the right decision about how to go about this may seem self evident to you, but I’ve gone through quite a bit of different hardware and software and have found that the recordings remain the same, but just about everything else changes dramatically every few years.

If you re-read my first post, you will see I wrote “as I’m having to split many items and keep 2 copies on HDs.”, yet you sniped “Seeing as you’ve not even tried it (it would seem you’ve not split files) how can you even begin to claim it’s problematic?” That’s an assumption, and an unfair statement. Can we leave it at that and carry on?

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Apologies if I got it wrong. If you’re having issues getting gapless playback from flac files you’ve split using accompanying cuesheets then I’d look into the tools used to do the splitting. If you’re using Windkws perhaps try foobar2000 to do the splitting on a sample of albums to see whether it resolves the issue - you should not have any issues with gapless playback using Roon.

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No problems. Some older rips probably were foobar2000, but I’ve been on Mac for a while. Using XLD (with default settings) for both ripping of new albums (which I’m doing in separate tracks) and splitting older cue sheet based rips. Seems to be no pattern, but I will try to note future occurrences.