I have my Hi-Res discs ripped to my library, 2.0 and 5.1.
All play fine, except one. The Special Edition of ABB’s Idlewild South has a wonderful surround layer. However, I can’t select individual tracks. Track three, Midnight Rider, starts fine, but actually ends (stops) 32 seconds early, delivering those seconds to the beginning of the next track, Elizabeth Reed, which also stops 32 seconds early, finishing the tune at the beginning of track 5, Hoochie Coochie Man. This continues until the end of the album. It does not happen with the first two tracks. And when I select “Play All” or “Play From Here” it plays fine, the process graph shows that the songs jump, seamlessly, to the start of the next tune. The 2.0 files are fine. I have had the 5.1 layer re-ripped three times.
So, I cannot add these tunes to a playlist or select them individually.
Has anyone here seen/heard this before? Could this be an authoring problem?
I run Audacity on the Mac. Fixing this (and thanks for pointing it out, I hadn’t listened to the 5.1 version yet) is pretty simple. There are two ways to do it: you can join the relevant parts together and then find the proper edit points manually, or (and this is actually pretty foolproof) you can just stitch the entire album together into one giant track and then have Audacity select the edit points (which it nearly always gets right). That’s how I do needle drops too: record the entire side as one track and then let Audacity break it up into separate tracks.
There’s also a side benefit to having Audacity on a Mac: if you make it the default program for opening FLAC files, then you can listen to any FLAC file by highlighting it in finder and hitting the space bar. Very convenient as you otherwise can’t play FLAC in Finder (which uses iTunes to render music files).
@Mike_Rife, I’m curious what Mac program you use for tagging. That’s the one gap in my Mac workflow – The only tagging program that I actually like is Tag&Rename which is Windows only. I’d love not to have to switch operating systems to fix my tags.
I am quite sure it is possible to do this. However, I doubt my computer ability to navigate the software, especially when there is not a version supported by Catalina.
I have a friend who rips my SACDs and DVD-As. He tells me that changing the edit points is time consuming and could degrade the sound quality of the finished product. If he is less than excited about the process, I defer to his thoughts on this. Your explanation makes it sound almost simple – pretty foolproof you suggested. But for someone who has never downloaded the program, the prospect seems daunting.
Plus, I do not use the Tagging feature of Roon, so I have no program to recommend. I do occasionally rename and merge my files, but mostly I am interested in playing them, not playing with them.
So, while I would love to have a fixed version of Idlewild South, I won’t be doing the job myself or asking my friend with the ripping software to take on the task, though I appreciate your encouragement.
Hello @rbienstock, apologies for butting in. If you are still looking for Mac tagging software, my go-to program on Mac has been Yate - https://2manyrobots.com/yate/ - for a while now, both for simple manual edits and some more complex batch / conditional / procedural stuff. Suppose there are plenty other options depending on need, and probably as many preferences as there are users .
If you are more interested in yielding control and letting the software try to complete and ‘fix’ tags for much of your collection based on Musicbrainz, Discogs and other online databases, you could also have a look at Picard, SongKong or Bliss, which all run on MacOS, each with their own options and strengths. (Yate has some similar abilities, in addition to traditional manual tagging)
One thing I managed to do fairly successfully in Yate is configuring it to give me easy access to Roon-specific tagging options (e.g Roonalbumtag and Roontracktag) to create a bridge between custom file tags and Roon’s internal tag options.
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