respect album track order

[geofstro]

Hi all,

I can't see how to get subsonic to respect the track order for each album. It always seems to queue the album based on the alphabetical order of the song titles; but ignores the track number which pre-pends the title. All my albums were ripped with DBPowerAmp and track numbers precede the names just as they do on the CD's.

Apologies if this has been asked before. Seems like such an obvious one.

[manwithaplan]

Track numbers should NOT prepend the title of each track in the actual tags of the file. In the filename itself, track numbers are usually desired, I use them all the time. But in the tags, the Title is the Title, that's it. No track number. Now, in the Track number/total tag, yes, you should have Track 1 of 8, Track 2 of 8, etc. If you have these tags properly, then your music displays just fine. I can vouch for that - 4.7 works perfectly for me, I never get alphabetized listing of tracks on an album, because I tag properly. I can only imagine the headache if you do not.

[geofstro]

Thanks for the clear explanation. I thought iTunes had taken care of this; but I'll check the tags with Media Monkey and make sure they comply with your description.

[geofstro]

Seems my problem was flac related, since flac doesn't seem to support the standard id2; etc. tags. Apple Lossless does though, at least to the extent of respecting track order, so if anyone wants to stream lossless, Apple Lossless seems the way to go.

[manwithaplan]

No sir, afraid you're wrong there. FLAC files take tags properly, just not the same way your lousy mp3's do They even take album art, embedded in the files themselves. Get the right tool, you can do any job. And for lossless streaming, I'll take my FLAC's any day - standard as well as high resolution, thanks very much. No need for Apple Lossless in my world. It's proprietary and proprietary makes baby Jesus cry. But of course it works fine (for now).

[hakko]

Apple Lossless is open source.

Beware that it's possible to write ID3 tags to FLAC files, but it's not widely supported. You'll be more compatible with the rest of the world if you write Vorbis tags to your FLAC files.

[manwithaplan]

Apple Lossless is open source.

Yes, within the last year, it is now Open Source. That didn't help me for the nearly 2TB of lossless FLAC files in my archive. I'll stick with the horse that brought me, since it is more ubiquitous than Apple Lossless anyway. Thanks.

[geofstro]

Apple Lossless is open source.

Beware that it's possible to write ID3 tags to FLAC files, but it's not widely supported. You'll be more compatible with the rest of the world if you write Vorbis tags to your FLAC files.

Thanks to both of you guys. It is the widest compatibility that I'm looking for. I use XBMC with Subsonic and the XBMC wiki says to use id3 as well. If you've already got a flac library though, I agree there's no point in re-encoding them to Apple Lossless.

I do sometimes buy flac formatted files from online sites. What would be the best tool to apply Vorbis tags to them?

I'm also interested in what would be the most universal lossless format to rip a cd library to, so I can advise other people who are starting from scratch on what would be the best approach.

[hakko]

The choice of tool depends on your platform, and so does that format. If you're on a Mac, you'd probably be better off using Apple Lossless since it's natively supported by iTunes for playback, and can automatically be transcoded for storage on iPods. If you're on any other platform, you should choose FLAC. IMHO

[geofstro]

Thanks. I use both platforms though and I just use whatever tool seems the best, either on Mac or Windows. The tool I'm referring to is the tagging tool. My entire CD library is ripped in aiff. If I encode this to flac, the track order is lost. It might be worth using flac if I can apply Vorbis ID3 tags to the files. Do you happen to know an app that would allow me to apply those tags to flacs, either on Mac or Windows?

I have subsonic running on a NAS.

[hakko]

I haven't been using AIFF myself and tried converting it, keeping tags. Doesn't mplayer do that? That's what I've used for batch converting.

I guess as a last resort, you could rename all AIFF files based on tags, convert to FLAC (not keeping tags), and then automatically create tags based on the FLAC file names. Even though that's an ugly solution.

[geofstro]

Thanks again. I'm finding that just a straight conversion from aiff to Apple Lossless works in most cases. i.e. respects the track order within an album, which is what I mostly care about. Some of the albums refuse to play through subsonic following the conversion. The best tool for fixing this, I've found to be MusicBrainz Picard. These albums probably got mis-tagged somehow when I ripped the CD's using EAC or DBPowerAmp.

I find if I convert aiff to flac the track order never seems to be respected, unless I clean up the tags with MusicBrainz first. So Apple Lossless has proved to be the least painful route for me. I've learned to accept though that some albums will always need the tags cleaning up.

Another advantage of Apple Lossless for me, is that I can use XLD to downsample any High-Res files to 16/44.1, which I think is necessary to make music steaming work for these files. Within XLD on Mac, there is no downsampling solution for flac.

So all in all, Apple Lossless has proved the best solution for me, with a little Music Brainz manipulation of tags, where necessary.

[manwithaplan]

Why on earth would you down-rez high rez files??? XLD as a worthy tool is the only part of your story that makes sense. Yes, XLD is fantastic. But you don't need or want it to down-rez FLAC or Apple Lossless as it turns out. As it turns out, Subsonic can stream high rez FLAC or ALAC just fine, and I've been doing so with FLAC for over 2 years. If you invest as I do in high rez FLAC from sites like HD Tracks, iTrax, B&W, etc. etc. you certainly have real money that you've spent on high rez files, and dumbing them down whether in Apple Lossless format or FLAC is a dumb idea. The best tool for conversion/ripping, etc. on a Mac is XLD. The best tagging solution on a Mac, for tagging FLAC or MP3 or anything else, is MediaRage. If you have a problem paying for good quality tagging software like MediaRage, then use Tag for free. The one major drawback of Tag is that it does not support embedding album art in files, though MediaRage does.

[geofstro]

Thanks for your advice. I'll definitely check out MediaRage and have no problem paying for it, if it does a better job than Music Brainz.

Concerning the downsampling, I want to be clear here that I am creating a duplicate downsampled version. The original brought from HDTracks; etc. remains in my library for playing back where I have a Mac/PC connected directly to a good USB/Firewire dac and system.

I haven't had much luck so far streaming high-rez with Subsonic. Everyone's mileage can vary

[manwithaplan]

I understand you're creating a duplicate copy. My point is this is a totally unnecessary step, and trying to help you avoid wasting time on a useless exercise. Fix the problem at the root, don't introduce band-aids and workarounds, right? Not sure why your high rez is not streaming well - are you transcoding all FLAC to MP3 on the server side, per the defaults in Subsonic 4.7? Or are you turning off transcoding for FLAC, and thus allowing the pure, raw FLAC file to stream for at least some of your user's Players? The former is done automatically as a longstanding default in Subsonic, the latter requires you to disable transcoding of FLAC per Player. The latter also requires you to setup a player that is External with Playlist, something like VLC on either Mac or Windows works great as a pure FLAC streaming client from the Subsonic server. There is no native FLAC streaming in the JWPlayer that Subsonic's web interface uses, you have to set up a Player that is "External with Playlist" and use either VLC or some other client software player.

So when you say it "doesn't work", what scenarios have you tried exactly? Transcoding or not? Again, I and many others are streaming native FLAC right now with no problems, so let's fix your root problem and make your process MUCH simpler. Make sense?