just purchased the Melco License as I am keen to now get our music collection into the best possible shape…
One area of interest for us is the quality of the original recording. The file extension WAV vs FLAC vs DSF etc. can give us some guide, but I was hoping for more detail.
I can see two fields in the metadata when I run a status report and select all available fields. One is called “Quality”, the other “Is Hd”. “Quality” appears to be blank mostly, so not sure whether this would normally contain anything I am interested in. “Is Hd” is set to 1 on many of the albums I know are hi-res, so this seems to be populated, however, it is also blank which could mean the album is not hi-res but could also mean the data is not available! A zero would be better so these could be differentiated …
The actual fields I would like are “bit depth” and “sample rate”, so any advice on looking at my music on this basis would be much appreciated.
Okay Quality is not currently used. Is Hd should be set if the recording has been identified as a HD recording, by HD we mean lossless at least 24-bit recording (rather than the usual 16-bit) or DSF files. I take your point about it not being set but actually the information is taken from the file itself so it should be available for all files.
So bit depth and sample rate are both available but are stored as part of the audio metadata rather than usual editable metadata. Now if using MinimServer with Melco you can browse by this information in your control point, this section below is taken from https://minimserver.com/ug-browsing.html
Special index and item tags
You can include some special values in the indexTags or itemTags list.
The special value #AudioData provides the audio data for the file (sample bit depth, sample rate and bit rate). The special value #AudioChannels provides the number of channels for the file (1, 2 or 5.1). The special value #AudioDuration provides the duration for the file in minutes and seconds.
The special value #AudioFormat provides the audio format for the file, and the special value #AudioQuality provides the audio quality of your files using the following categories:
HD
lossless, High Definition
CD+
lossless, higher quality than CD
CD
lossless, CD quality
CD-
lossless, lower quality than CD
LC
Lossy Compression
[NEW] In MinimServer 2, the following categories are also used in addition to those shown above:
DSD64 , DSD128 ,
etc. lossless DSD DXD lossless PCM, resolution 24/352 or higher HD+ lossless PCM, resolution 24/176 or higher
You can choose the names that appear in the index display for these choices by suffixing the indexTags values as described in the previous section. For example, to display audio data information in an index entry named ‘Music Info’, you would put #AudioData:MusicInfo in the indexTags property.
Back to SongKong you can also include SampleRate, BitDepth, isHD in the folder/filename if that is helpful.
oh wow - this is great Paul. I will take a closer look at your reply over the weekend and have a play with Minim to see what I can set up. I haven’t got the full license yet so may need to get that to do the config your are suggesting. I plan to set up so that I get the Audio Quality index in the Melco App.
Will let you know how I get on…
thanks again,
Karen.
well, am going up quite a learning curve, but real progress! Now have Audio Data and Audio Format in my index tags so very good for quick access to high quality recordings. Some findings:
after running SongKong updates/Fix Songs you have been recommending I always do a MinimServer Rescan, which I had been doing from the Melco front panel. However, I have discovered this does not appear to work. I’ll make a post in the MS Forum about this, but for the time being I am now always running it from the Mac version.
Looked more at the MS URL you sent and tried to get ambitious and set up Tag Formatting to give me a combined Audio Format+Audio Data indexing, but having trouble with the syntax… again, will make a post on Simon’s Forum re this.
The “Is Hd” is less critical now I have the audio data as above, but it does perhaps affect the Song Metadata completeness chart where it only registers 12% which seems to suggest the blank values are seen as missing rather than “non-HD”.
Anyway, think SongKong issues are all sorted, so will move my new questions to the MS team!
But generally you also have to restart the control app after the rescan (but depends on what control app you are using) to pickup the new data for MinimServer, are you doing that ?
I take your point, and we have the same issue with other fields such as Conductor which is only available for Classical music, I’ll have to think about to address this.
Thanks, I did not realize that the OLED reports the MinimServer scan has finished before it actually has, I have updated the information about this on the SongKong Forum - Update MinimServer after fixing with SongKong
