New to Melco/SongKong and am interested to know whether Performer tag could be used via MusicBrainz/Discogs database to identify individual musicians on albums in the users library. E.g. identifying which albums via a search on the control point (I Pad) that a musician played on who wasn?t necessarily the album artist. This would be very powerful and something which hard copy format e.g. a CD library cannot obviously do? Thanks.
Using Performer with Jazz albums
Yes, that can be done. In fact if MinimServer and using the Jazz Profile this gives yo a performer index, with the data coming from SongKong.
Thanks for the reply. Looking at my jazz library on Melco I have ~700 albums, only one of which has the performer details populated by default. I have manually fixed a couple of albums to test and yes, it is populating the performer name and sort fields using ;;; to separate the performers. However, after re-scanning Minimserver I am only seeing the first of the performers on the control point (Ipad); none of the other performers on the album/songs are identified.
If it does indeed work, a further question is whether I then need to “fix” all 700+ albums individually. Is there a “batch” function which would add performer from the appropriate database? There may be this function, but I’m not sure where to locate it.
Grateful for any assistance. Thx.
Because they should be listed seperately in the Peformer index, are you looking at the Performer index (rather than Artist) and are you siure they are not later down in the list ?
SongKong is designed to work in batch, there is no need to work one album at a time.
I was looking in the Performer tag and not Artist. I have tried “fixing” another album and again it’s displaying the performers correctly (;;
but only displaying the first named performer in the People tag on the control point.
I would add that when I first copied my music into Melco it appears that classical albums e.g. Bach cantatas do display all performers. These were not “fixed” separately but simply copied across. I assume the performer details were already embedded in there. Only one jazz album (from 700+) appeared to automatically include performer. Interestingly it didn’t have the ;;; between the performers identifying them on the control point as one performer. I added the ;;; using SongKong and it fixed the problem the three performers now being identified separately.
Any further thoughts? Thanks.
Hi Paul, I have now done further testing using the Performer tag. It appears that albums I previously ripped to my PC (using dB poweramp) and played via Minimserver to my hi-fi, when now using the SongKong performer tag fix, correctly show all performers on my Ipad. However, CD’s which I am now ripping onto my Melco only show the first performer as I indicated on my previous posts.
Obviously I’m confused as to why this appears to be happening. Any ideas? Thanks.
[quote=Anonymous]However, CD’s which I am now ripping onto my Melco only show the first performer as I indicated on my previous posts.
Obviously I’m confused as to why this appears to be happening. Any ideas? Thanks. [/quote]
Are you running them through SongKong afterwards or not because the melco cd ripping process does not currently use SongKong.
Hi Paul,
Process as follows:
- Rip CD using Bufallo into Melco.
- Use Fix in SongKong to add Performer metadata.
- Rescan Minimserver for Melco.
For example:
I’ve just ripped the Kenny Dorham album Una Mass. It has been correctly added to Artist under Kenny Dorham. However, the album only appears under Herbie Hancock as Performer as he is the first named on all the song (track) fields in SongKong. It does not show under performer for Kenny Dorham or any of the other musicians on the album and which are listed in the Performer tab in SongKong.
As I indicated earlier, I can add performers correctly for CD’s which I previously ripped using dB poweramp before purchasing the Melco and which have now been transferred to the Melco.
Hi Paul,
Further update to my published and awaiting moderation post. I have now ripped a couple of CDs on Melco using FLAC rather than WAV which I previously set the Melco to do. Using “fix” on SongKong, all performers are now showing on my control point (IPad). So it appears that it could be the file format which is the issue. I already had Minimserver set up to transcode FLAC to WAV as I previously ripped and stored CD’s using dB poweramp in this format to save on storage space.
Whilst ripping in FLAC on Melco may thus be a solution to the problem, I guess it still begs the question as to why the problem with the performer tag persists when ripping to WAV using Melco.
Any thoughts/solutons? Thanks.
I think I know what it is.
Wav use ID3 tags, and these can be IDv22, v23 or v24, Only v24 officially supports having multiple values fro a field, SongKong actually supports it for both IDv23 and ID3v24 but MinimServer only understands it for ID3v24.
So you need to use ID3v24, the problem is that with SongKong you can set MP3 Metatag version on the Save tab to V24, but if your file is already set to V23 then it will not change it for Wav files- https://jthink.atlassian.net/browse/SONGKONG-1064
Thanks Paul. I can see what you mean but I’ve had no real experience of the settings or changes to them that you describe. I’ll have a further look and decide whether to try and make the alterations you suggest or just stick to ripping in FLAC and then transcoding to WAV.
Is this worth raising with Minimserver as I would imagine I will not be the only person looking to rip to WAV and use SongKong/Minimserver to play the resultant file?
MinimServer are aware of the issue, but are currently of the point of view that they are sticking to the standard. But the standard was the idea of just one person, and v24 was introduced to address the defecits of ID3v23, like many other I see no practical problem with support multiple values in ID3v23.
It may help if you raise with MinimServer.