JRiver tips and techniques: user experiences repository

[AudioDoctor]

Figured I would put this here. JRiver for mac has updated to 19.0.84 It updated for me automatically, which I found a bit irritating but have now disabled that feature...

[wappinghigh]

Keeping it as a pure music player: I wonder if we will be able to disable video, photo and other non music data when this is finally added to the OSX version? The OSX version is so clean compared to the Win Version.

[AudioDoctor]

Keeping it as a pure music player: I wonder if we will be able to disable video, photo and other non music data when this is finally added to the OSX version? The OSX version is so clean compared to the Win Version.

 

It is. If those features are added, I also hope that we will be able to disable them.

[kumakuma]

Figured I would put this here. JRiver for mac has updated to 19.0.84 It updated for me automatically, which I found a bit irritating but have now disabled that feature...

 

I had the same thing happen to me. How did you disable automatic installation of updates? I did a quick check in Options but couldn't find it.

 

TIA

[AudioDoctor]

I had the same thing happen to me. How did you disable automatic installation of updates? I did a quick check in Options but couldn't find it.

 

TIA

 

I dug around for a bit until I found it...

 

Options > Startup > Update channels

[kumakuma]

I dug around for a bit until I found it...

 

Options > Startup > Update channels

 

Thanks. I appreciate it.

[AudioDoctor]

Thanks. I appreciate it.

 

You're welcome.

[dminches]

Tagging Question

 

For those of you, like me, who have multiple versions of the same album, how to you tag them to distinguish them? For example, I have a number of copies of Sonny Rollins "Way Out West." I was thinking of tagging them with a descriptor such as "Way Out West - SACD" or "Way Out West - OJC" or "Way Out West - Vinyl Rip." Before I spend time doing this I was wondering what others have done.

[mwheelerk]

Tagging Question

 

For those of you, like me, who have multiple versions of the same album, how to you tag them to distinguish them? For example, I have a number of copies of Sonny Rollins "Way Out West." I was thinking of tagging them with a descriptor such as "Way Out West - SACD" or "Way Out West - OJC" or "Way Out West - Vinyl Rip." Before I spend time doing this I was wondering what others have done.

 

That is essentially what I do.

[firedog]

Tagging Question

 

For those of you, like me, who have multiple versions of the same album, how to you tag them to distinguish them? For example, I have a number of copies of Sonny Rollins "Way Out West." I was thinking of tagging them with a descriptor such as "Way Out West - SACD" or "Way Out West - OJC" or "Way Out West - Vinyl Rip." Before I spend time doing this I was wondering what others have done.

 

Yeah, that's more or less what I do. Tagging - tag how YOU think about YOUR collection. That will work the best for you. I will only add that it helps a lot with a large collection if you are consistent. If you do it as you suggest above, then do it the same way for all SACDs, vinyl rips, etc. Your resulting searches will go a lot easier that way.

[ted_b]

Tagging Question

 

For those of you, like me, who have multiple versions of the same album, how to you tag them to distinguish them? For example, I have a number of copies of Sonny Rollins "Way Out West." I was thinking of tagging them with a descriptor such as "Way Out West - SACD" or "Way Out West - OJC" or "Way Out West - Vinyl Rip." Before I spend time doing this I was wondering what others have done.

 

Yes, I do album suffix tags, which I explain in the part two video. I show in the video about tagging them by sample rate, simply cuz it is easy then to filter a massive portion of your library and do the tag once (suffix like Kind Of Blue (24-192) ). I don't do redbook that way, I leave it. Then, within redbook (like having five redbook versions) you could tag them with MFSL or Vinyl rip. That would be a little more work in that there would be no real filter for mass tagging (unless you were lucky enough to have MFSL as a label, for example, then you could sort by label.

[jriver]

Keeping it as a pure music player: I wonder if we will be able to disable video, photo and other non music data when this is finally added to the OSX version? The OSX version is so clean compared to the Win Version.

 

In the Windows version, you can customize what you see. Tools/Options/General/Features.

[mwheelerk]

The consistency is important. What information is important is decided by you. For me I like to use the comments box to identify the source of my files so you might see things there like:

 

Original CD (meaning it is the original release of that title)

Original CD West German Target (identifying a special attribute)

Remaster CD (a generic remastering)

Remaster CD Deluxe Edition or 40th Anniversary Edition ((again ID a special attribute)

 

I also like like to classify my audiophile and high resolution sources:

 

MFSL Gold CD

MFSL SACD

Audio Fidelity Gold HDCD

 

[24/96] HD Tracks

 

To the question above regarding different versions of the same album and using The Beatles Rubber Soul as the example I do the following:

 

Album Title

 

Rubber Soul [1987 Stereo Mix]

Rubber Soul [1965 Stereo Mix]

Rubber Soul [Mono]

 

and the corresponding Comments

 

Remaster CD 2009 Stereo Box Set

Remaster CD 2009 Mono Box Set

Remaster CD 2009 Mono Box Set

 

If you are starting out think carefully about what is important to you and what you might of want to include. I always use the original date of album release in the Year tag but I have thought that I might have liked to have provided both that date and the date of the remaster release or audiophile release also.

 

I know now a number of people like to include the players for a recording session (for instance in a jazz combo recording) and classical music fans have their own unique needs for composers and performers.

 

So again be as thorough as you can to begin. Although it can be time consuming it is better to do it now than to redo a tagging project a couple of times like I have over the years.

[dminches]

Great comments. A lot to think about since I have a lot to tage properly.

 

After making the tagging changes how long should it take for it to show up in MC or jremote? At times I find that it isn't immediately.

[hifitubes]

This is Awesome Russ..

 

What "Rule" in the customise view do you use to separate PCM from DSD?

 

Edit. I figured it out.. Bit Depth = 1 (for DSD) .. Cheers

 

You can also use File Type = DFF, DSF, or SACD (if you have SACD ISO)

[hifitubes]

You would need to restart JRemote, same as when you make view changes in JRMC.

 

I would avoid, at all costs, adding extra information into standard tag fields. Album should contain the album name. If you start adding clarifying information, things like Music Brainz, Discogs, and J. River's own automated Internet Cover Art search will fail to properly identify your albums and fail (well Music Brainz won't but it will try to correct it).

 

The power of JRMC is such that you want to control your metadata, but eliminating the use of powerful tagging tools is shooting oneself in the foot. You can choose to display any field upon playback, or set any field as a commonly displayed one for browsing in any view scheme.

 

You could make a custom tag field named "Abum Info", or use the existing Comments field. Or you could add this info to another field you feel is a good fit.

 

You could also simply use JRMC Copy Field function to copy Sample Rate field into Album Info field; I just use Sample Rate to assist differentiation.

 

Also, if the actual filenames contained "MoFi" or "24-192", you could have JRMC to use that information by adding "Filename (Path) contains x", and apply it to view schemes. I do this to scoop up a lot of XRCD or MoFi that might be buried in my hard drives in random locations.

 

my .02

 

 

Great comments. A lot to think about since I have a lot to tage properly.

 

After making the tagging changes how long should it take for it to show up in MC or jremote? At times I find that it isn't immediately.

[ted_b]

hifitubes,

Good point about cover art sites not finding album names that have suffixes or other non-standard characters. That is why I recommend (and said so in the video) that you do your suffix editing after the album has been established (i.e JRMC has allowed cover art and other internet tags to be found). And a smart playlist can show which albums do not yet have cover art.

[dminches]

Ted, nice job on part 2. When you get a chance can you post a screen shot of your customized view rules of view by sample rate? That view seems very good view for cleaning up tags.

[ted_b]

David, here ya go. No rules needed. Just set up as panes, and use these fields in this order. File type is not even necessary.

 

[dminches]

Perfect - thanks.

[jumpsturdy]

Hi, I am new to this forum and was motivated to join specifically by this thread, though having lurked for a while, I have been hesitant to increase the signal to noise ratio. For my living room I am using a 2011 i5 mac mini with 16 gb ram and 256 gbSSD as well as the 500 gb rotational drive it came with. I have Mavericks and windows 8.1 bootcamped. Have used iTunes for many years and am comfortable in utilizing it for tagging. All music lives on a two 4tb firewire 800 externals. There are just under 11k albums, about a third of which are needle drops I have made over the past 12 years. All artwork has been imbedded to each separate track and for the most part have been acquired in sizes greater than 1200x1200 (I have previously used Coverflow to display an a larger flatscreen). Recently I have purchased and been using JRiver MC in both the mac and windows versions. I have been successful in importing the music into both version of MC but have not yet allowed MC to make any tagging changes to the files. File counts show that 100% of the songs were imported and so far I have not seen any evidence that metadata is missing. So much for laying the groundwork; my most basic question concerns whether there is any way to check the automatic import option that would allow MC to write metadata back to the music files while retaining what I guess I would characterize as a first right of refusal. In other words, while I am very happy with how all metadata has been tagged in iTunes, I would like to grant MC write privileges as long as I can see any proposed changes and have the ability to OK them first. I don't want to risk having MC overwriting tags or artwork that I have input. As Mr mwheelerk has done, I have my own elaborate system for distinguishing various versions of multiple instances of the same album (UK, US, CD, Needle Drop, Mono Stereo, etc) and don't want that disturbed. Yet, from what I have seen in MC there may well be further tagging I would want to add that I can't in iTunes, and would like to avail myself of that ability. For now, particularly because of the mac version of MC, I am continuing to use iTunes to manage the music held on the external drives and for adding new music to the library; which are then imported into the two respective version of MC. I suspect that I will eventually abandon iTunes, but for now maintaining three library databases is relatively easy. So, any thoughts on how to do this will be greatly appreciated. The only caveat being that I do not want to take any chances with potentially losing the metadata I have, as its acquisition, and the fact that I entered the majority of it by hand to meet my needs makes it second only in value to the music files themselves. And yes everything is backed up...but still. Thanks

 

I will soon add system info to my forum account, but for now the system (beyond the computer system described above) consists of Atma-sphere M60 amps & MP3 preamp, Lynx Hilo, SME 20 turntable and SME V arm and Coincident super eclipse speakers and attendant quality cabling.

[AudioDoctor]

I asked this over on the JRiver forum but got no replies, so I will ask here. Has anyone figured out how to fix multiple artist albums from showing multiple entries, one for each artist? The problem is highlighted here in the picture by the We All Love Ella album.

 

[SamTheSham968]

Took me a while to figure this one out. Make sure that the "album artist" field for each track is blank. Since the "artist" field will vary for each track, JRiver will then figure out that this is a multi-artist compilation and show it as one album.

 

I also had a problem with albums by one artist, where some of the tracks were by that artist duetting with another artist. The issue was that I had labeled those tracks with the correct album artist, but left the album artist field blank for tracks where the artist was the single artist. In this case, JRiver requires that the album artist field be the same for all tracks, allowing it to see them all as part of the same album.

 

Hope that helps.

[ted_b]

I asked this over on the JRiver forum but got no replies, so I will ask here. Has anyone figured out how to fix multiple artist albums from showing multiple entries, one for each artist? The problem is highlighted here in the picture by the We All Love Ella album.

 

or

Simply change album-artist (auto) to "(Multiple Artists)"

See rules:

Album Artist and Album Artist (Auto) - JRiverWiki

[AudioDoctor]

Took me a while to figure this one out. Make sure that the "album artist" field for each track is blank. Since the "artist" field will vary for each track, JRiver will then figure out that this is a multi-artist compilation and show it as one album.

 

I also had a problem with albums by one artist, where some of the tracks were by that artist duetting with another artist. The issue was that I had labeled those tracks with the correct album artist, but left the album artist field blank for tracks where the artist was the single artist. In this case, JRiver requires that the album artist field be the same for all tracks, allowing it to see them all as part of the same album.

 

Hope that helps.

 

That is an inelegant work around but I suppose it would work.