music management systems - which ones can show me artist folders?

[Innocent Bystander]

Julsay, this is a problem with the otherwise wonderful Audirvana - I have asked before on the official Audirvana thread, and others have pursued this on Audirvana’s own forum, apparently to no avail.

 

For those of us with missing, incomplete, inconsistent or incorrect metadata, varying across large numbers of files, metadata-based searching simply doesn’t work well: With Audirvana some of my music doesn’t appear at all, which is hopeless if you simply want to browse through what you have and pick something that catches your eye, as not everything shows up. Then some albums are strangely split into two or more, not necessarily appearing in the same view, making it challenging playing as a complete album. I think about 80% of my music generally appears acceptably in A+, though not always where I would expect it. For browsing, or to find one of the missing things, I use a workaround, going into Finder, doing my browsing there, then copying the album I want into Audirvana’s play queue. It works, but is not neat, and my wife simply gives up, which is a great shame.

 

I have tried various metadata editors, and, yes, I can add/amend to my heart’s content - but it is a laborious, time-consuming, and if you have hundreds of albums to do soul-destroying process. Some people my enjoy it - others of us do not, and do not have the time or energy to do so. I did a trial of Roon a couple of years ago, not for use to play, but because it claimed to be able find all music files and add any missing metadata; it failed - indeed it didn’t recognise much of my music.

 

I keep hoping that one day @damien78will recognise the issue and enable searching and browsing via file structure, which, after all, is simple, logical, readily tailored by any individual to suit their preferences, fits well with those of us who built collections before being aware of metadata and its significance, and doesn’t require time to check and amend or add metadata when a new album is added. Simple, convenient and it would make Audirvana shine as the most user-friendly software as well as the best sounding when used as a renderer.

[Innocent Bystander]

On 1/17/2019 at 4:14 AM, julsay said:

When I use Audirvana, which I am not liking at all for many reasons, I see an audio output option for "M-1".  When I select that, I can hear the music played over my system.  I therefore know that there's nothing wrong with my Mac, ethernet cables,

I’m a bit unclear how you’re trying to connect here: do you mean feeding the DAC direct from the USB output of the Mac? (Elsewhere I understood you to say you were feeding via network.) If you are talking about feeding direct, I found the optimised setup as given in the A+ manual gave excellent sound quality and commend that  - BUT given the inevitable RF contamination of the Mac’s output (even with fancy power supplies), using direct to a DAC requires either the DAC to be immune to RF, or you need to use an effective blocker in between.

 

I now use Chord Dave DAC, which has been designed specifically to be as immune as possible from adverse effects due to RF, but when I originally used A+ with a Hugo, it didn’t sound good direct. I ended up feeding through a Gustard U12 converter/isolator, which is an inexpensive unit that fixed the problem, and it sounded great.

[Innocent Bystander]

On 1/15/2019 at 3:53 AM, julsay said:

It appears that I cannot view "folders" of artists...each album sits on its own.

 

On 4/22/2019 at 11:22 AM, Innocent Bystander said:

Julsay, this is a problem with the otherwise wonderful Audirvana - I have asked before on the official Audirvana thread, and others have pursued this on Audirvana’s own forum, apparently to no avail.

 

There is a partial solution, advised by Jud, which I have just tried.

 

See post 600 on the Audirvana Plus 3.5 thread: