ua549

I finally transferred some albums from my music library to an SD card for the car. Music is organized in folders by Artist, Album, nn Track. Encoding is flac. Each album folder contains a m3u8 playlist and a jpg for album art. I'm having an issue with albums. COMAND sees a given album as several albums - one for each track. However I can play an entire album by selecting it from the artist menu. Albums play correctly when I connect the SD card to my Windows PC. Whatever the issue is, it seems to be related to COMAND. Any suggestions?

MikeO3

I would suggest you check Album Artist and Artist are the same. Not sure which software your using but hopefully it exposes these two tags. If not, you can use MP3Tag which will show you all tags and you can adjust.

ua549

The Album Artist tag is blank on every piece of music I have. It doesn't affect playback. I believe the issue is that the actual artist is different on every track in the albums that are problematic. The Artist tag is correct in MP3Tag. It seems that COMAND is ignoring the grouping of tracks in the album folder named "various".

ua549

I've experimented with many tag possibilities. The album, 2001 Latin Grammy Nominees (link), is still an issue with COMAND. Groove player in Windows 10 handles the album correctly. Perhaps someone with more music tag knowledge than I have will see the issue. Help is much appreciated.

grossmsj

I don't like the looks of this.
I downloaded the files and put them on my USB drive. I can see that when you list the files by Album it lists each artist separately. I also noticed that it now lists the albums in the alphabetical order of each artist, not by track number.
This is the part that spooks me. I went into MP3Tag and first wrote the album/artist tag as "$num(%tracknumber%,2)_%artist%", so "Y.flac" has album artist "12_Luis Miguel". Then I erased (made blank) the artist tag. So at this point there is technically no trace of the original artist, it has been encoded in the tag with the preceding track number appended for album artist and the original artist is erased.
Yet when I load the new USB drive it goes through the 'typical' FLAC file routine. When the file first loads, everything is in order. When I select by album all the files come up again as individual albums. And they come up again in alphabetical order of the artist! Each artist's name is listed correctly, with no pre-pended track number!
It seems to me that COMAND is not reading or paying attention to the FLAC tags. If it were, it would list the artist either as ' ' (blank) or tracknumber_artist. It isn't doing either.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I'm thinking that COMAND is not reading tags of FLAC files properly and is getting information from Gracenote which then gives you a stock playlist, that is sorted alphabetically or alphanumerically.
I can't understand why COMAND does not respect tags. egonvdv (France) and MBpippo (Australia) don't seem to have these issues, at least with M4A files.
I would bet that if you transcoded these to MP3 files (using the leading zero track naming scheme) the problem goes away.

You're not paranoid if somebody really is out to get you.

Egonvdv

UA549 - I replied to your PM. the only thing I can think of is that the problem comes from the fact that it's a compilation album
so each song is a different artist.. however even when I re-tag the songs and state same artists for the whole album in does not solve the issue.
also tagging "album is not a compilation" does not help

nycebo

For compilations, I generally put "Various Artists" as the album artist. It's resolved issues on a number of media players.

And at this point, if you live in the US, just transcode FLACs to MP3s on sync so that playback works properly. One only has to do it once and then it's done. I daresay you won't hear the difference in the car.

grossmsj

I know you have no problems with M4a files. Do you have any issues with FLAC files in general?

ua549

I tried the various artists tag and blank tag. Even with the blank for an artist the real artist shows up. The issue must be tied to Gracenote.

I have 10,000 tracks (my favs) coded as flac. Conversion from CDs took a full week. I don't want to repeat the process. Many of the flac albums share this issue. The rest of my music is still on hundreds of CDs. Is there a batch process to convert from flac to mp3? What mp3 parameters should be used? I'm a novice when it comes to "portable" music.

grossmsj

Fortunately, once you have everything digital on a disk it is very easy to convert from one format to another.
dBPowerAmp is one of the standards. EAC (exact audio copy) is another. iTunes will also do this although it can sometimes cause problems with tagging.
Most of these things are fairly easy to use if you are using the defaults. And yes, if you want you can often do every piece of music in your library at once. I use JRiver which is not free. But that program can transcode my whole library overnight and put it on a USB or SD card.
One other important note. When you transcode keep the original FLAC files unchanged. You might want to keep a separate cache of them if you have the space.
Once you go from FLAC to mP3 you can't go back to FLAC without losing resolution.

grossmsj

https://dbpoweramp.com/Help/dMC/FileSelector.htm

ua549

I already have EAC, but the menu only shows options for input from CD. What am I missing?

grossmsj

I may have misdirected you there. It might only be a ripper. See the link for dBPowerAmp, that does batch for sure.

ua549

Thanks, I'm downloading the 21 day trial of dBPowerAmp now.

nycebo

For my part, I use MusicBee to create a sync rule for a designated playlist (which could be all or a subset of my music). In this rule, it is able to convert all FLACs to MP3s during the sync process from my HD to the SD Card. Seamless and easy. I never think about it.

ua549

I installed a trial version of dBPowerAmp and ran a test on 4 albums converting from flac to mp3 quality level 5. Each album took about 5 minutes to convert on an 8 core i7 w/16GB memory. The results were good though I have not had a chance to actually listen to the albums in the car. What is interesting is that the memory stick contained both the original flac file structure and the mp3 file structure. COMAND ignored the flac files and indexed the mp3 albums properly. Go figure! Right now I have started a conversion of about 1k albums. This should take 80 to 90 hours. Thanks for all of the help. I couldn't have gotten through this without you.

***Edit***
Is there a way to get dBPowerAmp to copy the jpeg and m3u8 files to the new folder as well?

Egonvdv

ua549 - further to my pm;

in fact your flac files play fine on my pc (media player/iTunes/groove music) as long as I sort the files as album (ie not on alphabet)
but you still want me to try your flacs in my car tomorrow?

grossmsj , i think you misunderstand. i don't have problems myself, but was replying to ua549

grossmsj

I don't know what the function of an m3U8 file is, so I can't comment.
The conversion of a FLAC file to an mp3 should embed the image into the mp3 file itself. So you will be able to load the graphic image when the mp3 file loads, but there won't be an associated jpeg file. You might be able to get dBPowerAmp to do that, but I don't know the specifics of how to do it.

That's very interesting that COMAND just ignored the flac files! I wouldn't have guessed that either.

I agree with nycebo about mp3 quality, generally. We commiserated about this as we worked through the MP3 naming issue (I should say, as he solved that problem for me!). Even with the Burmester 3D system, the differences in sound quality in a moving car are negligible for most albums. There are a significant few where a 24-bit FLAC file is more satisfying, but with the frustration that comes with FLAC files (in the US) its mostly not worth the hassle.

ua549

The m3u8 file is a m3u playlist file encoded standard unicode (utf-8) character set. I converted 200 of the flac albums to mp3. It took 30 minutes on my Xeon server. The COMAND issue with the 2001 Latin Grammy Nominees albums is still there. Link to mp3 album. I have 20 compilation albums with the same issue. My favorite album has 67 tracks each indexed as an album by COMAND. Other players handle these albums correctly.

nycebo

I don't have MP3Tag at work so can't confirm, but I would suggest the following:

Create ALBUMARTIST field and assign all of those tracks "Various Artists"
Copy the conents of the CONTRIBUTINGARTIST field to the ARTIST field (which I don't see entered)
Delete the contents of and then delete entirely the CONTRIBUTINGARTIST field

My suspicion is that Comand sees all of the different CONTRIBUTINGARTIST entries and doesn't know what to make of it because it's not really a normalized field according to MP3Tag (https://help.mp3tag.de/main_tags.html). It may think that they are all different albums that just happen to have the same album name but different "artists".

ua549

I'll give it a try tonight.

grossmsj

AHA!
I think I've figured this mess out. Finally.
I won't give you all the ugly intermediate details, but some salient points:
I started with the same problems ua549 had. Multiple albums. Changing the tag and filename schemes didn't help, including deleting the album artist (set it to blank) and using Various Artists for the Artists. Multiple albums.
Then I stripped out all the tags and set the tag type to ID3V1. So that removes a ton of information. It also deletes the album art. Rewrote to the USB disc and guess what? The Album Art was still there!
So I suspect there is a register that is written that keeps all this information, and COMAND saw fit to reuse the album art that had previously been loaded into the system. This, I believe, is the root of all these problems.
I reformatted the USB drive and wrote a reliable MP3 album to the USB disk. Up comes Daft Punk just as it should. Played in correct order and album art present as it was written as ID3V2. No other music.
Then I moved the Latin Grammy files (stripped only to ID3V1) to the USB disk and loaded it in the car. NOW, just one Latin Grammys album comes up when I select by Album. And there is now no album art. But it played in alphanumeric order song 1, song 10, song 11...
Went back, reformatted the drive. Copied Daft Punk to it and loaded into the car. Just Daft Punk plays.
Then I rewrote the Latin Grammys as follows:
ID3V2 tags
Changed Track to $num(%track%,2). Tracks now 01, 02, 03 (ID3V1 only allows integer values, so no leading zero)
Changed Filename to %track%_%title%. Filenames 01_Song1, etc.
Loaded it into the car. Presto. One album is listed, with album art, and songs in the correct order!
Here's the best part. I then went in and wrote egonvdv's beloved Exile on Main Street to the USB disc with filenames written in the format 01_Song 1, etc.
To my DELIGHT, when I selected Artist>Rolling Stones>Exile on Main Street the second song is now correctly listed as Rip This Joint!

So, it appears its critical to force COMAND to rewrite some register by basically erasing the old data with an empty disc. Then, when properly formatted files are loaded into the system the music will play in the right order.
I suppose that egonvdv and MBpippo loaded their music correctly in the first place and couldn't force the error. I wrote my music wrong in the first place and couldn't correct it until I reset the register and reloaded it.

nycebo - would you care to give this a shot with FLACS?

ua549

How does on reset the music register? I tried inserting media with no music. That didn't work! MB documentation didn't help either.

grossmsj

First, I don't exactly know what exactly is going on here. And it isn't documented anywhere by MB. I'm inferring what's going on based on the behaviors.
What I did was the following:
1) Reformat my USB drive with exFAT on my Windows 10 computer.
2) Made a folder on it named "Music"
3) Put an MP3 album in it that worked using nyc3bo's scheme (Track w/ leading zeros, Filename 01_Song1)
4) Load that USB drive into COMAND and started playing that album.
This is what I refer to as "resetting the register". It's causing the system to recognize a new file structure and rewrite it.
5) Created a subfolder named "Various Artists" on the USB drive (I don't think this is important).
6) Back on the PC, using MP3Tag I selected the Latin Grammys folder I unzipped onto my PC hard disk.
7) In MP3Tag Tools>Options>Tags>MPEG I set Read to ID3V1 and ID3V2, Write ID3V2 (2.3 UTF16), Remove ID3V1 and ID3V2 and save that
8) Select all your songs on MP3Tag by and right click. Select Tag Cut (it erases all the tags and puts them on the clipboard), then immediately right click and select Tag Paste. This rewrites all the tags, making sure ID3V1 aren't there (again, I don't know if that's important).
9) Select all your songs again and "tag-tag" TRACK with $num(%track%,2), which writes leading zeros to the track.
10 Select all your songs again and "tag-filename" and format $num(%track%,2)_%title%, making your filenames 01_song1
11) Select all your songs and "tag-tag" Artist with Format String Various Artists
12) Select all your songs and "tag-tag" Album Artist with Format String " " (a blank space)
13) Save all these files to your hard drive. In my case all the songs were in a folder "2001 Latin Grammys". Make sure ONLY the files are there. No zip files, no jpg files, no m3U files.
14) Drag this folder over to the USB drive and put it under Music>Various Artists
15) Put the USB drive in the car and load everything.
Hope this works for you.

nycebo

Who, that's a laundry list of work. I'll give it a shot this weekend.