I’m trying to figure out whether to rip lossless or not and wanted to do an a-b comparison of the same track recorded at different rates. But I have to distinguish the tracks in some way. I tried editing composer tag using Windows Medial Player and then rebuilt my Sonos library, but it still shows only Beethoven, not Beethovenb, the edit I had done. So how to I distinguish two rips from the same track so I can play the different versions, either through editing tags or some other means? Thank you.
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I change the track names. I’m not very inventive with the track names. “Track(FLAC)”, “Track(MP3)”, etc. With this sort of scheme all of the tracks will sort together and allow quick selection and comparison.
Using Composer is risky because the Library Indexer will ignore identical tracks. The indexer will compare Track-Album and maybe Track-Album-Artist, but I don’t think that it includes Composer.
Another awkward detail may bite if you use a NAS drive and enable the share’s Trash folder. Sometimes the Indexer will discover the original version of an edited file in Trash before it discovers the edited version, then ignores the edited version. This can be annoying because one can prove that the file was edited, but the edit does not appear in the final library. The solution is to disable Trash.
Thanks very much. But I’m not sure what you mean by “track name.” (I’m new to tags.) I presume you don’t mean the file name that explorer shows. When I look in windows media player at the various columns I can show (and presumably edit the name of), I see title, but nothing comparable to track name. And it has to be something Sonos will show me, so that I can distinguish. So if you can elaborate at my remedial level, that would be great.
And no NAS, so those aspects don’t matter.
You should always rip to a lossless format, that gives you the highest quality to start with. From there you can convert to any lossy format if you need the smaller data size. Always keep the lossless version to use as the source for any other conversion.
I use FLAC for my initial rips and on my Sonos Music Library but down-convert to MP3 for use in my car’s music system with a small storage drive and on my laptop for use when traveling. If you are having Sonos wireless issues due to the data transfer size of lossless music you could use a lossy/smaller format to work around the issue until you get it sorted out.
My tag editor, EasyTag offers a lot of options, you might look for a more capable editor.
But I’m not sure what you mean by “track name.”
And no NAS, so those aspects don’t matter.
I should have said “Track Title”, not “Track Name”. As far as file names are concerned, they are arbitrary. The library limit is 65,000 tracks. The file names could be 1.flac, through 65000.flac, but this probably would not be very convenient for the human. I store each disc in it’s own folder and include the track number in each file name. If the Track Title is relatively short, I’ll include it in the file name. Since I rarely used the Folders view of the library, I’m stingy with respect to including full Track Titles in the file name.
I suggest that you prepare a written document showing how to format the metadata and file names. For example, if you have classical music, should the conductor or orchestra appear in the metadata? If so where? As part of the Album Name? Track Title? Artist? Do you include a soloist? Beginning of meta data string? End of string? First Name Last name? Last Name, First Name?
A copy of the Library Index is stored in each player and space is finite. In addition to the absolute 65,000 track limit, there is a space limit for the index. If the metadata is verbose, you may run out of storage space before 65,000 tracks. I’ve seen some rippers throw the whole first stanza of operas into the file name and Track Title. In my opinion this is unnecessary and wastes space.
By default, some tag editors don’t update the file’s modification timestamp. This is because some users like to preserve the rip date. If the timestamp doesn’t change then the Sonos indexer won’t take another look at it.
True. If this is the desired mode of timestamping files, you can simply delete the library setup and re-enter. This will slow the indexing run time because all files must be fully processed, but all tag updates will be included.
The tag metadata is on different levels for want of a better word, I had a bear of a time editing one song name (tag), I seem to remember it was v3 instead of v2 or something similar and Sonos was reading the v3 data.
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