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In Reply to: RE: J River posted by Old Listener on March 23, 2015 at 08:58:13
My replies below, I would like to mention that it was the third time I did a back up, and I had no problems with the first 2.
Because the back ups are time consuming a friend and I decided to use
a different back up program, namely
GFI Backup, in clear, no encryption, no compression, on another external drive
So that for the future back up we did not need to start from scratch.
It has been a lot of work copying and getting the Metadata right so that I could locate my music easily
I started copying the cd's in November
Q. Did you rip the CDs? With what program?
A: CD ripper from DB power
If you didn't rip the rip the CDs with JRiver MC, you imported them into JRiver. Did you import manually or use auto-import?
A: Manually
Q. Did you browse your files before you did the backup?
A: Yes
I wanted to play some music but discovered a mess,
There are lots of ways to view your music library in JRiver. What you see depends on the view you use.
Q. Could you describe the view you are using?
A Audio/Albums
lots of cd's (80%) did not play any longer
Sometimes when JRiver can't play music files, it is because Windows has changed the drive letter assigned to a removeable drive.
That sometimes happens when you have more than one removeable drive attached.
Q. Can you describe your computer setup? Windows or Mac? Laptop or desktop computer? Are the music files on an internal drive or a removeable drive (USB, firewire or Thunderbolt)
A: Windows 7 running on a dedicated laptop. First external USB drive is F:, second external USB drive for backup is E:
Q. Had you browsed your collection with JRiver or any other program before you did the backup.
A: Only JRiver
Q. Can you describe the view where you see duplicated tracks?
A : When viewing file They would be 2x track 1, 2 x track 2 etc
Lots of art works and cd's were also missing
JRiver doesn't move files or delete them on its own. The files, the tags in them and the cover art are probably still on your hard drive.
A: ??????
The problem is that you aren't seeing what you expect in JRiver. That problem is not a disaster.
A: It is a disaster and I do not understand how such thing can happen.
Something happened that you didn't expect. It can be fixed. That isn't a disaster.
A: I truly hope so!!!
Computer audio goes much more smoothly if you learn some things that are new to many audiophiles. That matters more than the amount of money that you spend.
Any clues!!
I've asked you questions that will help me and others give you relevant advice. When you answer those questions, I'll provide more details.
Q: Ready to give up PC audio.
A: I am not a computer guy and since I started I had many frustrating moments, luckily I have a friend that could help, but he is also baffled by this one.
Your choice. I started about 9 years ago. I got myself up to speed before I plunged in ripping my sizable CD collection. I finished the ripping process in a few months and have happily used my JRiver based system ever since. I have had no disasters.
Learn more, get over the initial hurdle and things should be much easier and more trouble free.
Your advise is most welcomed. Tx in advance
Follow Ups:
jazz1, thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.
First let's investigate the missing music files (from CDs).
1. Identify a few CDs that you expected to see and didn't see in the Artist/Album view. Note one or two relatively unique words in the titles of the CDs and in individual tracks.
2. In Windows Explorer note the drive letter of the external drive where your music files are placed. (It should be in the left pane under Computer after drives A-D.)
3. In Windows explorer, display the contents of the base folder in which your music files are stored. For example, f:\music.
3. Now type one of those words from the CD titles in the search box at the top right corner of the Explorer window.
You should see a folder and perhaps some files whose name contains the word you searched for.
You can lick on the folder name to display the contents of the folder that was found.
4. Display the contents of the base folder again. Delete the word in the search box and type in one of the words you noted for missing files.
You should see a list of files whose names contain the word you searched for.
I expect that this will show you that folders and files you thought to be missing are still on your hard drive.
--- missing cover art
Now we'll look for missing cover art.
1. Identify one or more CDs for which cover art is missing in the Artist/Album view. Pick examples for which you know what the cover art looks like.
2. In the same Windows Explorer you used earlier, display the base folder again if you aren't already there.
3. type folder.jpg in the search box.
4. There are three controls just below the search box. Click on the down arrow just to the right of the leftmost control. Choose "Large icons" from the list that drops down.
You should see a number of files all named folder.jpg with a small image displayed for each file. Look for an image that matches the cover art that you noticed to be missing in the JRiver view.
This exercise may verify that art you thought to be missing is still present.
There is more than one way that dBpoweramp may have stored cover art. This exercise looks for cover art for a CD in files named folder.jpg stored in the folder with the music files. dBpoweramp may have stored the cover art images in the music files themselves. If necessary, I'll give you an exercise for finding cover art stored in in the music files.
You were concerned that music files from your CDs and cover art were no longer on your computer. These exercises should reassure you that the information is still on your hard drive. The exercises also give you some tools for investigating similar situations in the future. Finally, they give me some information to specify next steps.
Do the exercises and report back and we'll make more progress.
my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/
Thanks for the replies, my friend managed to re import the library and it seems that all cd's are there and 95% of the art work.
The biggest problem is the tracks duplication or even triplication.
I also noticed that some cd's may now only have 2 tracks listed instead of say 10.
Where there is duplication tracks do not play and this affect about 50% of the cd's.
I also noticed that some cd's would have track on them but it may only be track 5-6-7-8 ???
I still have the 2 previous back up on different hard drives, obviously these only contain the cd's done at the particular point in time
thus are not complete
My main goal now would be to get rid of the duplication of tracks
because the tags are different. Even songs on the same cd will sometimes have different tagging. JRiver will group like tagged songs together. You might see, for example two of the same albums side by side. One might have two songs and the other the balance of the album. When you select "tag" you will discover different tagging.
I was trying to address your original concerns. You and your friend are proceeding on a different path. You are trying fixes without understanding what went wrong. I'll leave you to that approach with a couple of comments.
You have listed a number of problems.
duplicate files - Look at the full path + file names for groups of duplicates. You may find that they differ by a drive letter.
missing tracks - look for threads on this forum where useras report that albums are being split. JRiver uses the Artist tag info to create an Album tag value if none is specified. When the Artist values is different for different tracks on a CD, JRiver displays them as different albums in the Artist/Album view. The solution is to fill out the Album Artist tag yourself.
my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/
Thanks a lot for the info. I want to pick your brain again about one box set I copied
This is a 85 CD Beethoven box set and obviously has many different musicians. Many of the CDs only display 2 or 3 tracks and when looking at the tags I can see there are different musicians
I'd prefer that ALL the tracks from a particular CD are displayed when I click on the album in Album view
Is there a way to do this without too much trouble?
Tx
Jazz1, You should consider posting your questions on the JRiver forum. I liked to a recent thread with information relevant to this discussion.
> This is a 85 CD Beethoven box set and obviously has many different musicians.
> Many of the CDs only display 2 or 3 tracks and when looking at the tags I can
> see there are different musicians
dBPoweramp probably puts name of the piece of music in the Album name and the performers name in the Artist tag. That is an appropriate choice for selecting a performance of a piece of music in most music player programs. When you use the JRiver Artist/Album view, the combination just doesn't provide what you want.
JRiver provides several pre-defined views (way to look at your collection) and you can define your own views. You need a view that fits the way you want to look at your files.
> I'd prefer that ALL the tracks from a particular CD are displayed
> when I click on the album in Album view
> Is there a way to do this without too much trouble?
The first step is to see what information dBpoweramp is putting in your files. Click on the gear symbol at the left end of the heading for the Tag window ("1" in the screenshot") Choose "Show all Tags".
Select a single file from the 85 CD Beethoven set. In the tag window, look for something that identifies the file as being part of the 85 CD set.
JRiver only collects information from file tags for fields that are already defined in the JRiver library. It is possible that dBpoweramp wrote some information in tags that JRiver did not use. You can see all the tags in a music file by clicking on the first line under the Tag window heading ("2" in the screen shot. Look for something that identifies the file as being part of the 85 CD set.
If you found contents of some tag that you can use to identify that a file is from the 85 CD Beethoven set, you can define a view to use that tag. See the JRiver forum thread I linked to for information on creating a view.
my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/
Busy day yesterday and another today. I'll respond further tonight or tomorrow.
my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/
Many of the CDs only display 2 or 3 tracks and when looking at the tags I can see there are different musicians
JRiver thinks tracks belong to an Album if "Album" and "Album Artist" are the same.
Copy the performers to "Artist"
Set Alum Artist to Various or the one you think leading but do make shure the entire album has the same value for Album and Album Artist
Have a good look at the Excel style expressions
http://thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/Players/MC14/MC_Expression.htm
The Well Tempered Computer
I looked at some of the albums which have duplicate track 1,1, 2,2, etc
In Explorer, my music is stored on F:\1-Classical\Various\Beethoven
On the first list of track 1 on this album, the path is shown as F:\1-Classical (which is correct)
The second list of track 1 in this album shows F:\Various\Beethoven (which is incorrect)
How do I get rid of the incorrect entries in bulk?
Thanks in advance
jazz1
I have suggested that the drive letter that Windows assigns to your removable drives may have been different in some point in the past. That may have caused some of your problems.Whether or not it was a cause of your problems, you should assign a permanent drive letter to the removable drive that contains the copy of your music files that you use. (Call it your music drive.)
1. Turn your laptop off. Disconnect the backup drive from the laptop and disconnect any USB thumb drives as well. The music drive should be the only one connected.
2. Turn on your laptop. After it finishes booting up, look under computer Windows Explorer and be sure that the music drive is listed.
4. Right-Click on "Computer" and choose "manage". On the left side of the Computer Management window, click on "Disk Management" under Storage.
5. Under the Volume column heading, find the music drive. Right click on that drive and choose "Change drive letter...".
6. In the dialog window that appears, click on the button labeled "Change". Another window then appears with a drop down list of drive letters to the right of the "Assign the following..." text. Click on that radio button and then choose the drive letter you want to be permanently assigned to the drive. (It will be somewhat simpler if you choose the drive letter that JRiver thinks the music files are on. F: I think.)
7. Click on the OK button of each dialog window so that your change is accepted.
Now every time you start your laptop, your music drive will have the same drive letter.
I've included a screenshot showing several of the dialog windows.
my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/
Edits: 03/24/15
In your artist/album view, start with no artist or album selected. Find the column headings above the list of files. (circled in the screenshot below.)1. Right-click on the leftmost tag name in the heading.
2. Scroll downward in the list of fields and click on filename (path).
3. Drag the vertical divider to the right of the words "filename (path)' to the right so that the path information is not cut off.
4. Click on the words "filename (path) in the heading. Now the files will be sorted by the path name.
You should be able to scroll downward and find groups of files with invalid path names. In each such group, click on the first file, scroll downward if necessary and shift-click on the last file in the group. Once you have a group of files selected, press the Delete key and choose the first option to delete the files from the library (without deleting the files.)
Keep scrolling through the list of files finding groups with invalid path names and deleting them.
So far, you have been in a hurry to fix your problem without understanding how it happened. I suggest that you slow down and understand what happened. If you don't, things like this will continue to happen to you.
my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/
Edits: 03/24/15
I still cannot figure out why this happened. Does anyone else have a pointer to what caused it? JRiver seems to be finding paths that do not exist all by itself.
The only thing I did was a back up without any changes to the existing JRiver set up, and one must remember that the previous 2 back ups gave no problems.
Really puzzling as I will be nervous doing further back ups.
Maybe it would be safer to do back ups on another PC that has nothing to do with J River?
Thanks for the info's, my computer friend will come and help and hopefully resolve the problem.
From my limited experiences PC audio is only for computer wise people, the ordinary guys (like me) would find it difficult to cope with.
Thanks for the suggestions, what intrigue me is the fact that I had no problems with the 2 previous back ups, the last one was about 3 weeks ago
with at least 85% of the work done.
Maybe I should start from there?? as trying to fix the current issues
on 2000 cd's could be complicated and time consuming.
I would rather redo what was missing for the second back up, this would be less worrying.
Tx for your time!
I wonder if this has anything to do with backup.
Backup software reads the original files and copies them to another storage medium without changing anything to the original file
JRiver scans the audio files and load the tags and file location in a database
If you move files outside JRiver e.g. with Win explorer of course JRiver can't play them any longer.
If you have JRiver auto scan for changes in the file system, it will locate the files on the new location hence you get duplicates
Might this be the cause of your problem?
The Well Tempered Computer
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