Andrew Clarke
2020-08-30 14:19:05 UTC
Having inherited my wife's old Samsung Tab A tablet, I decided to use it as a kind of super Walkman for use when walking the dog or sitting on a Canberra bus. So I connected it to the family desktop and transferred some works from my library. The latter is organised not by albums but by musical periods, the composers, then by genre (symphonies, concertos, etc.) organised into folders and subfolders as required. In short, I'm a typical PC user.
Going back to the tablet, I found that that I could organise only a single level of folders, and no subfolders, so some reorganisation was necessary. More importantly, when I opened the Google Play Music Player or the VLC player, I found that my files had been automatically organised into 'albums'. There were other problems: the playing order for the complete Brahms symphonies (Ticciati) had the four first movements followed by the four second movements, followed by the four thirds and the four fourths. OK, I went back into the desktop, edited the track numbering in the metadata, reloaded the files and this solved the problem. More serious was that where there were differences in the metadata for the movements resulted in more than one album being created, with three movements being included in one album and the fourth in another. This alwas occurred if one movement had been edited, e.g. where attacca movements had been merged in Audacity to get rid of the 'gapless playback' problem reported earlier. Then of course there is the question of what the album is called, which in the case of VLC was usually either "Unknown Album" or the name of the conductor. What a mess.
I assume that when these players read the metadata on audio files they immediately look up the metadata from other online sources and compile my recordings into albums which I don't really want.
On the other hand, playing tracks as 'albums' does have one advantage. There are no gaps between attacca movements! These media players are obviously learning from external systems which movements are to be played gaplessly and which not.
This post will be otiose to people who are used to using Apple or Android music systems. Until very recently I had not. And it might explain why other people and I were at cross-purposes when discussing gapless playback ...
Andrew Clarke
Canberra
Andrew Clarke
Canberra
Going back to the tablet, I found that that I could organise only a single level of folders, and no subfolders, so some reorganisation was necessary. More importantly, when I opened the Google Play Music Player or the VLC player, I found that my files had been automatically organised into 'albums'. There were other problems: the playing order for the complete Brahms symphonies (Ticciati) had the four first movements followed by the four second movements, followed by the four thirds and the four fourths. OK, I went back into the desktop, edited the track numbering in the metadata, reloaded the files and this solved the problem. More serious was that where there were differences in the metadata for the movements resulted in more than one album being created, with three movements being included in one album and the fourth in another. This alwas occurred if one movement had been edited, e.g. where attacca movements had been merged in Audacity to get rid of the 'gapless playback' problem reported earlier. Then of course there is the question of what the album is called, which in the case of VLC was usually either "Unknown Album" or the name of the conductor. What a mess.
I assume that when these players read the metadata on audio files they immediately look up the metadata from other online sources and compile my recordings into albums which I don't really want.
On the other hand, playing tracks as 'albums' does have one advantage. There are no gaps between attacca movements! These media players are obviously learning from external systems which movements are to be played gaplessly and which not.
This post will be otiose to people who are used to using Apple or Android music systems. Until very recently I had not. And it might explain why other people and I were at cross-purposes when discussing gapless playback ...
Andrew Clarke
Canberra
Andrew Clarke
Canberra