Discussion:
Albums, works and gapless recordings
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Andrew Clarke
2020-08-30 14:19:05 UTC
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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
graham
2020-08-30 15:22:00 UTC
Permalink
Post by Andrew Clarke
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
I experienced the same problem when I ripped cds as mp3 files onto a
memory stick to play in the car. I managed to correct most of those
glitches but one remains that seems to be the fault of the car's software.
Sometimes when I start the car and the memory stick is in play, instead
of continuing where it left off when I parked the car, it starts playing
the first cd that I loaded onto the st
Andrew Clarke
2020-08-31 06:29:30 UTC
Permalink
Post by graham
I experienced the same problem when I ripped cds as mp3 files onto a
memory stick to play in the car. I managed to correct most of those
glitches but one remains that seems to be the fault of the car's software.
Sometimes when I start the car and the memory stick is in play, instead
of continuing where it left off when I parked the car, it starts playing
the first cd that I loaded onto the stick. It's completely unpredictable.
Same with the system in our Honda: otherwise navigation is not too bad, once you get past Mr Honda's notoriously confusing screen navigation. Where the machine blew its stack was opera: it couldn't handle the large number of tracks, so that bits of ACT 2 came mixed up with bits of Acts 1 and 3 for example.. So out came Audacity and I combined all the files into about six large ones. That fixed it.

My wife used to have a couple of CDs of Linda Ronstadt with Nelson Riddle, which she threw out: she recently asked if she could get them again. I could and did get one of the three from a US supplier at a reasonable price. The other two were available within Australia for AUD$200+. So we'll be playing these two from Amazon Music via Trish's phone and BlueTooth if we can get it to work ...

Andrew Clarke
Canberra

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