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Topic: Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order (Read 4220 times) previous topic - next topic
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Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

I tried to search for this and either used wrong terms or simply didn't understand what I was reading as reflective of my situation.

I have a lot of folders that were ripped with EAC. Not sure why but all may songs are in Alpha order and not Album order. I do have one CD that I ripped, perhaps with SoundForge, that looks normal.

Is there any way to have Foobar get the proper information and song order for each CD.

IOW, what I have is...

Folder CD Music
Artist 1
-- CD 1
------Song alpha
------Song next alpha
------ Song next alpha

I used a database when ripping and the song titles are correct but they are all mixed together.

So I have multiple albums that when I display "by album" looks like
- ? (2714)
|
---------then just a long list of single line items.

Below all that is the one ( from a different place on hard drive and ripped differently )
- Correct Album Title [Artist](11)
01. first song
02. correct second song ( not in aplha order )
03. correct 3rd song, etc.

Is there any way for me to easily convert all those others, either with Foobar2K or some other means. If no easy way, what least hard way would you suggest?

Thanks

TB




Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #1 –
My guess is that the sort setting located at Preferences > Shell Integration > Sort incoming files by: is set to the default of %path_sort% and that the tracks being sorted by their title is due the file name of those tracks not beginning with their respective track number.

As far as the simplest solution, you can change the sort located at Preferences > Shell Integration > Sort incoming files by: to something such as:
Code: [Select]
%album artist% - %date% - %album% - %discnumber% - %tracknumber% - %title%

As long as your files have the necessary tags, that should make them sort correctly.

Another option is to rename those tracks so that the file names begin with the track number. This can be accomplished by selecting the affected tracks in foobar, right-clicking them and selecting File Operations > Rename to > ... in the context menu. In the dialog that opens, enter something like the following in the box, then click Run.
Code: [Select]
[%discnumber%.]%tracknumber% %title%

This too requires the tracks to have the necessary tags, although %discnumber% isn't absolutely necessary. It will be used if present and ignored if not.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #2 –
I don't fully understand the situation. Are you saying that the %album% and %tracknumber% tags are missing for 2714 of your files?

If you don't have those tags, you could try sorting the files by "date modified" or "date created" inside a file manager, or possibly with the %last_modified% in foobar, and then scanning the list to load them as albums and apply the auto tracknumber function.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #3 –
When I look at properties of a song file there is no info on the Metadata tab.

the property tab shows this as an example
File name : Willie The Wimp.wav
Folder name : D:\CD Music\Stevie Ray Vaughan\Live Alive
File path : D:\CD Music\Stevie Ray Vaughan\Live Alive\Willie The Wimp.wav
Subsong index : 0
File size : 46.6 MB (48 874 604 bytes)
Last modified : 2004-11-16 10:35:14

Duration : 4:37.067 (12 218 640 samples)
Sample rate : 44100 Hz
Channels : 2
Bits per sample : 16
Bitrate : 1411 kbps
Codec : PCM
Encoding : lossless

PS, I can load them up by "folder Structure" and the songs are in alpha order.

I can't get anything from FreedB. It just pulls in random artists not associated with anything I have.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #4 –
WAV supports tags… but not in a way that is very widely supported. Chances are you didn’t save any proper metadata for these. You would be able to recreate artist, album, and title from the folder paths, but you do not appear to have saved the track-numbers in your filenames, so they’re probably not retrievable.

Sorry, but this seems like a simple case of a lack of foresight when you were ripping. Better-supported metadata is one of the most frequent points cited in favour of losslessly compressed formats. And in any case, you should be sure you know what you’re going to get before you rip hundreds of CDs. Did you not try playing any of them before and notice this issue?

Having said that, with any luck, a metadata-searching service will be able to salvage things here.

Quote
I can't get anything from FreedB. It just pulls in random artists not associated with anything I have.
What did you try? You might have to load one album at a time in whichever front-end you used. But you’d need to describe what you actually did before we can comment on it. Anyway, there’s bound to be a program that can do things automatically.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #5 –
You're using uncompressed WAV files. Those don't officially support tags.
You're far better off converting them to a compressed lossless format (such as FLAC), which will support tags and also take up much less space on your hard drive.

EDIT: db1988 beat me to the post.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #6 –
db1989 ... I honestly can't remember what I did. I used EAC and it found the album names and songs so I figured everything was good to go. It's been a while.

As to using freedb in F2K... all I have done is right clicked a file and Tagging, get tags from Freedb. All it does is retrieve several wrong artists.

I just tried to use right click, convert, quick convert and it won;t even write the file.. The wav plays fine.

Is there an easy way I could batch convert each album to FLAC? I hate to have to put all those CDs back in.

"Anyway, there’s bound to be a program that can do things automatically."  --- That's what I'm hoping for.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #7 –
Fortunately you've got a pretty small batch of albums to fix, just a few hundred, so it won't take long, maybe about 30 minutes at most. I don't know any fancy scripting approaches outside of foobar, so here's the primitive but reasonably efficient solution I would use:

0. Using a file manager with a good batch rename function (I use Directory Opus), select all the files in all the folders (e.g. using a "flat view" mode), and rename them as {creation date-time}*, where * is the original filename. There are endless different ways you could accomplish this kind of batch renaming very quickly, but one way or another, the goal is to get the file creation timestamp into the filename where it can be used to hopefully sort the files according to tracknumber under the assumption that EAC ripped them sequentially.

1. Load the whole batch into a playlist, select all, convert to FLAC, delete WAVs. (While they're converting, of course you'll want to do something else like eat dinner or listen to an epic concept album!)

2. Load the whole batch of FLACs into the playlist,  select all, go into Properties, select the %album% field, select "Format from other fields" in the context menu and use "%directory%".

3. Sort the playlist by %path% so that the tracks are (hopefully) in proper order.

4. Now you can just scroll down the playlist in a playlist view with an %album% grouping, select each album grouping individually, and run freedb on each one. Since you're dealing with CDs, it's likely they will be well-known albums listed on freedb, and so then you're done. This is the time-consuming part, but it should only take about 5 seconds per album if you have a keyboard shortcut for the freedb function. If something isn't listed on freedb, you can just use the auto tracknumber function to assign the tracknumbers and the "automatically fill values" function to extract the title and artist from the path very quickly.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #8 –
^i don't think that will work because freedb will use the overall album/track lengths to fetch the album info and with them being in alphabetical order, it will be all wrong. if you had untagged files but with correct track order, it would probably work out ok.

musicbrainz picard can do it though it needs a few tags. this should work.

-convert files into flac. make sure original folder structure is maintained. foobar can use a nice directory structure like this to populate a few tags....

Code: [Select]
File path : D:\CD Music\Stevie Ray Vaughan\Live Alive\Willie The Wimp.wav


do not delete originals just yet.

-load flacs into playlist. select them all, right click>properties. right click again>automatically fill values. from the source dropdown, select other...

enter this.

Code: [Select]
$directory(%path%,2)\%directory%\%filename%


in the pattern, put this.

Code: [Select]
%artist%\%album%\%title%


musicbrainz picard can now lookup albums and put them in order with just these simple tags and there is no need for tracks to be in track order. from this screenshot, you can see how the files are named in explorer, how they are tagged in foobar2000 and how picard has put them in the right order.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/22801321/2013/april/picard.png

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #9 –
Quote from: TB-AV on
db1989 ... I honestly can't remember what I did. I used EAC and it found the album names and songs so I figured everything was good to go. It's been a while.
Sure, it can find the metadata, but you have to set it up to embed it in the files too. It doesn’t support said process for WAV.

Quote
As to using freedb in F2K... all I have done is right clicked a file and Tagging, get tags from Freedb. All it does is retrieve several wrong artists.
You can’t just right-click “a file”. As I said already, you have to process files in batches because look-up is based upon albums, not single songs. Metadata is searched on the basis of ‘What if a CD contained this many songs of these specific lengths: what CD would that be?’.

Quote from: mapmike on
Fortunately you've got a pretty small batch of albums to fix, just a few hundred, so it won't take long, maybe about 30 minutes at most. I don't know any fancy scripting approaches outside of foobar, so here's the primitive but reasonably efficient solution I would use: […]
This could be a good solution if it worked, but I suspect your approach to retrieving the missing track-numbers is overly complex when, I would hope, a competent metadata-finding service could fill them alongside all the other missing data (those not present in the paths: genre, year, etc.).

An automated solution using per-album grouping or fingerprinting is more likely to bring success in an easier way, I think. marc2003’s solution looks promising, but having said that, I don’t see why FreeDB is not working, so I suspect that TB-AV has not been invoking it in the right way.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #10 –
Quote from: marc2003 on
^i don't think that will work because freedb will use the overall album/track lengths to fetch the album info and with them being in alphabetical order, it will be all wrong. if you had untagged files but with correct track order, it would probably work out ok.

My "step 0" was to put them in tracklisting order instead of alpha order, but your solution using Musicbrainz Picard is a revelation to me and seems to be the solution, a real "one step" solution. Nice!

Quote from: db1989 on
An automated solution using per-album grouping or fingerprinting is more likely to bring success in an easier way, I think. marc2003’s solution looks promising, but having said that, I don’t see why FreeDB is not working, so I suspect that TB-AV has not been invoking it in the right way.

From what I can tell, Freedb only works when the files are in tracklisting order, using only fingerprints, so it wouldn't work for the OP case even if it was invoked correctly, whereas apparently Musicbrainz Picard offers a different look-up method using tags instead of fingerprints.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #11 –
Quote from: mapmike on
My "step 0" was to put them in tracklisting order


ah i skimmed over that and didn't really cotton on to what you were doing. using the file creation time could work in theory but i wouldn't want to rely on it.

i forgot to say, i wouldn't try my method on the whole lot at once. i'd do it in smaller batches of 10 albums at a time or something like that so i could analyse each step before committing to it. the good thing about wav is that 150GB isn't quite as much as it could be with other formats.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #12 –
I'm still working on it...

I decided to try a one single album first. So I put Bonnie Raitt - Nick of Time songs in play list. In correct order. Selected all , right clicked and tried to convert to FLAC. Chose a destination dir. Then it asks me where is FLAC.exe.... is that not built in to FB2K?


Ok, I installed FLAC. Converted Nick of Time wav files.
Loaded them in order to playlist. Converted to FLAC


I don;t know what you mean by this. I don;t know where to put that code.

"-convert files into flac. make sure original folder structure is maintained. foobar can use a nice directory structure like this to populate a few tags....

CODE
File path : D:\CD Music\Stevie Ray Vaughan\Live Alive\Willie The Wimp.wav"


So I continued.

Loaded the FLACs into play list in order. Applied next two codes. Clicked OK

Loaded them in Music Picard as "files" and clicked "LookUp" It started ordering the files and adding info. It added a load of info and placed the songs -in order- in the right pane.

3 songs -- Thing Called Lov, Road my middle name, will not be denied are still in left pane as "unmatched"... but they are in right pane too but instead of a green icon they have a musical note beside them. I didn't know what to do next so I clicked save.

Foobar now sees the Bonnie Raitt album under Artist or Album but the songs are still in alpha order.

So better but still no cigar... I think I just don't understand the exact order I am supposed to be doing all the steps. If I could just get one album done to where I understand what I am doing I think I would be ok. But I don;t know why the Picard failed on three files and not sure why they are in order there but not in FB2K

UPDATE: ran
lookup" again in picard on those 3 files and they went through. All green icons in right pane under artist now. All have extensive data and correct track numbers.  Just can't figure how to get this back to FB2K

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #14 –
Quote from: marc2003 on
no but you can grab an installer here.

http://www.foobar2000.org/encoderpack



OK, see above I added more info. Got that working.

One more little update. Resave from picard after last three files. Now FB2K shows.....

1.02. Thing Called Love
then the rest go back to alpha order
Cry on shoulder
Have a heart
Etc

AH! I got it... I forgot to select all in Picard. they are in order now in FB2K.

1.01 Nick of Time
1.02 Thing Called Love
1.03 Etc.

Fantastic.....!!! Now I'll try some multiple album conversions... I think I have a double ZZ Top I'll try that first and see what happens.


Ok, I tried ZZ Top Six Pack. The main problem I have is some songs in MBP are seen as a musical note icon adn they won't save to be seen by FB2K. The other songs have little square green icons. After I save they turn to green check marks.

Can't figure how to get the others squared away.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #15 –
Quote from: mapmike on
Quote from: db1989 on
An automated solution using per-album grouping or fingerprinting is more likely to bring success in an easier way, I think. marc2003’s solution looks promising, but having said that, I don’t see why FreeDB is not working, so I suspect that TB-AV has not been invoking it in the right way.
From what I can tell, Freedb only works when the files are in tracklisting order, using only fingerprints, so it wouldn't work for the OP case even if it was invoked correctly, whereas apparently Musicbrainz Picard offers a different look-up method using tags instead of fingerprints.
Good point that the order of tracks is essential for FreeDB; I apologise for not checking that before. However, you have it the wrong way around regarding fingerprinting, assuming you mean acoustic fingerprinting: whereas Musicbrainz is capable of that, FreeDB is not and calculates the ID of a given CD purely from its tracks’ quantity, lengths, and order. If this is simply a matter of terminology, most people will interpret “fingerprinting” to refer to the acoustic variety; what FreeDB uses is normally called a disc ID.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #16 –
I'm getting closer.... Tried the ZZ Six pack which at first tired to place the songs in separate albums, which would be ideal... Never could get it to work. Lots of missed items. There is a lookup with browser tool but I'm not sure what to do with it. IOW, I would expect it is there for me to browse to the web and choose one of the various solutions and have it applied to the track. Never could figure how to do that though. I see the correct choice on the web but not sure how to attach that info to song.

So anyway... then I tried the "SCAN" feature. that actually found all the songs in the six pack but they are all in one album. Not ideal but it works. Next I'm going to try two albums from two different artists and see what happens. If I have to do each album one at a time, I'm ok with that, I just need a workflow that is most likely to get correct results.

Need advice on 150G of CDs in wrong song order

Reply #17 –
You might want to read the documentation to better understand how Picard works.

Also, there's a brief tutorial.