Does anyone know of a tool that can manipulate tags across a whole collection? Specifically, I want to copy the values of one tag into another across all files in the collection (without doing it an album at a time). Can it be done?
Depends which tag you are trying to copy. MP3tag is free and very good. Worth a try
It depends on your data format. lltag, metaflac and easytagsupport some batch processing for, among others, .flac files. But I think that for what you want to do you, will have to write a small script. Just google “metaflac script examples” if your file are .flac files.
Thanks, everyone, for the ideas - plenty to look at. However, I’ve been thinking through my original idea (and hence the need to do this) and I’m now convinced it won’t achieve what I’d hoped/thought. Back to the drawing board. (It relates to my earlier thread about ordering albums by release date within Asset.)
I am not sure what you want to achieve with the copy but if (part of) the goal is renaming a tag, this can be achieved in MinimServer by just adding the pair A:B to indexTags. Here A represents the name of the tag that you have in your files, for instance composer. B represents the name of the tag that you want to see in your control point (Naim app, Linn Kazoo, etc.), for instance Komponist, e.g., if you fancy browsing your music collection in German.
I admit to not fully understanding how to manage tags to get the desired results.
I occasionally come across problem albums. For example, I have 2 JC Complete San Quinten recordings. One is ripped in FLAC and one is ripped in AIF and each are stored in separate folders on my QNAP.
However, in the Naim App using Asset both albums are combined into one album instance. How do I fix this? I use Bliss HQ for tagging and fixing errors but not sure what to fix exactly.
You could edit the album tittles to add flax or aif to the album title. I have done this when testing different versions.
Both albums have the same Album and Artist tag set, so when the server looks to serve it to the streamer the two albums look the same, i.e. they are both Johnny Cash Live at St Quentin, the server can’t tell they are two different rips and it looks like one album with 2 Track 01, 2 Track 02 etc.
If as suggested above you change the Album tag in one of the rips to a different value, maybe just add FLAC to the Album tag. Then the server will see two different albums.
I hope that was comprehensible.
Thanks for all the responses. Changing the album tag makes sense. What’s weird is I know I have other duplicate albums that are ripped in FLAC and AIF so it makes me wonder why I haven’t had problems with those. I’ll try to hunt down one of those and see what’s going on.
I do not see any problem here: you have 2 “Big River” files (one in FLAC and the other one in AIF format) with the same Album value (SuperU …). You ask the server to list all the files with that Album value and the server correctly shows you, among others, the two “Big River” files. What would you expect the server to do?
If you want to see the FLAC files and the AIF files in different albums, you have to give different Album names to the FLAC and to the the AIF files.
If you prefer the FLAC files and the AIF files to share the same Album value and yet be able to distinguish between the FLAC files and the AIF files you can introduce a Format tag. Then, you set Format=FLAC for the FLAC files and Format=AIF for the AIF files and you use a server like MinimServer that supports “intelligent browsing”.
There are other ways to achieve the same result. If you want to learn about how to use tags to organize your music collection, have a look at the MinimServer manual.
Okay, so when I use the Minimserver instance on my Naim App it has no problem making the distinction. Here are the two albums separate. So I wonder if there’s a setting in Asset I can tweak to get this result?
Back in Asset I notice the two At Folsom Prison albums, one AIF and one FLAC. are separated. So for some reason Asset handles these albums okay but not the San Quentin albums.
The AIF albums are my rips. and the FLAC albums are a collection I inherited. I have no interest in deleting the duplicates and aside from this rare issue I’ve had no problems. It’s weird to me this one album is a problem but others are not.
Just look at the tags of a pair that is not a problem and compare them to the tags of the pair that is a problem. You should see some structural differences, beside the difference in the values of the tags, of course.
It’d be interesting to see what the differences (in the tags) are that mean one pair is shown separately, but the other pair is merged.
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