Media Library for WAV files

Community Archives WD TV Live Firmware
1

With reducing disk storage costs making large (1TB) disks affordable, I have decided to rip my CD’s as .WAV file format (uncompressed audio @ CD quality).

However, this format doesn’t support ID3 tags, so the media library can’t organise by Artist and Track Name (nor Genre).
It would be a great help if the WD-TV could parse a .WAV file filename to split it it into the various items, so that:

Abba|Money,Money,Money|Pop.wav

gets listed as:

Artist: Abba

Title: Money,Money,Money

Genre: Pop

and is therefore fully searchable using the ‘search’ button.

Many ‘ripping’ programs (I use CDex) can assemble a filename from such elements obtained from CDDB/FreeDB.

The same case can probably be made for picture andvideo formats which don’t include metadata in ‘tags’ or similar structures.

A further enhancement would be to support several, or even user-defined, naming conventions; the one I used in the above example is typical, and uses a non-language seperator (the pipe ‘|’) which can never appear in a name, but there are others…

2

Its extremely unlikely that this will happen but you could post it as an idea.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Ideas/idb-p/idea

3

Problem is, several of those delimiting characters you used are illegal in file names, the comma and vertical bar being two of them…

By the way, consider using FLAC instead of WAV.    FLAC is lossless but still compressed.   You can expand FLAC back to WAV, if needed, with no loss of original information.

4

As an alternative approach, maybe the WD-TV could use the parent folder name as the Artist name?

Or further, the parent folder as the Album, with its parent folder being the Artist:

Abba

    Greatest Hits

        Money, Money Money.wav

BTW: Pipes (|), commas, full stops (periods) are all legal filename characters on my PC… Windows XP

5

radders wrote:

As an alternative approach, maybe the WD-TV could use the parent folder name as the Artist name?

Or further, the parent folder as the Album, with its parent folder being the Artist:

 

Abba

    Greatest Hits

        Money, Money Money.wav

 

BTW: Pipes (|), commas, full stops (periods) are all legal filename characters on my PC… Windows XP

As I said you can propose it as an idea. However I am totally sure that it will not be taken up by WD.

6

Apologies all - I posted this in the WD-TV LIVE forum by mistake. It should have been the WD-TV forum.

Perhaps a moderator can remove this?

7

Won’t make a difference when it comes to likelyhood of future support.  And as said before FLAC yields double capacity and also supports tags so there’s no need to stick with WAV.

8

I was told to use Media Monkey to add album / artist info to wav files, but I’m not sure that seems to work.  Anyone know?  Thanks, ned

9

WAV does have support for tags using the RIFF INFO header. This was added to the spec but very little supports it.

Some details here http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/RIFF.html

J Rivers Media Center does if you enable it in the WAV plugin, Audacity and also DAE (DVD Audio Extractor) has recently added support. I use this method to tag my LossLess library as I need to stream it to many devices and not all support FLAC, mainly my Denon 4806CI. WAV is supported by just about everything and space is not exactly an issue even with a 1000 CD’s  and a 2TB hard disk just for music in my server is not even close to full. Broadcast Wave (BWF) also based on WAV uses the same mechanism.

Now the kicker, although everything else I’ve used happily ignores the INFO chunk and plays the file just fine, the WD TV  Live does not and you get a burst of static as it “plays” the last couple of seconds. (MC places the tag at the end for various technical reasons) (Would be interested to know what lib is used on WD TV to render WA

If you want to stay with WAV, use J RIvers Media Center, Don’t enable RIFF INFO, but do use the DLNA server and then you can build the library as you wish and access it from WD TV and the Artist, Album, Name etc. will be passed via DLNA and display correctly and you will not have to browse file structures and see file names. MC is a superb library manager, especially if you have a large library.

I do this for EVERTHING with WD TV and that way I control what is displayed and how I browse / search.

Note, If you do go down the MC path, load the latest build as it resolves an issue with WD TV not playing certain MKV’s if you tell it some MPEG 4 codec it contains, if you don’t or tell it another supported one, it plays just fine :slight_smile: J River were quick to provide a work around, even though it is a WD TV problem.