Problems with tagging FLACs

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

Dear all,

I’ve had a WD TV Live for a couple of months now, and I’m very pleased with its capability of video- and YouTube-playback. Especially I like the possibility of using the iPhone/iPad as remote, although I think there’s quite some room for expanding this extension of the useage. Particularly it would be brilliant for audio playback, if you could select the music to be played directly on the device rather than having to turn on the TV to see what you’re doing.

That’s not my issue, however. One of the great things I was looking forward to was to be able to collect all media - video, audio and pictures - in one single hub and access everything with one single remote. To get rid of the inferious MP3s and dump the physical CDs in the storage and have as much music and as many movies as I’d like to on one single box.

I started loading the external harddisk connected to the WD with FLAC-albums, and quickly found out that it was displayed in a quite disorganized way when accessed through the WD TV Live. Earlier today I thought I’d start tidying up, and I started from the beginning of the alphabet to rename, tag and put covers on the albums in the correct order using a program I’ve had my hands on before - mp3tag.

However, when I tested if the tags were accepted by the media player, I was disappointed to see that it hardly changed anything. For instance, I’d collected all Bruckner-symphonies under one tagged album to avoid it being spread over 9-10 CDs, where some symphonies might even be shared over two CDs. The same with double-CDs I’d merged into a single album - it refused to show up as one single album, as well as my attempts to rename albums also failed.

I’ve tried to look for a solution on the internet, but haven’t been able to find a good answer.

Is there anything I can do here? Should I use a different program than mp3tag? Or perhaps the settings in the program?

For your information I’m using the latest firmware on the media player, and as said I’m playing back directly off a harddisk connected to the WD TV Live. “Media Library” is set to on. Any help is greatly appreciated.

2

Hi, see if the following link helps.

http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Live-Plus/Music-Sort-by-Filename-vs-Song-Title-in-MP3-tag/m-p/24647/highlight/true#M7365

3

Thanks for the reply, Ichigo. It doesn’t really give a solution to my issue. I’ve given up on trying to organize my albums on the WD-connected harddisk - it simply doesn’t recognize half of the tags I’ve put on the FLACs. I don’t understand why, because it seems totally random - it works with some albums, but on others, WD ignores that I’ve specifically merged a double-CD into one single tagged album with ascending track names. It makes no sense.

My new strategy is to dump the music library on to a separate harddisk and have it connected to a computer. I’m trying to find a way to be able to stream music from this harddisk to the WD Live using my iPad. I found an app called MediaConnect, which just nearly does exactly what I need it to do - except, something goes wrong in the process and it doesn’t play back on the WD Live.

Do you have any suggestions to good apps that can let me stream stuff from the computer to the WD?

4

Ellegaard, I know this is not the direction you are looking, but I have found that it works very well for me sorting though a pretty large library of music that I ripped from my CDs. Tagging the songs did not really help me organize, or give me the view that I wanted, so I ended up using was a folder organization strategy instead.

My music is also all in FLAC and I have tagged all the metadata as well. I have found browsing it via folders was just the simplest way to keep it organized and easy to find stuff. I do not use the media library. I started organizing this way with my LivePlus, and continue still now that I have a LiveHub and a SMP as well. It works well for all of them. I am currently connecting over windows shares, but for a long time I had the music on a local USB drive that was attached the LivePlus.

For example, I have a directory called “Studio Albums”. Under that, I have each album in it’s own folder (directory), with a folder cover (folder.jpg) and the cover also embedded into each song. To keep albums chronological, I include the release year in the folder name. I keep songs in order (since the unit does not seem to recognize track number) by starting the title of each one with a number.

Example:

>Studio Albums

–>ACDC - 1977 - Let There Be Rock

----->01-Go Down.flac

----->02-Dog Eat Dog.flac

----->03-Let There Be Rock.flac

----->04-Bad Boy Boogie.flac

----->05-Problem Child.flac

----->06-Overdose.flac

----->07-**bleep** Ain’t A Bad Place To Be.flac

----->08-Whole Lotta Rosie.flac

----->Folder.jpg

->ACDC - 1978 - Powerage

----->01-Rock ‘N’ Roll Damnation.flac

----->02-Down Payment Blues.flac

----->03-Gimme A Bullet.flac

----->04-Riff Raff.flac

----->05-Sin City.flac

----->06-What’s Next To The Moon.flac

----->07-Gone Shootin’.flac

----->08-Up To My Neck In You.flac

----->09-Kicked In The Teeth.flac

----->Folder.jpg

On the LivePlus, I can view in list mode where see the names of the albums, or Thumbnail mode and see a grid of the covers. Hit play on a folder and it will play the entire album, or whatever is in the folder. The song that is playing displays some metadata; the embedded cover, band, song title and the genre. It also shows the next song.

Even though the metadata is not all used, I still went through the process of fully tagging everything with the thought that at some point I would be in a situation where it would be useful and I would be happy that it was already there.

For me, using the Media Library for music did not work well, and made it harder to find what I wanted. If I want to listen to an artist, I just have to scroll to the first letter of the band name and I can see all their work. Though I just have two main directories (Studio Albums and Live Music), you could of course have genre folders, or even ones for each artist, with the albums as subfolders if you found that to be easier to search for.  

Good luck whatever direction you choose to take. I found browsing by folder by far the easiest. 

-P