Media Server Reviews

Sidebar 1: Maintaining a Music Library

It has long been apparent that for some music consumers—those who lack at least modest proficiency with computers—maintaining a digital music library can be a daunting chore. If your library consists only of paid commercial downloads, you may not have a problem, because usually paid downloads have their metadata well-sorted: They should work fine in any system, with tracks collected together in an album and album art displayed. (If they don't, complain to the download service, though they'll probably blame it on the record label.)

But if, like me, you combine commercial downloads with private recordings, CD rips, and prerelease files sent by record companies (sometimes great, sometimes a mess in metadata terms), you need skills to keep things shiny. Facility with a metadata editor—I use Mp3tag, but there are other perfectly good ones out there—is, I think, a minimum requirement, unless you have a friend (or a dealer) who's willing to spend time maintaining your music library for you. At a minimum, you need to be able to locate and save cover images when they're missing and convert track numbers and titles from filenames to metadata fields. Sound like Greek? It's okay; you can learn.

But you need to know what works—what manipulations will assure that all the tracks on an album stay together and that your album art displays. Fortunately, the rules are much the same for every music-library platform I've ever used.

I maintain a library of several thousand albums. For years, I dumped music into it without much thought or planning. Usually it worked, but something like one of every five albums was a mess, split into multiple parts, individual tracks masquerading as albums, and missing cover art. Then a few weeks after my recent surgery, I decided to repair the damage. I went through the whole library—it was a major undertaking, but it kept me off the streets—and fixed everything. This followed a similar experience years ago when I ripped my whole CD collection into my music library.

As a result of these two experiences, I've gained reasonable facility with Mp3tag, and I've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't.

To make things work, you want to dump everything relating to an album—files for the tracks, cover art, pdf booklets—in the same folder. As a rule of thumb, everything you want associated with a particular cover image should be in the same folder. For multi-album box sets—say, Wagner's complete Ring Cycle, where each separate opera has its own cover—use a subfolder for each separate album, the cover art (and everything else) in the subfolder. The biggest challenge I've found—the worst case for any server software—is ripping those budget boxed sets where, say, 10 original albums are combined onto seven CDs. I finally got those to work. I don't remember how.

The metadata tag Album Artist must be the same for every track on an album. The Album field, which contains the name of the album, must also be precisely consistent across all tracks. If the cover image is embedded in the track metadata—it doesn't necessarily have to be embedded if it's in the folder and properly named—then the same image must be embedded in all tracks. The cover image file must also have the right filename—cover.jpg and folder.jpg are safest, which is to say, they work well across different systems. If there's a pdf liner-notes insert, dump that in the same folder, too. Innuos handles inserts nicely.

I don't mean to discourage anyone considering starting a digital music library (eg, by ripping a CD collection). None of this stuff is hard, but it's stuff you need to learn. To me, the work is relaxing and enjoyable, but if you're sure it's not your cup of tea, you may want to stick to streaming and physical media.—Jim Austin