Adding audio files without ID3 tags, e.g. dts, ac3

[panda 1]

Hi everyone,

 

Hopefully this will be a quick question someone can answer.  A similar issue was raised on this thread, but it does not seem to have been resolved:

 

http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/8375-wav-music-invisible/

 

I have a number of dts encoded audio files (unlike the linked thread, with dts extension).  As most of you know, there is no official way of adding an ID3 tag to a dts audio file.  Nevertheless, I decided to trying adding an album to the library to see what happens.  Partial success!

 

The dts audio files can be accessed and played, but only via the Suggested and Songs menus in the Music view.  It does not appear in any of the other menus: Albums, Album Artists, Artists, Genres, Music Videos (kind of obvious I know). 

 

Considering that I store the dts audio files in a folder structure as recommended by the wiki, is it possible to use the folder structure as a backup when an ID3 tag doesn't exist?  In this case, perhaps Artist and Album Artist can be treated as the same tag?

 

I hope this can be a quick and easy patch.

 

I am using Windows 8.1 x86, Media Browser v3.0.5464.40000, and have tested with IE 11 and Palemoon 24.7.2.

 

[Luke 38827]

if you use the folder structure it should show up under albums. the containing folder will be considered an album

[panda 1]

Hi Luke,

 

Thanks for the quick response.  Yes, it does appear under Albums.  I am not sure why it wasn't last night, but perhaps a reboot of the server helped.  It still does not appear under Artists or Album Artists.  Is this by design?

[Luke 38827]

you could use the metadata manager to edit the artist and album values for your songs, although that's going to be a very manual process unfortunately.

[panda 1]

Thanks Luke, yes that seems cumbersome.  I think I read somewhere that you don't want us interfacing with Sqlite directly. 

 

Is there another way to edit the library, for example, exporting and importing xml files? 

 

I used to do this many moons ago with Windows Media Player, because someone had written a neat app to export the WMP database as an XML file, which I could edit at my leisure and then import and overwrite the existing database.  The most useful aspect of this was that refactoring was quite easy with a few careful scripts in the programming language of your choice.

[panda 1]

As an addendum to my previous post, in case you where wondering what kind of refactoring.  I moved my music library to a new location, so I replaced the path name for each and every audio file in the exported XML file.  That took about 5 minutes, as opposed to rescanning the library which would have taken a few hours.