Albums in multiple formats

[6b6561]

My library is primarily in mp3 format but I do have some of the albums also in flac format (one large file for the album with embedded cue sheet). My issue here is that PA see's the mp3 + flacs as a single album which is logic as PA groups "album artist" + "album title" into a pseudo album, so now I have some albums with duplicate tracks as both the mp3 and flac is added to the same album.

Anyone else having problems with this and what is your experience / workaround.

Two approaches:

• Use folder view: I can do that as I have all my albums organized in an artist/album hierarchy, but with this approach I can't really use the other categories.
• Dummy album name: Add something like "(flac)" after/before the album name, this works but causes problems with lyric search.

Any other ideas?

[6b6561]

Dummy album name... What's better, add "(flac)" before/after album name?

• After: Allows albums to be sorted alphabetically
• Before: Places all the flac versions before or after the mp3's

Decisions, decisions... life is full of them...

[andrewilley]

First, yes if both the Album Artist tag and the Album Title tags exactly match between different files, those files will always be grouped together into one logical 'album' in the category lists, regardless of other factors such as Track Artist tag or differing file formats/bitrates/etc. That is by design, and won't change.

I have one 13-track album that I store on my device in two formats for testing purposes - one folder contains the general VBR 16-bit MP3 files (the format I use for all my music) and then a second folder contains the same songs as 192kHz/24-bit FLAC files. To avoid having all 26 songs (2 x 13 files) grouped in one location, I appended the wording " [High-Res]" to the end of both the folder name and the Album Title tag. Whether you prefix or append the extra wording would depend on what you intend to do with the files, and how you want them sorted in lists.

Andre

[MotleyG]

4 hours ago, 6b6561 said:

Dummy album name... What's better, add "(flac)" before/after album name?

• After: Allows albums to be sorted alphabetically
• Before: Places all the flac versions before or after the mp3's

Decisions, decisions... life is full of them...

This is similar to reissues, remasters, deluxe editions, etc. So in all cases to identify them separately I append an indicator in square brackets to the end of the album name. I'm not sure how this affects your searches for additional info like lyrics, as I don't use them. But in these cases maybe a manual search would help?

[6b6561]

Oh flac... Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away... I just took a closer look at my flac graveyard, roughly 600 CD images at 220GB... basically most of the CD's that I have ripped over the years. These are plain flac files with no meta data with external cue sheets... My OCD personality would like to have these organized in an neat tree structure, each file named in a particular way.... with matching album art file... and all metadata embedded.

I now have a nice script that does most of the magic for me, I will run it on new flacs and the old ones that I'm actually listening to and will the rest just sit as they are for the time being...

Two days ago I where thinking about a "dummy" pre-/suf- fix for flac albums, I have no settled for appending (flac) to the album title, this seems to work the best for me... but... now I got to the second caveat, what about song titles, should I also append (flac) to the title? As said, life is full of hard decisions. Anyway, now I have my script and I can quite easily fix it and let it rip through the organized flacs and have it rewrite the cue files and re-embedd them as needed.

All of this makes me think,why bother, as I can barely hear the difference between a 16-bit VBR mp3 and the flac which is a 16-bit 44.1 kHz CD-rip... Guess the answer is "because it can be done" and It's only a hobby... $ure they say...

[andrewilley]

I just renamed the overall folder name to append "[High-Res]", and did the same with the Album tag on each track. I didn't change the track Title tags, nor the filenames.

But to be honest that version is really only on my phone for testing purposes. As you say, on a phone with relatively basic earbuds it's almost impossible to tell the difference between a FLAC and a good V0 LAME encode. And I don't use CUEs at all; for me all metadata is embedded in tags.

Andre

[6b6561]

My flacs are CD images, originally wav images left over from CD ripping, so therefore the cue file. I have since started to convert the wav to flac to save disc space but haven't done anything about the meta in the file.

I now have a script that will run a character set conversion on the cue, embed the cue and folder art in the flac, add metadata and finally set the replay-gain.

I guess I will just have a limited number of albums as flacs on the phone, basically albums that I will enjoy as albums on the home stereo. I cast the flac from Poweramp to a Chromecast Audio which is connected with an optical cable to the amp which handles the D/A conversion, here I can hear some difference in the audio quality. With my logic the audio quality should be comparable to playing a CD.

The limited number of albums/files and the naming isn't really an bigger issue than I make out of it. I will just append (flac) to the album names and leave the track names as they are and call it a day.