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Kaotician · 2011-03-03, 01:47

I'm ripping some albums to Flac. Although I can find them under files, and play them back (albeit with limited controls), there doesn't seem to be any way to get XBMC to recognise them in Library View (Albums). Am I doing something wrong? Ideally, I'd like them to show up with the rest of my albums in the 'album view' mode in Confluence.

jmarshall · 2011-03-03, 03:18

Where have you placed them? Are they alongside your other music? If so, just update library. If not, just navigate to the folder that contains the files and Scan to Library.

I assume you haven't done something like rip them to a single FLAC file. There's no reason to do this at all, and it's much, much better to have each track as a separate .flac file.

**bossanova808** · 2011-03-03, 03:25

Well technically there are some timing things to do with gapless playback that single flac files + cue files do better but I have to agree - having a librayr of 15000+ flacs going back to the early 90s, I have long long ago come to the conclusion that, as usual, jmarshall is right and single flacs are way easier for systems to deal with.

jmarshall · 2011-03-03, 03:37

There is no timing things to do with gapless playback that single flac files + cue files do better.

The only thing that they *might* do better is preserving the lead-in times (if non-standard) when reburning to CD - it certainly wouldn't make a CD re-burn (or playback) no longer gapless.

There used to be (a long time ago) a problem with gapless playback on mp3 files (and similar lossy formats), which was fixed around 5-6 years ago by the LAME crew, even iTunes now handles that (though in a non-standard manner).

There's never been such an issue with flac, as flac specifically encodes every single sample you feed it - it's 100% lossless.

Kaotician · (This post was last modified: 2011-03-03, 14:13 by Kaotician.)

Hi Jim, and everybody, thanks for the replies. I've updated the library, and tried again just in case, but no joy. When I scroll through my albums there's no sign of it, when I search the particular artist directly, there's no sign of it. I've added the album as single tracks under the artists folder - in this case, it's Radiohead, and Amnesiac is the album - added as single tracks, making 11 in total, in the format Artist - Album. I used Switch to convert the tracks, and converted them directly off my own cd.

I'm wondering if it's something to do with the way they've been tagged - or not, as the case may be. Although I've named each track, and they show up under files, when I open up 'Song Information', all the entries say 'Unavailable', which I presume is why the Library is not seeing them. What should I do?

odt_x · 2011-03-03, 14:16

Sounds like a metadata problem. Check with your favorite tagging software.

Kaotician · 2011-03-03, 14:26

odt_x Wrote:Sounds like a metadata problem. Check with your favorite tagging software.

Thanks for that. Can you suggest one?

Kaotician · 2011-03-03, 14:36

Well, I've used Foobar to add metadata, tracks are sampling at 44.1mhz, 16 bit, but it still won't show up in my library.

Kaotician · (This post was last modified: 2011-03-03, 15:12 by Kaotician.)

Done it, thanks everybody. I didn't realise that, despite having named the tracks already, I'd need to add that data too to the metadata via Foobar. Having done that, it now shows up.

So, just the other 400 or so albums to go, then................

**sho** · 2011-03-03, 17:35

Mediamonkey can fetch data from the internet (perhaps foobar also, cannot recall).

Kaotician · 2011-03-03, 18:38

I'll give that a try, thanks for the advice.

**bossanova808** · 2011-03-04, 07:05

jmarshall Wrote:There is no timing things to do with gapless playback that single flac files + cue files do better.

The only thing that they *might* do better is preserving the lead-in times (if non-standard) when reburning to CD - it certainly wouldn't make a CD re-burn (or playback) no longer gapless.

There used to be (a long time ago) a problem with gapless playback on mp3 files (and similar lossy formats), which was fixed around 5-6 years ago by the LAME crew, even iTunes now handles that (though in a non-standard manner).

There's never been such an issue with flac, as flac specifically encodes every single sample you feed it - it's 100% lossless.

Err yes well I may be a but out of date on that but there was a time in the deep dark ages (2002ish) when my Squeezebox wouldn't do gapless from individual flac files and would do it from continuous ones. But yes thinking about it that really is quite a long time ago....I still think the general principle holds that separate is better - certainly seeking within a track is quicker and smoother with individual files, even now, with things like the Squeezebox and Sonos.

d'Wooluf · 2011-03-07, 07:44

sho Wrote:Mediamonkey can fetch data from the internet (perhaps foobar also, cannot recall).

It can certainly get data from freedb. There's also at least one discogs plugin. It's a bit hard to keep track of foobar plugins really. If the op has named his files systematically, getting foobar to parse the filenames and populate the tags thusly might be the way to go.

Fert · 2011-09-10, 15:23

Hi,

I am having the exact same problem: XBMC won't scan new .flac files to the library. I've tried it a dozen times but the files just won't show up in the library even though tags are all set. Playback via the "files" menu works, though, but without displaying the album art (which is embedded in the files). VLC plays the tracks, displays the tags and the album art.

I've written "new" files up there because there are already some .flac files in the library tha work without causing any trouble.

Here's the debug log http://pastebin.com/0kFVfged - in this particular log I tried to add the .flac-encoded Album "I CHAOS - The Human Repellent" (~ line 400) first, which did not work. I then added the "Grave Digger - Tunes of War" (.mp3), which did work.

I've tried this on two different XBMC installations, both on WinXP.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Fert

albaranov · (This post was last modified: 2011-10-25, 17:24 by albaranov.)

Hi Fert,
Just in case you have not fixed the library issue of your .flac files. I have a bunch of flac files and all of them are recognized by the library. But some time ago I got similar issues. You have to check the following.
1. Artist and AlbumArtist should have the same spelling: e.g. Glenn Hughes (not like Glenn Hughes and Hughes, Glenn);
2. I also make sure that the the band's name is spelled in the folder and the file name in the same manner.
Hope it helps. Regards, Alex