Tips 'n' Tricks to get jRiver to do stuff you want.

[Jazid]

jRiver...I like the software a lot but have found their forums unhelpful, the lords of the universe or whatever they style themselves as verging on being patronising, and cliquey. Also their online help and FAQs have to be amongst the most inept of any paid for software yet put on the internet, constantly referring to menus and options that don't exist or have moved, and getting a lot of stuff just plum wrong (presumably because it refers to ancient implementations of the program, and there appears no effort to update). This makes me think we need a thread for getting simple stuff done, things that should be simple but seemingly aren't.

For example four years into ownership and in frustration with the 'organization' of my collection I discovered the following work-around for compilation album tagging:

The problem - if you rip a cd to disk and it is a compilation of different artists it often comes up as a long collection of separate tracks with the same album name in jRiver rather than as one compilation album. The tracks will therefore not play sequentially. I found working out how to adjust this is all but impossible from their help.

The reason- is in the obscure (to me) field 'Album Artist'. My software came configured with 'album' and 'artist' appearing as primary fields in the main display pane, and by and large ripped cds come with tagging info consistent with this. However jRiver by default sorts albums by 'album artist' which was not visible and then by 'album'. By right clicking in the field bar and selecting 'album artist' to display (but NOT 'album artist auto' or whatever the other option is called) I discovered about one in five hundred albums had actually been tagged in this field, not a popular field for taggers it appears. However if the field is empty then jRiver instead sorts by 'artist' and then 'album', and if the artists are all different they appear rightly as separate 'albums' of one track each, and with all 'albums' of the same name.

The answer - By changing all the 'album artist' entries of the compilation cd tracks to something consistent, (I just used 'Various'), the program then defaults to sorting the tracks by 'album artist' and after by compilation name, and since the album artists now appear consistent within the compilation, they all appear correctly in the main window, with the 'artist' still displaying the correct artist. Oh, and FWIW the first time I did this the tagging editor changed the 'artist' entries instead of 'album artist' - that was a but of a fright but 'Ctrl z' undid the damage - second time and subsequently it worked just fine.

I then removed the 'album artist' field from view since it is basically empty, uninformative, and irritating, but that's just me. Hope this helps somebody out there

 

[Maro73]

Well thanks

For any compilation cd .. I use <Various Artists> in the artist area , and Various Artists in the "album artist area" , ticking compilation

The only thing I messes is when the cd is ripped in multiple artists ..

Overall , I agree upon the fact that the forums are no so helpful

BUT PLEASE TRY DB POWER AMP for ripping .. nicer , easier , various ripping modes ..etc

Cheers

 

[roob]

like the software a lot but have found their forums unhelpful, the lords of the universe or whatever they style themselves as verging on being patronising, and cliquey.

A hifi forum cliquey and patronising whatever next :shock:

 

[Jazid]

A hifi forum cliquey and patronising whatever next :shock:

Ok, fair point :minikev:

All the same I find it unhelpful as well, and it seems such an Achilles heel for an otherwise fine product. How long should one be expected to trawl through random tranches of rubbish trying to elicit simple bits of information? Too long in my case, I'm fed up with this aspect.

Frankly I'd rather ask our very own cliquey patronising citizens of integalactic 'Wamspace for advice than the jRiver mob :^

 

[roob]

I have just started using Jriver for Mac and have not needed to use their expertise yet

 

[DPICT]

I tried reading the 'help' section and looked at forum posts about this various artist problem and it gave me a very sore head, is there an understandable explanation in the english language which works?

I like j player but i've given up on playing various albums, haven't got many but it still pisses me off a bit.

 

[DPICT]

The answer - By changing all the 'album artist' entries of the compilation cd tracks to something consistent, (I just used 'Various'), the program then defaults to sorting the tracks by 'album artist' and after by compilation name, and since the album artists now appear consistent within the compilation, they all appear correctly in the main window, with the 'artist' still displaying the correct artist. Oh, and FWIW the first time I did this the tagging editor changed the 'artist' entries instead of 'album artist' - that was a but of a fright but 'Ctrl z' undid the damage - second time and subsequently it worked just fine.

I then removed the 'album artist' field from view since it is basically empty, uninformative, and irritating, but that's just me. Hope this helps somebody out there

This sounds good but how do i do it, i only changed from windows media player to j player recently (because even i could work WMP) it is a better player but god it's frustrating to get used to. Im using media monkey for tagging and j player for playback, just cant get to grips with the dam thing when it comes to various artist albums. Tried reading the online help but i get that thing Clarkson get's when James May tries to explain something technical. :zzzz:

 

[DPICT]

Ok i get the picture, i'll try another forum :x

 

[roob]

Ok i get the picture, i'll try another forum :x

Computer audio is heresy to most Wammers, try Computer Audiophile forum they are much more up to speed there.

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/forum/

 

[DPICT]

Strewth, i thought it was just me, it sometimes seems like a new black art this computer noise making. Cheers for the answer btw, i did wonder.

 

[AmDismal]

Plenty of us use computer audio, but it has been a sunny weekend

I find that compilations and the like are best dealt with as follows. Note that I never want to play a compilation album other than as the album, so:

1 - retag using MP3Tag, changing the track name to "artist - track" and the artist to Compilation or Sampler as appropriate

2 - delete anything in the albumartist tag and all similar ones (I use some of these for my specific purposes)

2 - keep everything in the original folder

Err. that's it. Note that this works for me - it means that Last.fm nags me to tidy my tags (IDGAF), and you need to suss out how MP3Tag Actions work - once you do, they're great, and you can do everything in just a couple of steps. If you are concerned about losing metadata, create custom tags called OLDARTIST and OLDTITLE to store the data in case you need it later, or use a separator like "|" that you can easily use to separate the new title later.

 

[DPICT]

Cheers, as you say, i will have to suss out the id tag thing, i use mainly flac but have some mp3 stuff too. Guess my age is against me here but then i did hate computers back in the 80's, sometimes i still do ;-)

Maybe i just need a DRAM update, Talisker might be a good start eh

 

[AmDismal]

Mp3tag works for FLAC too.

 

[Guest]

Compilations are a nightmare in a large number of players - most Apple devices (for instance) Just Don't Get It.

As the OP suggests, the answer is usually in the Album Artist field. Personally I set this to "Various" for most compilations, and the DJ for DJ mixes (e.g. "Nick Warren"), leaving Artist on individual tracks to be set to the correct artist. I also use it for artists who frequently collaborate with other artists e.g. Brian Eno, David Sylvian so I don't the top level polluted with "A and B" album artists, and then leave the Artist field set to "A and B". It's occasionally a bit of a toss-up who gets demoted down to mere Artist level ;-)

Sonos and GoneMAD (on my phone) just do the right thing once this is set up.

I don't know what the OP is using for ripping and tag management, but DBPoweramp and MediaMonkey seem to maintain this field fine. Maybe I've just got used to getting it set right over the years.

 

[rdale]

Compilations are a nightmare in a large number of players - most Apple devices (for instance) Just Don't Get It.As the OP suggests, the answer is usually in the Album Artist field. Personally I set this to "Various" for most compilations, and the DJ for DJ mixes (e.g. "Nick Warren"), leaving Artist on individual tracks to be set to the correct artist. I also use it for artists who frequently collaborate with other artists e.g. Brian Eno, David Sylvian so I don't the top level polluted with "A and B" album artists, and then leave the Artist field set to "A and B". It's occasionally a bit of a toss-up who gets demoted down to mere Artist level ;-)

Sonos and GoneMAD (on my phone) just do the right thing once this is set up.

I don't know what the OP is using for ripping and tag management, but DBPoweramp and MediaMonkey seem to maintain this field fine. Maybe I've just got used to getting it set right over the years.

I use Mac OS X with either XLD or iTunes for ripping, and they both respect the compilation meta data. However, if a compilation is by a single artist like 'Van Morrison' I unset the compilation option so that in iTunes it goes under the 'Van Morrison' folder, rather than Compilations.

 

[Jazid]

Hi alll,

kind of missed the chatter - saw no action for a few days after my original post and concluded it was only my own feeble intelligence that prevented me from making the damn thing work!

Gyroscope I am using jRiver start to finish. I have ripped the bulk of CDs and am not gonna do it again! I did try one other program but like ease of use, not further complication and have no axe to grind about the jRiver ripping software.

Sorry DPICT, no offense meant at all, and I share your pain at the byzantine complexities and inexplicable gobbledegook that seem to suffuse this aspect of audio, but it gets easy to use (once you have it doing what you want). If you are still at sea and want to PM me then I will try to explain what I have done in more detail!

 

[DPICT]

Cheers mate! i'm going to have another go at it but somehow I keep finding reasons to put it off , might be in touch tho sometime :^

 

[Jazid]

Here, trawled from the dark recesses of the jRiver forum is information I will find useful. I hope you will as welll; How to set active multiway filters and crossovers in jRiver, with some common filter types, frequency, bandwidth and massively most important for me - fully adjustable 'on the fly' time delay for getting your mids and upwards drivers propely tuned in to those subs :^

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=81448.0