j river library

[spacejay]

i thought i would download and try j river for 30 days. however it won't copy across my music library properly. quite a few of the albums have the first track somewhere else for some reason and some albums aren't in their group folder ie talkie walkie isn't with the air albums even though it is in the air folder in my music i have looked up google and can't see anything to solve the problem so does anyone here know what is going on?

[slinger]

Check the "Tag" pop up on the left of the main screen. First of all you need to make sure that all of your albums have exactly the same entry in the "Name" box, otherwise you'll get the problem you have with different tracks on the same album suddenly appearing as separate albums. For instance, if you highlight the main entry on the main screen for Talkie Walkie, and then Control-click the orphaned track so that both are highlighted you should see that the entry for Album is down as [Varies]. Replace this with Talkie Walkie and your orphaned track will rejoin it's parent album. Repeat as necessary.

As for the albums appearing in the wrong "groups" it's down to tagging again. JRiver doesn't take into account what physical folders your albums are in but requires you to tell it how you want them shown. Again, highlight all of the Air albums and you'll probably see that the tag entry for Album Artist is shown as [Varies]. Type in Air and all should be well.

Basically, treat JRiver as dumb. Tell it what you require. Personally I prefer this approach, rather than having a piece of software tell me how I want to catalog my albums. If those solutions don't work, or you can't work out any further problems give me a shout.

[spacejay]

brilliant, thanks for that. had a little play and reunited some of the songs. there are quite a few to do unfortunately.

[slinger]

Glad I could help. Once you get it set up it's worth the effort I think. Google is your friend for any missing album covers by the way. Between 300x300 and 500x500 are good sizes to use.

[Gazjam]

Agree It's all about tagging.

Tagging features in Jriver are great, but Itend to use it to "fine tune" my tagging.
Best way I've found when needing to sort out a library "from scratch", a quick way to get all the tagging done properly in one fell swoop is to use MP3TAG.
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html

In Mp3Tag, (assuming all similar Artists are un their own folders?) browse to each folder and open it up.
It lists all tracks for that Artist and lists all the Tags. select all tracks and change each tag to what you want.

Do that for Artist, Album, Year etc and your sorted.

Both MP3TAG and Jriver can pull in album art from within the program.
9 times out of 10 if it doesn't find it the album name isn't right!

[terrybooth]

Plus 1 for mp3tag. It's a lot easier to use than JRiver's tagging options. Now you can get those compilation albums where you want them. I've had commercial CDs (not compilations) which weren't tagged properly.