[JMW73]

My streaming has changed drastically over the years, but my local library is still stored in an iTunes folder. Using iTunes, LMS, and ultimately Roon it never mattered. The library was found and the artwork was there. Now that I dropped Roon and am using DLNA, my artwork will not appear. And it’s the same on my CXN V2 in my main system and both of my WiiM on secondary systems.

I assume it is because that artwork is stored in a separate file; but is there a fix for this?

[newzooreview]

Roon puts artwork in its own proprietary database, so streaming the files outside of Roon loses access to the artwork that Roon was using.

I haven't used iTunes in a long while, but it likely does something similar.

The best long-term solution is to embed the artwork in each file's metadata. An AIFF or a FLAC file has embedded metadata that can include album artwork. On the Mac, I use the app Metadatics to edit that. I can drag a whole album into Metadatics and add the album cover to each one.

That is laborious for a whole music library, but there are also apps that will scan through a whole library and add correct metadata to each track, including album art. I have seen these apps over the years, but I do not know the current best ones. Perhaps someone here has more recent experience.

In my experience, WAV files do not allow embedded album art, but the description of the format on Wikipedia says that WAV is, theoretically, designed to support embedded metadata, including album art. Whatever the case may be, as a practical matter, I moved everything to AIFF format. It fully supports embedded metadata and places no burden on hardware to decompress the file during playback. When I first started streaming locally stored files, uncompressed formats like AIFF and WAV sounded better on my system that FLAC due to the decompression step. With modern hardware that may no longer be the case, but since disk space is cheap I kept everything as AIFF for consistency.

In any event, unless you switch to another streaming app that assigns its own album art to your files, you will likely need to update the medadata for each file. It's a one-time pain with long-term benefits.

[newzooreview]

A quick search turned up AudioRanger for adding metadata to a music collection: https://www.audioranger.com/en/

I have not tried it, but I would certainly run any such software on a backup copy of the library. A 2 or 4 Tb hard drive is good insurance while keeping the original library files unaltered.

Any automated metadata system is going to require some curation and cleanup of the results.

[newzooreview]

A final comment: it looks like AudioRanger allows you to setup a "watch folder". It will automatically fix the tags for files that are added to that folder.

One approach might be to designate a watch folder on an empty external hard drive and copy files artist by artist from the library. I'm assuming that the music library is organized as folders with the artist's names, so you could copy the Dolly Parton folder into the watch folder and have the tags and album art fixed by AudioRanger. Then you could double check that it did that correctly and move on to the next folder from the original library.

This methodical approach might pay off over the long term. You can catch issues as they come up rather than having a new library where you are constantly finding problems (sometimes years in the future).

For example, iTunes will often break-up an album that is a compilation of songs from multiple artists into a folder for each artist. So "Greatest Hits of the 70s" becomes a folder with one track from Steppenwolf, another folder with one track from the Eagles, etc. If you catch these issues, you can reassemble the tracks into one folder call "Greatest Hits of the 70s" so that AudioRanger has a good chance of creating and tagging a single album.

Also, if AudioRanger fails to find any artwork, you can fix that as you go. In most cases a Google image search will find the album art and you can use the metadata editing feature of AudioRanger (or other software) to add it manually. In rare cases I've had to scan the booklet from the CD to get the correct art, but that does not happen too often.

[JMW73]

Thank you for the detailed posts.  I will be attempting this fix and I'll report back.

[JMW73]

I did download that software (AudioRanger) and ran a test.  I'm not sure it did what I need it to.  I need to run another test and make sure all the files are where they need to be.

But!  It has me thinking.  I'm going to be dragging out all my CDs to display them.  This might be a good time to start over and just revamp my digital library.  If you were starting from scratch and ripping CDs in, what software would you use and what file format?  That library is AAC, and since I don't use iTunes anymore I might as well start over.

[newzooreview]

AAC is like MP3, so some information in the original recording is deleted to compress the file. It's done in a way that tries to preserve sound quality, but with a revolving system, ripping the file from the CD will give you better sound.

I have used EAC on Windows and XLD on the Mac to rip CDs. They are both designed to reread the disc if they encounter an error, so you will get an error-free file. A lot of software just ignores errors and drops bits here and there. If it's a clean disc, this might not be an issue, but a lot of discs have surface imperfections: they might play ok on a CD player (which also ignores problems) but to create your digital archive its obviously preferable to extract all the data.

EAC: https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/xld/

As mentioned earlier, I rip files to AIFF. Streaming services use FLAC because the smaller files are easier to stream. But the CPU processing to decompress the FLAC slightly degrades the sound. In critical listening, AIFF and WAV sound better. Not everyone agrees, but hard drive space is cheap and your local network has more than enough bandwidth to send uncompressed files.

Both EAC and XLD will check public databases for album art, album and track titles, artist info, etc. I think with EAC you might need to set up access to a database service. It's been a while since I set it up. But once you do that it will find information for 99% of your CDs, I expect.

[WGH]

Streaming services use FLAC because the smaller files are easier to stream. But the CPU processing to decompress the FLAC slightly degrades the sound.

That used to be true and I ripped my CDs to WAV because I thought I heard a difference. Now all my music is in FLAC. Why did I switch?


I no longer hear a difference.

Modern processors are all powerful, they just loaf decompressing FLAC to WAV these days.

Music players have evolved into memory players. FLAC files are converted to WAV in the background and hang out in memory waiting to be the next song. The song currently playing is also in memory and it's now a WAV too, no more converting on the fly. Don't worry about memory, computers have plenty and are designed to remember and do more than two things at once. Memory and storage (SSD and HDD drives) are two different things, people get them confused all the time.

WAV and artwork and tags sometimes do not play nice together, depends on the player. Convert to FLAC and artwork and tags are ALWAYS shown no matter the player or decade. There are workarounds but why would you do that when FLAC is clearer better at indexing and displaying artwork? If you insist on WAV files do a couple test albums, check for artwork, the ability to easily edit ID Tags and ultimately the ability to SEARCH for an artist, album, song etc.

"FLAC, AIFF and MP3 formats take full advantage of metadata whereas WAV files only allow a little metadata input, so not as helpful for browsing your library. It's important if you want to locate and play music around your home. Network players like our CXN use metadata to browse and play your music."
https://www.cambridgeaudio.com/usa/en/blog/metadata-digital-audio-files-%E2%80%93-what-it-where-it-and-how-tidy-it

I used to use EAC but moved on to dBpoweramp, it costs a few dollars but it is a nicer program to use and more versatile with lots of features.
https://www.dbpoweramp.com/

[JMW73]

Thank you for the replies.  I'll look into it,

[Digi-G]

I no longer use EAC either.  It had lots of issues when I would use it and the interface isn't very good (think DOS).  I now use Goldwave to rip CDs.  I don't know what it does with any errors it encounters, but I've never had any issues with it.

I'm not an expert on file formats but would definitely steer clear of MP3s and WAV.  MP3's are a lossy format, even at the higher bit rates.  I learned that the hard way (i.e. ripped a bunch of CDs when I started my digital music library using MP3 format only to realize I needed to redo them to a "lossless" format.)  WAV files are hit and miss with artwork and possibly with other metadata.  Sometimes it works, many times it doesn't.

I use FLAC but other formats probably work just as well.  I've never heard a difference in sound quality between FLAC and WAV.  I know some people say they do hear a difference, I can't.

I'll also give a shout out for the MP3TAG program.  Don't let the name fool you - it works on every music format file I've tried.  But it's a great way to add metadata and artwork to music files.  I'm not sure it would be helpful to bulk / batch fix a library (like the OP needs) but it's great for a folder or an album at a time.

[JMW73]

Thank you for the additional information!

[JMW73]

Ok, now I’m going crazy. I started over with building my library and am using EAC. I decided on flac because it seemed like the best compromise and seemed guaranteed to have the metadata imbedded…. I finally got EAC to organize my files properly on my hard drive and my DLNA player to sync with the proper folders. Check this screenshot; tracks have the artwork but albums do not!  What am I doing wrong?




See how the artwork is blank on the albums (and is blank when I click each individual album) but at the bottom of the screen in the “now playing” bar the artwork is there. And also shows up on the screen of my streamer (CA CXN V2). DLNA player is JPlay.

[newzooreview]

It seems like a Jplay issue. If it is seeing the artwork embedded in the tracks, then the files are setup ok. You could also try ripping a CD as AIFF and as WAV to see if Jplay does any better with those. EAC does not rip to AIFF, but it is quick to convert afterward. It would be unusual for Jplay to read metadata better from one file format vs. another, but software bugs are often unusual.

There is also a Jplay forum on their website if nobody here has any insight about the app.

[newzooreview]

In the Jplay forum, someone with a similar but not identical problem was advised to delete the Jplay installation so that Jplay had nothing cached in its system. Perhaps Jplay previously indexed those albums and did not see any artwork. It did not pick up on the fact that you replaced the files with new versions. Maybe it reads track artwork anytime it handles a track, but it does not recheck for album artwork after the initial indexing.

[JMW73]

Thanks for the info. I tried deleting and reinstalling JPlay and got the same result. That made the most sense based on what you said. Unfortunately, I’m getting the exact same result. I’ll have to post over on JPlay forums.

[newzooreview]

Argh.

I wish I could think of something outside of JPlay that could be the cause, but I'm stumped.

If JPlay turns out to be more frustrating than it's worth, you could look into Audirvana. There's a very long and interesting comparison of streaming software in a studio setting with excellent microphones posted by Alpha Sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX9rnKBXV3s

Jumping to the last 30 minutes, they do some wrap-up discussion. It's an interesting channel in general because with headphones, you can hear the tonal differences among things they are testing, even if you can't hear everything audible in the room.

I do hope you sort out the album art issue. Hopefully its a setting or workaround in JPlay that is not too cumbersome.

[JMW73]

The response is SLOW on the JPlay forums.  Still not sure what the issue is, but there is a possibility that it is a known issue that will be corrected with an update?  Who knows.  I maybe should have done Audirvana, but I like the "coreless" function of JPlay.  Well, I've already paid, so now I'm invested in making it work.

[newzooreview]

The good thing is that once you have your music on disc with correct metadata embedded, you can use various local storage streaming systems as they evolve over time. It's a solid foundation. Hopefully, JPlay will fix the issue, but if not you are not locked in other than the cost and time.

[JMW73]

I got it!  The JPlay forum thread is below.  Marcin (the developer) over there is a serious lunk.  I couldn't get straight answers to save my life!  Here is the thread, but the TLDR is: I had to install MinimServer on my PC for JPlay to recognize the album artwork.  Maybe this would have worked with my iTunes library too, but now I'm invested in setting it up as flac anyway. 

http://jplay.eu/forum/index.php?/topic/6616-jplay-ios-not-displaying-album-artwork/

Overall, I like JPlay as a player.  And I like the DLNA aspect to it so it is stripped down, unlike Roon which uses a TON of system resources.  At $50 per year, it is quite a bit less than Roon but also does a lot less (which I don't need all that Roon does... glad to be away from it actually).  And it is quite a bit less polished, especially from the business end!  I would recommend it if you have the patience to set it up properly with little in the way of instruction.  If anyone is setting it up, I'd be willing to lend a hand.

[newzooreview]

That's great news. Stripped down is frequently better in streaming setups.

I hope you have a relaxing Christmas with the new Jplay approach!