Metadata mangling - back to Foo and Cue

I thought I'd share my current reversion from JRiver + Flac + Tagging to Foobar2000 and Cue sheets and explain my madness. I acknowledge it is MY madness...it may not taste good to you.

First off, f**k automagical shit. JRiver loves to do automagical shit by default...get album art, apply tags, automatically add synced device files as stacked files into your collections, all sorts of helpful little assumptions that end up doing things to your metadata without your knowledge. Every time I install or reinstall I have to remember to disable this crap, and inevitably I forget and have to clean up the mess.

Second, f**k MAX_PATH. Both Linux and Windows are limited to around 255 characters without going to exotic filesystems or dealing with wonky configurations and limitations. Yes, the file doesn't have to be named after the track, and it doesn't have to be in a folder named with the Album name etc., but shit happens and if you need to get critical metadata back from human-readable things like directory and file names you'll be glad you didn't elect to name everything with a frigging GUID. Classical will max out your MAX_PATH very easily in my experience.

Lastly, I'm OCD and I don't like throwing away information, or having to represent it in some screwy way. CD tracks and gaps are information that is effectively lost when you ditch your cue sheets and migrate to the new world of tagged files.

These things prompted be to see if I could simplify, and at the same time reduce inflexibility in my collection. Fortunately for me I'm OCD, so for CDs I have a Master archive of WAV images plus CUE sheets and rip logs (EAC and AccurateRip).

Step one: Make sure my WAV images, CUE Sheets, Logs and Album Art cover images are all named by Artist - Album with a standard escape scheme as used in EAC.

Step two: Convert all my non-CD material to single image WAV files with CUE sheets using Foobar (very easy to do).

Step three: Move everything into a single directory in the root of my media drive. My longest path is now around 129 characters, no Artist/Album/Track hierarchy anymore, just Artist - Album plus file extension.

Step Four - Point Foobar2000 at the directory, and Voila! Done. Foobar likes EAC CUE files. JRiver not so much, specifically JRiver does not see the top-level Performer record as the Album Artist and so makes a hash of the Artist-Album relationship. JRiver also constantly reimports single track CUE sheets and loses metadata like #plays etc.

Disadvantages:
I like lots about JRiver:
I like Zones.
I like device syncing.
It has awesome metadat maniopulation capabilities.
I like the UI - it's Purrrty.
I will miss these things.

Advantages:
No more WTF moments when something automagical happens that you didn't ask for.
No more Master image archive which gets ever more out of sync with my main Flac library...I have just one source of Truth.
I have human readable information for my music that is not program dependent and doesn't require exports or other manual, prone to being forgotten, practices to maintain.
I have plenty of space for file names being the way I want them.
JRiver is a bloated slug.

I feel like I just did a spring cleaning and threw out all the clutter.

YMMV, My2c and all that.

 

Well written. When discovering that I could get a proper mono mixdown done with Roon 1.3, that threw JRiver + Sonarworks and Foobar out for good.
The metadata efforts put into the software is quite impressing and in 1.3 I can finally access and browse PDF artwork that I've scanned.
For me it's money well spent.

 

Roon is on my radar to check out. Thanks for the prod.

 

https://roonlabs.com/pricing.html
There's at least a 14 day free trial available.