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Topic: What is the best Way to Manage a Bootleg Collection with Foobar (Read 1972 times) previous topic - next topic
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What is the best Way to Manage a Bootleg Collection with Foobar

I've been collecting live recordings since the 70's and have close to 10,000 shows. A very large chunk is in .shn. The goal is to tag and convert everything to flac.
I have no experience with music players, or tags. Never had a itunes account, because I won't settle for mp3 quality.
I started using Foobar for it's tagging (one of a few that will tag flac's)
I've got a NAS box with twin 6TB drives to store collection, and play music through a Pioneer N-30 network player.
So here's my questions
1. Can Foobar convert shn to flac?
2. Can Foobar generate a md5 check file?  (I currently use Traders Little Helper for both of these tasks)
3. What's the best file structure for storage so that it will work well with FB the player? I currently use a folder tree ie; A to D folder/ Individual Artist folders/specific show folder/flac files
4. I'm not sure of the best way to tag for searches later. Started using "Artist" = Allman Brothers "Track Title" "Date" 1970-02-11 format "Track #" and disc if needed Now for "Album" only a small % of shows have an album name I started using the location ie Fillmore East NYC and noticed that an album search on the N-30 was totally futile. Now I going with the show's wrapping folder name ie; abb.1970-02-11.sbd_ex.Fillmore_East .... I'm open to any advise for structure and tagging of boot leg collection.
5. I've also found under File Operations "Rename Files" I thought this great because without tags a player will only show file name and most of what I have is in abb1970-02-11d1t01 format so I ran with this with a simple [%discnumber%.]%tracknumber%-%title% now this is where it gets weird or at least to me. I renamed the tracks of several shows this way. When I search the NAS with the N-30 by Folder I open the wrapping folder and all the tracks are in alphabetical order not in track # order, this only happens with the shows that I renamed the tracks via Foobar. I have many shows where the track file names are in the same format ie 101-In Memory of Elizabeth Reed done through window explorer and when opened the same way show up in the proper track order, and with live shows track order is very important. So should I only play with file names via windows or am I missing something in the way I use  Foobar??
6. I've only uploaded about 1000 shows and not everything has any tags, I'm getting ready to point Foobar to my NAS for a music library.
Is there anything I should do before letting it chew on this chunk of data?
Can I get Foobar to recognize my artist folders as the artists in a search? 
Can I tag folders on a Network Attached Storage device??
7. Is there any way during the tagging process to automatically pull over the track #'s so I don't have to enter them manually??
Please don't be to technical I'm just an old man trying to make useful progress on a retirement project.

Re: What is the best Way to Manage a Bootleg Collection with Foobar

Reply #1 –
1a) http://bfy.tw/EF0Y
1b) Because I'm kind really (http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_input_shorten)
1c) I doubt if there are any issues but FYI shn decoder uses APEv2 tags and FLAC uses Vorbis comments for their tag format -- I'm sure fb2k handles the copying over of tags perfectly well - perhaps others might comment on whether it's sensible to convert SHN to FLAC first, and then tag ?
2) Don't think so - personally I use MultiHasher
3) Tagging is the most important thing - since if all your files are properly tagged foobar2000 will be able to create pretty much any directory structure you'd need based on those tags.  If tagged properly fb2k would be perfectly fine and just as functional with all your files in one directory (not suggesting that - just making a point).

I'm sure others will be able to help on the other stuff.

Good luck.

C.

EDIT: Added 1c
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)

Re: What is the best Way to Manage a Bootleg Collection with Foobar

Reply #3 –
I assume you have enough disk space for the FLAC files as well as the Shorten files - if not ... I am not sure how you ask fb2k to delete the input file (which you should only do if you have a backup! And for simplicity, you would want the backup to have the same folder structure as your library). I also assume that you have FLAC on your computer (take note on where FLAC.exe is), and that you have first made a small subcollection: copy a few of your folders to a new directory D:\smallpart or whatever.

In fb2k, open Preferences. Under Components, add foo_input_shorten, foo_bitcompare and http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_verifier . The latter checks files for errors. (How to do that? Click Install, open your web browser at the component website, copy the download link. Do that for all three components. Then OK or Apply; fb2k will reinstall.)
Under Media Library, add the small part folder: D:\smallpart (you will later do this for the entire collection). Click Apply, wait until it says "Monitoring" (could take days for ten thousand shows if they have tags, but likely less if they are tagless). In the same window, make sure that "Installed media library viewers" includes "Album List".
You may familiarize yourself with foo_verifier: Select all files (Library -> Album List and then right-click "All music" on top), and under Utilities -> Verify integrity.

To convert, select all files (assuming there are only the shorten files in your library ... yet). Right-click brings up a menu; select Convert and the "..." option to configure the conversion. Once in the Converter Setup: In Output format, click FLAC. I would put it to maximum compression (encoding is done once, and it does not affect decoding speed), so click Edit and slide it to Smallest file (should say "8"), and OK; then make sure that Output bit depth is "Auto" and Dither is "Never". Under Destination: You should make a choice here between (I) everything on new drive, and (II) to source folder. Assuming (II): click "Source track folder". Under Output Style, click the top choice of individual file, and enter in the Name format: %filename%. That will convert blahblahblah.shn to blahblahblah.flac - since you have a lot of information in the filenames.
Processing should say None. Other should say transfer tags, in case there are any. (Does Shorten support tags?). Save the preset as e.g. "flac-to-sourcefolder". Then Convert. First run you will be asked to locate flac.exe. The smallpart should not take long if it is only a few folders, but ten thousand shows will take days.

When done, you can bit-compare in order to be sure. Make sure you compare the right files to the right files ... searching for %filename_ext% IS *.shn will give you the .shn files, and searching for %filename_ext% IS *.flac will give you the .flac files. First sanity check: make sure that the numbers and the total length matches.  Here you need to learn a bit about how fb2k sorts playlists anyway: make a playlist (Ctrl+N), right-click the bar just under New Playlist, under Columns add Path and Codec. Then click on Path to sort by Path and by Codec to sort by Codec. Once you have a playlist with first all .shn files sorted by path, and then all .flac sorted by path, you select all and right-click -> Utilities -> Bit-compare tracks. Again, the full collection would take days.
If it shows differences, then the first source of error is that you did not sort the right way (fb2k does not know which ones to compare with which ones other than the order in the playlist) - that is yet another reason to make a sample from your collection first, for a test run.
If it shows no differences on your entire collection, you can select all your shorten files, and delete them. I would do that from within foobar2000, and then let Windows Explorer search for .shn files; if there are any, they would probably be too corrupted for fb2k to even recognize them as Shorten, but I assume you want to know that.

Then you have just replaced .shn by .flac. For tagging, there is a nice feature: select files, Alt+Enter to get Properties, right-click, select Automatically fill ... and you will see a way to get e.g. discnumber and tracknumber from filename. %path% as formatting source could give you a lot. (In Pattern: %% discards. So %%\%%\ will discard the first couple of levels from the %path% ...)

Huh, I thought I was just going to type quickly, and so I did, but ...

Re: What is the best Way to Manage a Bootleg Collection with Foobar

Reply #4 –
And:

2: The FLAC format has md5 for the (decoded) audio, which is what you want for tagged files.
3: Most like to use tags, but your folder tree is not bad either. I would start the "specific show folder" with date for sorting though.
4: That's in your filenames now, right? But likely you have a lot of text files too ...
5: You need tags to be right before you do this! Until then, keep the filenames in order not to lose the information. Of course you can start off with tagging every file with MYOLDPATH = %path%.
6: If artist is missing, you can tag using $if(%artist% PRESENT, %artist%, %directory%) ... and, you don't tag folders, you tag files.
7: "pull over" as in extract from file names or path? Yeah, like I described at the end of the previous post.
And there are tools available, with or without foobar2000. Here is one component: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Components_0.9/foo_masstag

Re: What is the best Way to Manage a Bootleg Collection with Foobar

Reply #5 –
Quote from: Porcus on
6: If artist is missing, you can tag using $if(%artist% PRESENT, %artist%, %directory%) ... and, you don't tag folders, you tag files.

This is just plain wrong. Do not confuse query syntax like PRESENT with something you can inside title formatting functions. In this context, PRESENT has no special meaning and is treated like any other random words/letters.

Re: What is the best Way to Manage a Bootleg Collection with Foobar

Reply #6 –
Quote from: marc2003 on
This is just plain wrong.
Thanks! I actually checked: $if(%artist% PRESENT,yes,no), which returned "yes". Now if I only had the common sense to check $if(%artist% MISSING,yes,no) as well ...
Thanks again :-/

Re: What is the best Way to Manage a Bootleg Collection with Foobar

Reply #7 –
Thank you all for your responses. I've loaded the shn component and it works fine, and thank you for the heads up on the tag format difference between flac and shn. I'll just convert and then tag.  I'll play with foo-verifier soon.
Most of my shn's are on old IDE drives and spindles of data dvd's. I'll keep these as ultimate backup. I'm just spoon feeding the NAS through the desktop. I do need to keep the folder structure, because there are folder and files within the wrapping folder that are not audio related that need to stay with the show.
I'm going to create a mini file tree on the NAS and on the desktop with a few dozen entries with different tags and lack there of. Build a couple library's and play with them. Better to experiment with a few gigs than a TB. 
Porcus for pulling track #'s I followed your directions and choose automatically fill values but without any tags in the set of files it didn't extract any info, I tried again and next to the autofill was Auto Track # and it worked perfectly. Also that menu gave me the remove all tags tool I was looking for. This rookie will work with the new info you've given, and more than likely will be back with more questions. Thanks again
 

Re: What is the best Way to Manage a Bootleg Collection with Foobar

Reply #8 –
Quote from: DeadTrader on
for pulling track #'s I followed your directions and choose automatically fill values but without any tags in the set of files it didn't extract any info

I was assuming you would extract from filenames. You have filenames like "abb1970-02-11d1t01".  I don't know how many letters you use to abbreviate the artist, but if the last 15 characters (before .shn) are always YYYY-MM-DDd<discnumber>t<tracknumber>, then for Source choose Other... and enter
$right(%filename%,15)
Then under pattern enter %date%d%discnumber%t%tracknumber%, and see what it does.  (If you have e.g. artist or venue information in directory names, you can extract a helluvalot from that too.)

If you do not have such a strict filename regime enforced, you could first select those files that match a search for
%filename% IS *19??-??-??d?t??
(that will only give you year 19xx. You can use
%filename% IS *19??-??-??d?t?? OR %filename% IS *20??-??-??d?t??
or, say, if all your boots are from the 70s/80s/90s/00s, you could give it
%filename% IS *197?-??-??d?t?? OR %filename% IS *198?-??-??d?t?? OR %filename% IS *199?-??-??d?t?? OR %filename% IS *200?-??-??d?t??
- using three digits will reduce the possibility of false positives, in case you overlooked, say, a filename that has DDMM where you think YYYY was; no MM starts with 7/8/9, but admittedly most of them start with 0).

If you make a playlist out of the search result and manually remove oddballs that do not fit the naming pattern (say, the 15-last-letters) completely, you can - after done tagging and before you delete the playlist - give them all a tag DONEWITHTAGGING and some arbitrary nonempty value. Then you can repeat your search with say
(%filename% IS *19??-??-??d?t?? OR %filename% IS *20??-??-??d?t??) AND donewithtagging MISSING




Quote from: DeadTrader on
next to the autofill was Auto Track #
IIRC that function enumerates them per folder in the order of display, so then you must be completely sure they do appear alphabetically and that your folder structure is precisely as it should.