Loading Music

[jfwi1]

Hello,

I have had Control4 for 8 years.  I use it primarily for media; music, movies and radio.

We recently went through an upgrade and everything has to be reloaded.  I have a large collection of CD's, 2,500+ albums.  It took me weeks to scrub the meta data when we first bought the system.  Examples:  missing album art, album and track meta data incorrect, albums with various artists being loaded as multiple albums I need to join, etc.

I backup my system on a regular because of all the work I have into the meta data.  The upgrade did not bring any meta data forward.  My dealer is reloading the music and it is showing up wrong.  Album appears to be the folder name of where the music was found and artist is the root folder name of the drive.

Can someone tell me how the music meta data is loaded so I can try to clean up my music before it is scanned.  I am very organized and every album is a folder on my external drive.  The folder is labeled 'Artist - Album Name'.  I wonder if I can organize my music differently so the meta data is picked up since it appears to be how the meta data comes in.  My dealer spoke to Control4 and their answer was we use Gracenote and they had no advice.  That can't be possible when the data shown is 100% identical to how I named my folders - Gracenote did not input this data. If I go to artist, I have 2,500 'Music Folder' descriptions.   

Any advice???  Love this system.  I am sick to my stomach with the weeks of work to manually add all of my own meta data. 

By the way, my DVD juke box is the same.  About 200 of the DVD's loaded ok, the other 200 were 100% manual inputting of the meta data.  I can deal with 200, not 2,500.

Thanks for any advice, direction or best practices. 

Are there people that have written scripts to deal with this I can buy or pay to set my music up?

 

 

[Cyknight]

Try redoing 6000 movies because you want to make use of the new option of high-rez art...I know what you mean.

First off, IF there were no other major upgrades doen - you could try reloading an old back-up. Depending on the version, you'll be asked/told that the media base needs to be upgraded - let it run. That SHOULD restore the info.

If that isn't an option, if you have back-ups have a dealer load a back-up into a virtual director (part of pro - don't think it's in HE?, could be wrong). From there you can actually extract the meta data info (go to the drive holding the info, right click and extract meta-data). From there, go back to your actual system, right click again on the drive and import the file created - should load all your info. Note that while this can be carried across driver, the folder structure MUST be the same as before.

Last option is to reload a copy of your drive if you have it, though you can try anyway if not. Do a scan WITHOUT using the online look-up. This MAY work depending on the original folders (and/or how it was ripped and managed before) - that way it will attempt to load the meta data that may or may not be present in the folders/files. Bit of  long shot, but small effort for potentially large reward if the above fails.

 

Oh and the first two things could work for your DVD Juke as well.

[jfwi1]

Thank you taking the time to respond Cyknight.  

- The upgrades were major and they don't think the backup will work, i will ask that again.

- The think the drive the music was on is now bad, that would kill options 2 and 3 suggested as i need the identical structure.  I will check here too.  

great advice.

I am hoping to find out how the system creates the meta data.  Its not from Gracenote as the meta data is clearly my folder structure.  If i could understand how control4 maps the file and folder names to generate album and artist infor maybe i could clean up my data so it loads right.  I have album art in each folder already.  I have all the meta data, just need it mapped right. 

[Cyknight]

-If so option 1 is likely not feasible

-Option two may well be - the folder structure is just the order of folders - ie if it's a direct data copy of what was there, you should be fine.

-Option 3 is a long shot in general - I'd still try it. Because by using online data backup, C4 tends to not look for local data tags at all - it of course see the folder structure and copies that in case of no info, but scanning that way is about 3 seconds work and 30 minutes waiting - hard pressed to see a reason not to try?