Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Sooloos Missing Metadata

I've just finished adding hi-res images to my ~1,700 CD collection. While I was fantasizing about integration between Sooloos import and hi-res galleries, I mostly used http://www.albumartexchange.com/ and http://www.discogs.com/ .

Discogs.com had valuable information on release date and label, in addition to many medium res images to import.

Metadata "grooming" is critical to enjoyment of a Control and less so in a iPad/iPhone environment, mostly because of the de-emphasis on images on the iPad app, as Meridalien as just mentioned.

I don't envy doing a large collection of Classical, the Sooloos file import doesn't seem to honor the "Prefer local metadata" option and I would have nightmares about manually typing in all that credit and genre information.

I have not been able to get the "AMG ID" in Update Metadata to work, even once.

When you have CD and High resolution copies of the same album, do you create a "set" or leave them as duplicates in the main view of the collection, or simply delete the CD copy ? Having doubles of the small amount of CDs that have high resolution DVD A or HDCD alternatives make it somewhat untidy.

I have created sets of the duplicate albums
E.g. Beatles 24 bit and mono

Keeps the cover browsing much neater.

Agree the " prefer local" is a bit flakey.

There's a new feature with the latest software update that allows you to easily find albums with missing metadata. This feature is accessed through the "Focus" page, just select the "*" to the right of "Moods"

Here is an example for you, lets say you want to find all your albums with no credits. Select "Focus" then select the "*" at the top next to Moods, then select "Exclude" next to "Credits". This will give you all your albums without credits. That's a great new feature, thanks Meridian!

I have no qualms typing in release date and label ... but credits? Credits are critical to using the Sooloos correctly. Does the AMG ID lookup from allmusic.com data id work for you? What is the format of the data you use if you could get it to work.

I have managed to successfully look up metadata from AMG. The important thing is to use the same number of spaces that AMG have in their ID so that the ID is always 10 characters long (or better still, copy and paste from the AMG web site) e.g. 'R 2202255' or 'R 21816'

Ian

Hmmm - edited to add that although when I drafted this post (and when I edit it) there are four spaces between R and 21816 in the second example, and two spaces between the R and the 2 in the first, it doesn't show like that in the actual post! Anyway, make the length of the ID up to 10 characters with spaces between the R and the first digit when using the ID in Sooloos.

Hi Ian,

The UBB forum software stips consecutive spaces from posts, in order to 'space' things out you have to get creative.

Have a look at my previous post #142082 - 2011-05-25 15:04 (3rd post from top in this thread).

Regards,
Carl

Yes, my problem was with cut & paste, Firefox was deleting white space from the allmusic.com website and into the Sooloos Mono Client on Mac OS X 10.6 .

I'm surprised the Mono client is as stable as it is (on Mac).

Not surprised at all it is not perfect on Mac OS Lion. Drag & drop very hard and low level to implement correctly in Java and Mono.

Didn't Novell lay off the Mono development team?

Rather then create a new post, I thought I would revive this (old) thread. New to Sooloos and really liking it! So far (aside from hardware issue that has since been fixed) my only issue is with metedata. Running Control:PC and while some allmusic ID#'s work to correctly identify a (missing) CD, most of the times it just will NOT work. Also, I'm not sure why but I can't cut and paste into Control:PC. I basically enter the R (and then as many blank spaces required) followed by the number.

Always 10 characters. Sometimes it works...most times...it don't.

To copy and paste into Control:PC, copy as you normally would then right click on the spot you want to paste to then hit the "control" key and "v" at the same time to paste.

The allmusic ID# will usually only work if your version of the album has the same number of tracks or more tracks than the allmusic version.

Thanks for reviving the thread - some valuable info here I had missed.

However I've never needed to type much in unless editing hashed up data from the metabase. Copy and paste (you have to use CNTRL-X, A, C & V with Sooloos) has filled in and corrected quite a few entries. I just had to go through this process when Sooloos incorrectly identified CD 2 in a set as CD 1, despite CD 1 only having 17 tracks and CD 2 having 25. It seems a never ending job correcting Sooloos errors in this Classical collection. I've been at it for a month now - just as well I'm retired, but there is still a lot of tidying up required.

We need a sticky to point to helpful editing tools. I'll start one so we have some sort of guidance and are not scratching around fruitlessly as I've done so often in the past.

John

Padding out the whitespace usually worked for me...can you post the allmusic ID and name of a CD that fails to work for you?

Thanks Victor!! I'll give that a try (typical copy/paste method don't work).

MJT- Keep in mind, by padding out the spaces, a few worked...but MOST didn't. I will give a list of a few when I get home tonight, thanks.
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