Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming dBpoweramp Plug-in

+1
I'm still happily using dBpoweramp without the plug in as I still haven't had a simple explanation how a simpleton like me would benefit from it.

I have avoided getting it just in case it makes things more complicated without a benefit to me. Given that most of this thread seems to be on tangents that are well beyond my understanding, I consider that a legitimate concern.

I would appreciate M publishing something to their less advanced customers.

Aloha,

Glad I'm not alone.

Meridian has no documentation on their site about it.

Can anyone explain the benefits in layman terms?

If in doubt just keep using dBpa and import as usual.

If you don't like the way that import over-writes some of your data then use the plug-in.
That's the main difference.

It bypasses the the import lookup by using restore.

I tried the new plug in yesterday.

It had worked for me before, but this time with restore it told me it wasn't a valid folder. Folder was fresh.

Import worked fine, although it showed two albums (one set of FLACs with 0kb size).

I also received an invalid folder message, but I could not understand why.

The plug-in generally works very well. I use it to determine what metadata I want to store. At this stage I have not finally determined the extent to which this can be achieved.

So, if it works, don't mess with it.

Love that answer! Makes it obvious for me and I can stop trying to understand this thread.

Mahalo Nick,

Am I correct in understanding that the plugin produces an empty Sooloos album credits screen?

At the moment it doesn't appear to be working, so produces not a lot. Hopefully be back up soon, though?

Can anyone tell me, when you rip in dBpa and then import with Control:Mac/PC as you have no choice currently, whether the Sooloos files retain the metadata dBpa wrote into the files? At this point I'm using dBpa not just because it's far easier, and the metadata/album art so much better, but to ensure as much file/track info as possible is stored for future/forward compatibility.

If, due to manual import, Sooloos simply strips this info off the files, I need to keep another, completely separate copy of the flacs, pre-Sooloos import, is that correct?

Cheers,

James

Sooloos leaves all the tags exactly as you ripped them.

This has actually been covered many times on HH as it is the way to enable Sonos and Squeeze to share the same single library.

As I also mention in the other thread, the dBpa plugin does seem to be working. Not sure what failures folks have been referring to.

That's not the way it works in my experience - if you set the "Prefer local metadata" flag in Settings and use drag and drop, Sooloos will still overwrite all dBpoweramp input data with the exception of the Album Artist and the Cover Art with whatever it accesses from AMG. The only exception to this is when the Sooloos Metadata Service cannot find an album (how I long for such occasions!), in which case the dBpoweramp data is mainly preserved. I say "mainly" because even then the Release Date data is not carried over and there may well be other data that is lost in the translation process that I have not yet identified.

The only way to avoid this is by using the dBpoweramp plug in, which uses the Restore function rather than the Import function. The plug in is the answer to this problem but, as has been noted many times, it is not currently working. There is a detailed description of how it works in the other "failure" thread.

The plug in also solves the problem of producing FLAC files in more than one format - it is easy to produce a standard FLAC file that can be read by virtually all of the other streamers on the market, together with a Sooloos based file that only Sooloos can access. Ditto an MP3 file or virtually any format you care to mention.

The sooner Meridian switch to a standard open system, the better as far as I am concerned.

Nick,

My plugin doesn't appear to be working, I hadn't used it for a while and had changed no settings. If yours is working, could you possibly outline what settings you have? There must be something different in the way yours is set up. IIRC, I followed the sticky when I was setting up though...

What happens with mine is dBpa rips the tracks, then gives a message at the end which says AMG lookup failed, and it never pops up the Meridian options. Yesterday, it then, additionally, failed each track on a CD with AMG.

I'm ripping the whole rest of my library at the moment, so would be grateful to get this running if it's possible.

Cheers,

James

Hi,
Nick is referring to the Tags that are imbedded within the FLAC file itself during the ripping process, not the [Sooloos] metadata that the Sooloos database uses.

So whilst it is true that Sooloos does not use the majority of this data when instructed to do so [and we all agree this is bug], the actual FLAC tags them selves are retained within the FLAC files and can be utilise by a 3rd party software directly from the Sooloos store.

Regards,
Carl