More Home Audio
Another day, another trivial yet time-consuming conundrum with playing digital audio files at home. Today there were two odd issues:
The first is a persistent matter that dates back to the earliest experiences I had trying to store albums as audio files, which is the given system doesn’t recognize the files as part of an album. I had a three-track recording, the wav files of which I downloaded, along with cover art, from a music publicist’s Dropbox folder. When I loaded them into Audio Ranger, which is the software I use to edit metadata, only the track file names appeared. The rest of the fields were blank. This lack of data is, unfortunately, quite common with promotional audio files from publicists. I added all the requisite fields, and associated the cover art with the files, and it all looked fine. In fact, when I loaded the tracks into the VLC audio player, it all worked fine. However, when I copied the files to the external hard drive that I use for my Plex jukebox system, only one track was considered the “album,” and the other two tracks were listed as unidentified standalones. I tried to fix this various ways, and in the end the only thing that worked was downloading the album as FLAC files (instead of wav ones).
The second issue was quite odd. A publicist sent me a download link to an album. It seemed vaguely familiar, but the release date was recent, so I just downloaded it, confirmed the files had the metadata (they did, because they were housed on Bandcamp, which seems to routinely handle metadata well, at least for albums with a single artist), and moved them to the external hard drive. However, the album failed to appear in my Plex system’s list of recently added recordings. I tried a few things: I noticed some non-Western symbols in the title, and so I removed those, but to no avail; then I deleted the files from the drive and retransferred them; then I deleted the files, re-downloaded them, and retransferred them. None of these approaches worked. Then I noticed something: the album seemed familiar because I already had downloaded it and saved it to another hard drive in the same Plex system. But the system didn’t alert me to the duplicate copy because I had two sets of files on different drives. The closest it came to acknowledging the issue was by failing to display the new album on the “recently added” playlist.
