Hello fellow users! I recently bought Yate to try to get a better handle on tagging my music for Audirvana, because I know that some of you have been recommending it. So now I’m wondering why these apps are not working together a little better. For example, the information I enter in the Musician Credits panel in the Credits tab in Yate isn’t turning up in Audirvana. As an alternative, I can use the special Audirvana tab in Yate to get one “Soloist” into the Audirvana tagging, but for the kind of music I’m listening to, there’s often more than one significant musician involved. I would appreciate any clues from any of you Audirvana/Yate users. Thanks in advance!
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I also use Yate to tag meticulously my albums. But AS does not care about these tags, because it displays junk metadata that it gets from MuscBrainz. It’s very frustrating, especially for classical music. But if you like the sound of AS, you should get used to it.
I’m using Audirvana 3.5 actually, not the new Audirvana Studio - I should have clarified that! Do you think the MusicBrainz metadata is getting in the way there too?
Yes, the support at Yate does seem exceptionally good, I noticed that. But I also read a clear assessment that, if Audirvana can’t read standard FLAC metadata as written in Yate, that’s an Audirvana problem, rather than a Yate problem. Which made sense to me…
The MusicBrainz metadata does not get in A3.5.
I think that Audirvana does not read properly all the tags of Yate. Roon does it better.
That’s a little disappointing, no? Frankly, I would have been content to work with Audirvana’s built-in tagging system, rather than resorting to a third party solution. Because I would have assumed I would continue to use Audirvana for a long time, maybe “forever,” as it went through periodic improvements and paid upgrades. But now, the wind seems to be blowing in a different direction, right? I’m one of the users who definitely won’t be shifting over to a paid subscription to Audirvana Studio, so I’m assuming that, at some point, I will need to abandon Audirvana, despite its astonishingly good audio quality. And when that happens, I will need to know that my metadata is in a format that whatever new software can read…
I never tag my files with the tag editor of a player. I tag them with Yate before adding them to the library. From time to time, when I play an album, I may change something in the tags with the tag editor of the player.
The problem with tagging is that there are many tags, and not all the players display them all.
If you tag properly your files with Yate, you’re sure that they are well tagged. But it won’t change the fact that the players won’t display all your tags. There’s nothing you can do about it.
With Audirvana Studio, all this is pushed to absurdity. Because the player display metadata that it gets from MusicBrainz, that is often wrong, instead of displaying the metadata that you tagged meticulously.
Roon isn‘t that much better in handling metadata. It’s quite good when you allow Roon to display the data on its own, as it grabs data from ROVI Music (as far as I know), which isn’t bad. But since it is an automated process, the metadata displayed can be faulty.
When tagging manually, Roon does display the data one entered, but often in an awkward way. This is particularly true when one entered multiple composers.
So presenting manually edited metadata is always dependent on the player. Euphony is quite good in that respect, but its metadata properties are weak, to say the least.
And BTW, MusicBrainz as a resource for meatadata isn’t that bad!
Isn’t that bad for rock and jazz. For classical music, it’s a source of garbage metadata.
EDIT
And with Roon you can set it to display your own metadata instead of its automated gathering. You can even tune your settings to level of each album.
For me, the best player for metadata management is JRiver.
True, I am not into classical music, so I don’t know about this genre. I did notice, though, that MusicBrainz’s recent update leads to very confusing genre mapping.
Over at Roon forum, they kept complaining for years about Roon’s inability to tag classical music correctly. I don’t know if it improved with the 1.8 version.
And yes, of course, Roon’s metadata editing/handling is light years ahead of others!
Are you aware of this custom Yate mapping for Audirvana?
https://2manyrobots.com/YateResources/docs/AudirvanaMapping.html
I’ve used it with Audirvana up to last 3.5xx version and never had issues (… now I don’t use Audirvana anymore)
I’m aware of the existence of the custom tag mapping for Audirvana in Yate, but I don’t use it. Audirvana is a secondary player for me, so I have no reason to all this additional tagging work especially for Audirvana.
Yes thanks Stefano, I did install the Yate custom editor for Audirvana, which I had hoped would solve my problem - the fact that there was such a thing was one reason I thought Audirvana and Yate might work well together! But as I mentioned in my original post, the Audirvana editor in Yate doesn’t seem to provide an opportunity to list more than one musician/soloist for each track. What if the first solo is John Scofield and the second is Bill Frisell? I’d like to find a metadata system where I can find that information while I’m playing the music, rather than needing to launch a whole different piece of software to do what we used to do simply by pulling out the album cover and looking at the track notes. Yate seems to allow you to tag any number of musicians on a track, but that information doesn’t seem to surface when you play that track in Audirvana… Or am I missing something?
Well, I’d like to find a player that has the high sound quality of Audirvana, but which also allows you to view your own metadata. Here again, I suspect there might be two user profiles that Audirvana is trying to simultaneously satisfy - users with their own treasured collections of tracks, who want to play (and display) those tracks in the best possible way, and users who want a portal to the vast collections available on sites like Tidal. This takes us back to the question of paying for upgrades vs paying by subscription, right? I mean, I would imagine the users with their own collections are generally happy to pay for upgrades from time to time, but will resist the subscription model. While the users who want a music delivery service like Tidal or Spotify are already committed to the subscription model, so they might be willing to subscribe to Audirvana in the same way. Except that most subscriptions are paid to guarantee a flow of “content,” and Audirvana isn’t offering that. Paying one provider for the content and another provider for the system that delivers the content - that seems like a model that doesn’t have much of a future…
I agree with you that there are two profiles of users.
IMO, in the last years Audirvana focussed its development efforts to satisfy users who stream, and neglected the users who play their own music.
I also agree that the subscription model for a player is an absurdity.
People who have their own music bought their turntable for their vinyls, and the player for their CDs and SACDs. They don’t pay a subscription to play their music, and there’s no reason that they should do that with the digital trucks that are most often rips of their CDs and SACDs.
For people who stream, it’s also an absurdity, IMO. They pay already a subscription for the content and are asked to pay a second subscription only for the player.
The only player that does it much better than all the others is Roon. Try it to figure out what it can do with your music collection.
But it’s a subscription player. And the price of its lifetime license is very high.
The problem is that the Soloist tag is not a multi item tag like Artist.
I solved this problem filling the Soloist tag with the name of the most important artist and writing all the other artists in the Artist tag (separated by triple semicolon if editing with Yate).
This works fine for me as most of my music is Classical.
Another way could be to not use Soloist and use only Artist where you can write more than one Artist.
Using Yate you could write in the Artist tag
Bill Friesell;;;John Scofield
In this way Audirvana will be able to show all the tracks for Bill Frisell if you are searching for Frisell or all the track for John Scofield if searching for Scofield and both artists will showed playing a track where they are both artists.
I also do the same with classical music. I input the soloist name first in the artist tag, and then I input the other musicians, the conductor and the orchestra. I use a single “;” to separate the names.
Try with triple semicolons ;;; that is the convention to separate each item of a multi item tag, Audirvana will understand this convention and will translate triple semicolons in comma managing in the right way the multi item tag
Thanks for that very useful information, Stefano! I will most certainly try that strategy when I get back to the files… and let you know how it works out. One question, though… does that formatting (the multi-item artist tag) also allow you to enter the instrument to be associated with each artist listed? And if so, would that be simply entered in brackets? Or is there some specific formatting required?