I am a long-time Audirvana user who is currently evaluating Audirvana Studio.
I carefully curate the metadata on my tracks, and have noticed that said metadata is being… massacred on most of my tracks. Fortunately, this is only done internally in AS, and not on my files.
For example, I have a track where I wrote the Artist tag as: James Ehnes (violon)
In AS, this appears as: James Ehnes (violon), Paganini, Niccolò
(unnecessarily adding the composer to the Artist Tag)
In another track, my original Artist tag is: Chœur philharmonique de chambre d’Estonie, Paul Hillier
In AS, this appears as: Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Chœur philharmonique de chambre d’Estonie, Paul Hillier, Paul Hillier
How can I turn this behaviour off? Can I get AS to, at the very least, stop changing the metadata of a track if it’s already been filled?
Doudou is right however it should only do this on your first time use. I ended up removing the offending additional entries using the tag editor in Audirvana. Once completed I exited the programme and then made a copy of the Audirvana (clean edited) database file (AudirvanaDatabase.sqlite) and saved to a back-up disk.
Now if for whatever reason it repeats the scan of the library ( i.e re-installing the Audirvana software, accidental corruption of the database file etc) I can copy in the cleaned up AudirvanaDatabase.sqlite file over the one created by Audirvana after a Music Brainz scan to re-set the database back to the correct metadata. It is a pain…
It’s a good solution, but it’s not really workable for users with big music collections of thousands of albums. Especially for those who have a lot of classical music for which I will qualify the metadata of MusicBrainz as junk metadata.
Thanks, that’s a good theoretical solution. But, unfortunately, with about 50,000 tracks in my library, it’s not a practical solution at this point.
This, and also the fact that Album view within a playlist will display every track in an album, and not just the playlist tracks as it does in A+, are the 2 deal-breakers for updating from A+ to AS.
Ah I see your problem! I only have 500 albums some classical but mostly from the punk era to the current day. It is absolutely bizarre how bad MusicBrainz is at assigning accurate meta data. I wonder if Audirvana will ever allow users to accept or reject the third party metadata in the system settings as Roon does?
I think his ghastly MusicBrainz mess should be made to end as a matter of urgency.
Maybe Antoine will care explaining what exactly prevents Audirvana from granting us an opt-out from MusicBrainz services. Are some commercial ties at stake here?
I don’t think so. MusicBrainz is completely free. It works a bit like Wikipedia, people can freely add albums and data.
The data in MusicBrainz can be really helpful, but not without curation. If I add music to my library I use a program called 'MusicBrainz Picard". It suggests the meta data, but I can always edit it before applying.
The disadvantage of Audirvana is that it justs blindly adds the MusicBrainz data to it’s database without curation and/or checking. Luckily it does not add this data to the music files (anymore) by default, but to it’s own sqLite database. Still a complete Opt-out would be preferable. Or at least maybe a choice in the settings like ‘prefer metadata in local music files above Audirvana’s Music Brainz data’.
The fact that MusicBrainz services are free for us does not necessarily mean that MusicBrainz, as an organisation, cannot seek to monetise some of its services to software developers or music streaming services.
At another level, and still about MusicBrainz, does the analysis of Audirvana clients’ music files returns any metadata to MusicBrainz to help consolidate their databases?
There have already been some ‘lively’ discussions on this forum about this subject (automatically gathering of metadata) in the past (to say the least ).
In these earlier discussions on this forum @Damien emphasized that no data from our local library/computer is added to/shared with MusicBrainz, but that only metadata from MusicBrainz is searched and downloaded.
I can’t find this thread/discussion anymore, but it seems logical. After all, if local data from our computer would be added to MusicBrainz database without our permission that would be a breach of privacy. Maybe @Antoine can give an explanation how the communication with MusicBrainz works?
I mainly use YATE for tagging or editing tags. Yate makes automation of such processes relatively easily by letting you define ‘Actions’ that remove such tag
Far from me to disparage MusicBrainz as some find it useful, but the problem described by @rdreyer is affecting the database of many of your customers.
It has been described numerous times in the past and we are still hoping that a simple solution is offered through a toggle in the Preferences for those of us who do not value MusicBrainz and its most disappointing interference with the carefully curated metadata of our music files.
I think it cannot be clearer than that: it is not a bug, it is a feature/design problem.
I can confirm you the metadata you see is not added to your file unless you add it yourself. You will be able to deactivate it in the next update to not display those recovered metadata you see in Studio, we will add an option in the Local section of Studio for it.
Hello @Antoine ,
Can you describe the name of the metadata tags that will not be retrieved from MusicBrainz with this new option? or the tags that are retrieved from MusicBrainz by not activating this option?
I think it is essential for a user to understand what will be the consequence of activating this new option (in Arstist section , for search etc…)
@Antoine Unfortunately this has not been fixed in the latest update (1.8.7 on Mac).
When I turn off the toggle for enabling recovered metadata (« Récupérer les données manquantes… »), I still see the original issue:
For example, I have a track where I wrote the Artist tag as: James Ehnes (violon)
In AS, this appears as: James Ehnes (violon), Paganini, Niccolò
(unnecessarily adding the composer to the Artist Tag)
In another track, my original Artist tag is: Chœur philharmonique de chambre d’Estonie, Paul Hillier
In AS, this appears as: Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Chœur philharmonique de chambre d’Estonie, Paul Hillier, Paul Hillier
).