In the imaging industry file organisation is paramount - need to find an image among 100,000? Around 10 seconds. Most images have no proper naming and little user added metadata. Now come to the music industry where all tracks had names since day 1. Ditto creation dates, searchable lyrics, albums to group them; the list goes on.
Why, oh why does no music software (but iTunes) allow effective searching, drag and drop playlists, simple adding of folders as favourites - anything to make the users life easier?
Audio quality is indisputably excellent in Audirvana, but it fails users very badly in organising music. I have devoted a substantial percentage of my life helping to fine tune software interfaces in the imaging world @Damien can we work together to improve track / album / favourites management - improving the user experience would make this product perfect!!
Thank you for your post. I am only hoping that the offer of your experience will be greeted favourably by Damien.
I am not holding my breath though, as many repeated suggestions to that effect by ordinary users have so far been left unanswered, and more disappointingly, unaddressed.
I don’t think it’s the software at fault. I use a program in windows called tag and rename, it will sort you faulty files out for you and get covers etc. https://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm
I am afraid we have not understood HiRes message in the same way.
My understanding is that HiRes is not impressed by Audirvana’s searching feature, even if the tracks contain well informed metadata.
@Grwfsywash is correct in his understanding. Audirvana, like most audio players, urgently needs to become user friendly. We need to be able to easily organise our libraries of favourite music; drag and drop tracks, albums or folders of music into the library, drag tracks to playlists.
It would also be help if we could rank tracks with stars - 1* for poor, 5* for outstanding - all the things that we have been able to do with image assets (which are data files, just like music tracks) for 20 years.
I would love to see an improvement to metadata and file organization within audirvana.
In the meantime, I’ve resorted to using Foobar2000 for tagging and organizing. Its interface is brutal and has a steep learning curve, but once you’re setup, it’s very powerful.
smart playlists in Audirvana work well enough for my use cases. I just wish it had a few more features. Namely:
Reference Other Smart Playlists from a Smart Playlist (recursive playlists?)
e.g., File is in Playlist X
This is a feature I used a bunch in iTunes as it lets you build up compound playlists very organically, or combine genres into “sets” of related music.
Another:
Make Favorites a usable criteria for smart playlists, i.e., “Track is a favorite or not a favorite”.
I used to make a bunch of playlists based on tracks being 3 stars and up in iTunes. Since moving to Audirvana, I’ve been using Favorites more to denote that I like a track. Unfortunately, it’s an all or nothing thing if I want to build a playlist around my thousands of favorite tracks.
Just a couple of suggestions to throw on the pile since we’re talking about user features. These wouldn’t require a great deal of additional UX work and would be a big (for me) benefit.
I have more, if anybody’s interested. So many more…
Hi, insted of trying to get solutions for all kind of players and computer connection problems which have nothing to do with the sound quality (reading this forum) I would like to see that this wasted time resources should better to be invested into album organisation according to folder/file structure. Still I am tortured by fixing meta data and trying to get a proper structure. I have audirvana licensed and happy with the sound quality.
Thanks for the input @robcee and @Sven I think we are all on the same page here - audio quality is superb, organisation not. Hopefully at some point @Antoine (or is that @Damien) will respond and we can look towards a solution and collect ideas on people’s needs
Look in the section ‘audirvana user voice’. There is already a feature request for a folder structure. You can vote for that feature there. The more votes, the more chance it will be implemented. If that tree view is implemented I will drop Roon and Foobar in a heartbeat. I would also happily pay again for a new version of Audirvana with that functionality.
It’s not this that bothers me so much as there truncated titles of albums and tracks, making it difficult to read at a glance, especially on the remote.
I am trialling Audirvana atm. Have my music collection on a NAS, organised and tagged using MusicBrainz Picard. I tried to cross reference what is displayed in Audirvana with a list of tags from Picard. Not an easy task - Audirvana seems to pull different tags and combine them in one line under ARTIST. (that’s just one example) I have downloaded another software from Apple Store and they name Picard tags differently. Composer in one is a trackartist in another and so on. So this is a proper mess, no easy solution.
I think if Audirvana published how it reads tags, users then could adopt it in their tagging method in order to get predictable results.
For me (having tagged all of my music) Audirvana does very good job in finding music and artists, but the way albums are displayed and sorted is messy. If we were told how to tag our music, things would improve a lot.
However, in our “spoilt for choice” real world, the issue of metadata tagging is compounded by the fact that many of us have several playing platforms throughout our homes.
I for one have a listening room for “serious” HiFi listening with Audirvana on a MacMini and a HiFi system. All is connected to a Home Network where a Synology NAS mirrors the Music Tracks held on the MacMini, making them available to either a Plex Media Server used in the TV Room/Study or a couple of Sonos speakers scattered in other rooms for casual listening.
Not all of those systems seem to agree fully on how to use and display metadata, but they tend to agree on a number of those in a Lowest Common Denominator. This is mostly what we have to live with in the absence of definite standards.
It seems that replies via the email interface do not show here. No idea why…
This was my reply to Peter’s comment:
We cannot expect Aurdirvana to accept all the tags from multiple software developers; there appears to be very little coordination in the industry and trying to support multiple tagging schemas is expensive in time and resources. With a small developer team, it diverts resources from important tasks.
What we can expect is that tracks can be dragged to playlists, ranked or tagged within Aurdirvana itself, so that they can be searched, grouped and played in the way that users wish. Hopefully UI improvements to display of multiple albums and tracks.
The lack of standardised tags is a problem, but my original point was not digging into the semantics of tags, more a general comment about the lack of usability of the current interface, of which tags are only a small component.
You are right, however I think it is way more difficult than it seems.
One part of course is developers (and that is not Audirvana issue alone) have not put enough effort to figure out what is actually required from their software. It is way easier to put emphasis on some unverifiable magical qualities than to put in lots of hard work in the things that may offer less return.
Apple is a bit of an exception here, but their effort is focused on selling music, not so much on sorting somebody’s enormous music libraries.
Another issue is that from all the user requests and complaints, it is really difficult to figure what is that the users really want.
For example, I am listening progressive rock where a piece of art is an album. So all I need is to sort albums by genre artist, year and that’s about it. I can do it with folder structure. I hate those who make playlists, as I automatically judge everything just from my perspective.
Now take classical music and everything turns around. Album is not necessarily that important. Now I want to find a composer’s title, choose from different artists performing it. I may want to know the year it was composed, year it was performed, and so many other things that I am not even able to explain how I would want it done. And yes, now I may want to make playlists with say composer’s early sonatas or something.
And then there are at least 20 different other user scenarios, how does one deal with that?
For some weird reason though, photo software developers are able to deal with the issue much better, so maybe there is hope.
are you guys sure there is not a standardized Tags schema, that is universally covers at least the most commonly used tags? I’ve found consistency when tagging from Music Brainz and reading / searching in Audirvana…
That said, I second all that is said about Audirvana’s lack of usability. It’s a nightmare and I am almost regretting releases before 3.5 … old school but efficient.
iTunes remain the best UI i’ve experienced. Absent of consistent user feedback or use cases, Damien could start by mimicking the most widespread audio apps like Spotify, Qobuz, iTunes and try take the minimum features from them to make a normal app, not a crappy app… I keep thinking Damien may put 80% of his limited resources on SQ and cap to 20% his work on UI, marketing, etc … It’s a choice that is courageous, but now I’m also thinking whenever I come onto this forum, I read poor feedback on the UI… time to listen to customers!!
Music metadata has been a story of conflicting standards for many years. There are ID3 tags, updated to ID3 v1 and the incompatible ID3 v2 created by another group, all in competition with APE tags. It is beyond comprehension that such a big industry has not resolved this. In late 2019 the Music Enrichment and Description (MEAD) standard was released by the not-for-profit Digital Data Exchange (DDEX).
The user interface is the worst I have ever encountered.
The audio quality is the best I have encountered.
I have 2TB of MP3s.
I have been editing metadata for years but still haven’t finished.
Editing metadata in Audirvana would take centuries.
I don’t care about album art; I want to see my folder organization.
I want to enqueue from my tracks into Audirvana.
I’m a bit of a pessimist when it comes to the music industry, however I feel like the reason film/tv/photography industries have gotten their metadata under control is because their artists/performers earning$ are not tied to the # of streams.
The more metadata that is included with songs, the more (potential) royalties large music labels might have to pay out. I believe (and have read) that this is the reason the music industry “just magically” hasn’t gotten their sh*t together in the last 20-odd years…
So many more…