Burning FLAC and WAV to Micro SD

dragon1952

I got a new digital audio player for my car and I'm using JRiver MC 24 to transfer entire albums over to a 256 GB SanDisk micro SD card. The WAV albums seem to copy fine but the FLAC files don't contain the individual track song names. For example, a FLAC album will look like this,
AC/DC - Back in Black (1)
AC/DC - Back in Black (2)
AC/DC - Back in Black (3)
AC/DC - Back in Black (4)
AC/DC - Back in Black (5)
AC/DC - Back in Black (6)
AC/DC - Back in Black (7)
AC/DC - Back in Black (8)
AC/DC - Back in Black (9)
AC/DC - Back in Black (10)
...so it lists the track number but not the song name.
Is this something inherent in FLAC files? In JRiver they show the song names. It's not the player because it's the same when viewing the SanDisk on my computer.

Mikey081057

Is it that way for all albums?

Hermitism

It's as if it's showing the file names and not the metadata info. I listen to FLAC off of usb thumb drives all the time for car, Marantz DAC, computer, and have never had an issue.

dragon1952

Mikey081057 wrote: »

Is it that way for all albums?

It appears that it's like that for all FLAC albums. I didn't actually look at every single one but enough to get the idea. I have Googled the crap out of this with no results.

jdjohn

Were the FLAC stored on your computer, and then transferred to the micro SD card? If so, how do they look on your hard drive?

FLAC files can store all the typical meta data.

Mikey081057

Does JRiver have a setting/routine to fetch the corresponding metadata? Google it

Hermitism

dragon1952 wrote: »

I'm using JRiver MC 24 to transfer entire albums over to a 256 GB SanDisk micro SD card.

Have you tried not using JRiver for transfers and using Win10 File Explorer and copy/pasting the albums to your SD card? Personally I don't think that would make a difference, but that's how I do it.

dragon1952

I think the problem is that JRiver labels the albums ripped as FLAC as Media Center Files with no folder/file hierarchy whereas the WAV rips are placed in folders with the artist name, then a subfolder with the album name which contains the properly labeled track/song names.
When looking at the file names in JRiver, on a FLAC rip it shows the track names as "flac;1, flac;2, flac;3, etc

Emlyn

My guess is the player is displaying file names rather than meta data as the computer also does when looking at the SD card. If the files are tagged in JRIver and the meta data show in JRiver most likely there is a setting in the player that is just showing file names by default.

It is also possible in JRiver to universally rename files according to what the actual album track numer and song names are tagged as.

It used to be that it was more difficult to tag WAV files in media software but that is no longer the case. It has always been the case that FLAC files can be tagged with extensive meta data.

dragon1952

That's probably on the right line of thinking. Here's an example of how the filename is displayed in JRiver. This is when I select an album for playing that has been ripped in FLAC.
Filename = C:\Music\ACDC - Back in Black,flac;1
vs a WAV rip
Filename = C:\Music\Beck\Morning Phase\03-Heart is a Drum.wav

jdjohn

FWIW, MP3tag is a very powerful free download for managing audio file meta-data tagging/saving.

Adapting files/formats for a new device can be a real labor of love

Emlyn

If you're relatively new to JRiver, it can be confusing because of all the options it has but that's also why it's also so powerful.

If loading meta data is the issue, this may help:

Right click on an album in JRiver to select it, then from the pull down menu select "Library tools" then "Lookup Track Info from Online Database"
JRiver uses the YADB database for metadata and it's very good for common albums
Select one of the options it presents to you
You can also manually enter or edit the Artist, Album, and Track Name if you don't like what it auto fills

If you already have the meta data, there is a way to get all the file names to be similar in format:

Right click on an album (or many albums) in JRiver to select it, then from the pull down menu select "Library Tools" then "Rename, Move and Copy Files" then from the table that shows select the rename option
With your info from above, set a "Base Path" as c:\Music
Set the folder structure as [Artist]\[Album]
Set file name as [Track#]-[Name].............(there is a preset button for this too)
It will show the current file info for the album's tracks and the proposed changes

What you are seeing now is Back in Black as a separate folder for each track compared with Beck as "Artist" and Morning Phase as "Album" followed by individual tracks within the Morning Phase folder.

The Morning Phase album is file structured correctly, or at least how I would do it.

dragon1952

OK, I just thought of something. I haven't ripped CD's to FLAC for quite some time....like one or two JRiver versions ago? So I tried ripping a CD to FLAC with MC 24 and it worked fine and labeled the filename just like it does for WAV. So whatever the issue is with these older FLAC rips was with older JRiver versions.

jdjohn

Very limited exposure to CD ripping for me, but Exact Audio Copy (EAC) has worked a treat, and it's free.

dragon1952

I finally learned that the files I've having the issues with are albums that got imported into JRiver as .cue files which are single files instead of a folder with a file for each song. I guess this is an option for certain types of music, like classical, where there aren't necessarily individual song delineations? Those must be from a long time ago....maybe from my Exact Audio Copy days. It's possible I used that option with it and then later imported those files into JRiver, so if so, that goes back 6-7 yrs or more :^ /
Anyway, one solution is where you just re-convert the file to FLAC and that pretty much solves the issue. This has been driving me nuts for days. I knew I had those files out there but I had no idea why they were different than the others or that it mattered.