B2 organisation and display

[William Ellison]

Hi Forum,

I’m thinking of buying a B2 to house my CD collection, a large proportion of which is classical music. Before I go ahead I would like to know a bit more about the way in which B2 organises and displays the attributes of stored classical music, and I hope that someone on the forum may be able to help me with the following 4 questions.

1. Taking a fairly typical CD:  Deutsche Grammophon / W A Mozart / Symphonien Nos. 29 & 39 / Berliner Philharmoniker / Herbert von Karajan / DDD / 431 268-2 / Barcode 0 28943 12682 3. From my point of view it would be good if the leading attribute displayed on the B2 were Mozart, followed by Symphonie No. 29 and Symphonie No. 39 at the second level, followed by the individual tracks – is that arrangement likely to happen?

2. And for a slightly more complicated one: EMI Classics for Pleasure ref 7243 5 68147 2 1 ) contains both Ravel’s string quartet (4 tracks) and Debussy’s string quartet (also 4 tracks). When the CD is sitting on my shelf it’s a toss-up whether I have filed it under Ravel or Debussy. I can live with that when looking for a CD on the shelf, but I wonder how this CD would be referenced on the B2 – would it be filed under Ravel, or Debussy, or both? Or neither?

3. On a different topic, would the B2 be suitable as a home for digital audio CDs? For example, a 3-CD recording of Margery Allingham’s book Hide My Eyes produced by Hachette Digital (ref 9781405507134, which I think is actually the book’s ISBN number). If so, I would also welcome any information regarding the way in which the recording would be displayed by the B2.

4. Finally, if I don’t like the way in which the information is displayed, is there scope for me to alter the default settings so as to tailor the display to my own preferences?

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Bill.

[Daniel Taylor]

The B2 is not flexible or robust when it comes to managing classical music.  If you know the rules, you can work within the system, to a point.

The Brennan units store the music information using a folder structure of ArtistName / AlbumName / Tracks.  It doesn't care what text you supply for those folders and filenames (except for certain reserved characters).  When you have the B2 rip the CD for you, it gets the information from the MusicBrainz database, and populates those fields with the text obtained by the lookup.  After the fact, you can rename as you see fit.  However, that's somewhat tedious.

As an alternative, you can rip the CD on your computer, using a program such as dBpoweramp.  That program allows you to change the data that will be used to name the folders and track names before ripping.  It also populates the tagging metadata fields in the track files (that info is not used by the Brennan units, but it is used by other devices such as Sonos).  Once ripped and named on your computer, there are various ways to import the files onto the B2.

Given the first album in you examples, you could name the top level folder as Mozart.  Or you could make it more complete as Mozart; Berliner Philharmoniker; Herbert von Karajan.  Then you could separate the two musical works into two album folders named Symphonie No 29 and Symphonie No 39.  One thing to keep in mind is that the B2 has a hard limit of 170 characters for names.  I forget if that is the total for Artist/Album/trackname, or just each one separately - I think the former.  Better to be safe than sorry.  If you use more than 174 characters, bad things will happen.

[JFBUK]

Hi Bill,

As regards your spoken word CDs the B2 will rip these just as it does with Music CDs.

Typically spoken word CDs have a number of tracks like Music CDs but exactly what values the B2 will allocate to folder names and track names I am not sure.

I took a look at the Musicbrainz database which the B2 uses to get CD info and your particular CD set is not listed but other recordings of Margery Allingham books are.

My guess is that in terms of B2 naming and organization you will get Artist = Margery Allingham , Album = Police at The Funeral, Track = Police at the Funeral Part 1 etc.

As Daniel suggested, ripping CDs on a computer, if its an option for you, will give you greater control over file naming and organisation. You will also get a lot more tag information saved with the file.

The B2 Web UI does have good search capabilities on Artist, Album, & Track which you can exploit if you settle on a naming convention for your collection that works for you.

John

[William Ellison]

Thanks Daniel, that's very helpful. I thought it might not be as straightforward as I had hoped!

William

[William Ellison]

Thanks for your very helpful advice, John. 

William

[Arthur Vasey]

Bad things will happen all right - I added Now 111 to my Brennan - my sister ripped it in - the first track on CD 1, the full artist and title was really long - caused a crash when I added the album to my Club Classics playlist - deleted the entire playlist - I had to change it to Encanto Cast!

My sister has this very annoying habit of writing out artist and title names in full - she refuses to use ampersands or abbreviations - Juniour (sic) instead of Jr, And instead of &, Featuring instead of Ft or Feat - like how it should be spelt, as opposed to the artist’s rendering, resulting in over-long filenames!

On Thursday, 7 October 2021 at 11:11:35 UTC+1 Daniel Taylor wrote:

[PMB]

Hi All,

We have moved to a new Forum page - thebrennanforum.com - please post any new questions there.

There is a 170 character limit for any Artist, Album or Track name and exceeding this can cause some odd results.

Paul

Brennan Support.