[SOLVED] No option to play album although cover art present

[papanoob]

I'm running release 9.2.2 2025-01-08 on Pi4. My music is on a USB drive which I add to using rsync from my laptop.

I'm having a problem with just one album - although it has a cover art file, and the art is displayed at the top level folder - i.e. all albums by that artist - when I browse into the folder for that album there is no icon (whether that image or anything else) with options to play, clear etc. Also, rather than displaying track names Moode displays file names not track titles.

When I saw the file names, I realised the files must be missing ID3 tags, so I added those. But I see in mpd.log that they're not being used:

Code:

ffmpeg/wav: Discarding ID3 tags because more suitable tags were found

What can I do?

[Tim Curtis]

Check permissions:
The files require "read" permission and all containing directories require "read + execute"

Check the MPD log for errors after doing a database update
cat /var/log/mpd/log

if the permissions are good then go ahead and zip up the album and PM a download link to myself, @TheOldPresbyope and @Nutul and one of us will analyze them

[papanoob]

Check permissions:
The files require "read" permission and all containing directories require "read + execute"

Check the MPD log for errors after doing a database update
cat /var/log/mpd/log

if the permissions are good then go ahead and zip up the album and PM a download link to myself, @TheOldPresbyope and @Nutul and one of us will analyze them

Thanks, permissions are good.
I updated my post before I saw your reply, including entries in mpd.log saying that the ID3 tags are being ignored. Will PM you the album.

[papanoob]

Just to add that I took the opportunity to upgrade to 9.3.0 but that didn't make a difference to this issue.

[Tim Curtis]

Looks like the only tags MPD was able to index were Date and Duration which suggests some sort of tagging issue in the file.

                   

[Phil323UK]

I to have this download, (Shriekback fan for longer than I can remember).

And I can confirm that the downloaded wav files are completely devoid of tags.

As tagging wav files can be troublesome, in my case I'll convert the files to something that is more tag friendly.

Regards,
Phil.

[Nutul]

I copy on that.
WAV files are not to be tagged. Software may not be ought to accept the fact that there is a id3v2 tag attached to the file. Some do, some (correctly) don't.
You want tags? You make a FLAC out of the WAV and are all set up.

[TheOldPresbyope]

WAV is an application of the Resource Information File Format (RIFF). A RIFF file consists of chunks of data. The optional INFO chunk allows the inclusion of various metadata. There are subtypes of INFO chunk, with some predefined categories such as Artist, but also an ID3 chunk is seen in the wild.

Trouble is, the spec is so open that different applications use (and abuse) the chunks differently.

I started examining the files that were shared with Tim, Al, and me, and I see an ID3 chunk and other chunks too. I assume that ffmpeg is too and deciding which to use.

I agree with Al. Best to convert the WAV files to FLAC. They are both lossless encodings.

For work from the terminal  in LInux, I take advantage of  the SoX (Sound eXchange) package, a self-described "Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation". To convert file xxx.wav simply invoke

Code:

sox xxx.wav xxx.flac

Note, the resulting FLAC file still needs to be tagged. For that, I often use another LInux CLI tool metaflac.

As CLI tools, both can be scripted.

Regards,
Kent

[DRONE7]

I found that manually populating tags was so time consuming that now I convert or rip to FLAC and use Beets to auto-tag then open the tagged file with Picard to auto update and save. Quick and simple.

As a side note, when ripping LP albums I save as a single .wav and  use wavbreaker to add breakpoints for tracks. Convert to FLAC and add track titles using Audacity.
As above the converted file is opened with Beets and 9 out of 10 is found and auto-tagged then to (Musicbrainz) Picard and saved with album art.
Any art not found can be added from Discogs search cut and paste.

Anything not found by Beets or Picard goes to a 'fix' bin where I may (or not :-)  spend time manually tagging.

https://beets.io/
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Picard_Linux_Install
https://wavbreaker.sourceforge.io/

[papanoob]

Thanks everyone! What a lovely supportive community - and happy to meet another Shriekback fan @Phil323UK

I was stumped by the fact that all my other WAV-based albums work fine tag-wise, but lesson learned: in case of issues I'll convert to FLAC and tag those.

All best,
Jake