DSF metadata

General Discussions
1

Hi,

Like many others I have issues with getting Plex to match metadata for my DSF audio files. Is there a way that I can put together a script which updates the XML files for my songs using the folder structure? My folder hierarchy is quite simple: Music - Artist - Album - Song.dsf. So if I can simply create a small script or batch file which looks at the 2 folders above the DSF file then it should work. Has anyone done this? And would there be any drawbacks to this approach?

The automatic function is completely screwed up and updating manually in Plex is a nightmare because files in the [Unknown Artist] section aren’t even organized by folder
 So updating multiple files in one go is quite difficult. I don’t understand why this is so tough. And yes I have enabled “use embedded tags” and all files have album artist etc. set using MP3Tag :frowning:

Thanks in advance
M

2

Plex doesn’t read embedded metadata from .dsf files.

The only chance you have is to fulfill the requirements for filenames and folder organisation exactly so plex can gather all metadata from these.
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200265296-Adding-Music-Media-From-Folders

Metadata on DSF Files
3

Here’s a more elaborate variation which works for multi-disc and/or sampler albums

This might come in handy in absence of embedded metadata:
possible ‘side car’ files for music

4

So looks to me like I have 3 options:

  • Upgrade to Premium (buy Plex Pass)
  • Organize my files differently
  • Provide the “side car”. This has to be per song? Can’t be one file for a complete album?

Thanks in advance for your help!

/M

5

@mskovgaard said:

  • Upgrade to Premium (buy Plex Pass)

Won’t help that much. IMHO

  • Organize my files differently

Yes.

  • Provide the “side car”. This has to be per song? Can’t be one file for a complete album?

Side car files can only provide cover art and song lyrics, but not all the other information.

6

Thanks, Otto!

7

This is a bug that should not be worked around, dsf metadata should be read from the files directly. How do we get this listed as a bug??

8

I am having this same problem with my ‘aiff’ files. Does this same problem affect ‘aiff’ files?

9

@edjferg said:
I am having this same problem with my ‘aiff’ files. Does this same problem affect ‘aiff’ files?

Probably.
But then again, there is no reason to use AIFF anymore.
Convert them to flac, which is lossless as well.
It gains you compatibility to lots of player devices and saves some storage space too.

1 Like
10

I really think that especially for DSD files the correct naming of files is not enough.
There is a simple reason why I think so: for classical music (which I guess is the genre most used in combination with DSD files) you want to have more than only Album/Albumartist/Albumtitle/Trackartist/Tracktitle.

The most common thing I can think of is the composer tag, but there could be others as well that are included in classical music file naming. Although for me solely the composer support is missing in plex, I do know people that like to keep things like bit depth, sample frequency in folder/file naming


Being a computer scientist myself I hate to ask, but shouldn’t that be extremely easy to implement and test (like adding the constant “dsf” to an array of file extensions using ID3 tagging)?

So
 please implement reading metadata for dsf file
 that would solve at least some of the problems related to DSD files :smile:

11

@OttoKerner said:
But then again, there is no reason to use AIFF anymore.
Convert them to flac, which is lossless as well.
It gains you compatibility to lots of player devices and saves some storage space too.

This general advice for the PCM universe is mostly valid for the DSD domain as well.
So go for Wavpack v5 as it not only compresses PCM losslesly but DSD as well.
Hence you gain some space and full tagging ability.