Ripping the Membran JATP box

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I got the Membran JATP box on Saturday and listened to most of it on Sunday. I decided to rip the lot to my hard drive and sort it out into the original albums, which I think will make it easier for me to absorb all that stuff. So, about ten AM yesterday, I started ripping.

Oh Lord! I’ve complained about the work needed following ripping, but this was ridiculous! Each disc, as I ripped it, was assigned to some completely different album, so everything was wrong. Except for the last disc, which came out correct for some strange reason. This is what the database decided I was ripping:

disc 1 JATP in Tokyo

disc 2 JATP The Montreux collection

disc 3 Buck Clayton Copenhagen concert

disc 4 JATP Perdido

disc 5 Billie Holiday Star power

disc 6 Roy Eldridge What it's all about

disc 7 Charlie Parker 1946 JATP concert

disc 8 Hawkins Eldridge Hodges alive

disc 9 The legendary big bands - Krupa, H James, Basie

disc 10 correct - JATP all stars feat Roy Eldridge !!!!!!

None of these incorrect assignments was entirely irrelevant. Disc 7 had the right session, for the most part, but a different issue, with loads of other material. That was the case with one or two other discs. So I spent ages, after the rips were all done, working out which the correct titles were and changing the file names, then sorting the stuff out into albums, then re-tagging everything. I got all the discographies nice and lined up and Googled for the correct album art.

By then it was six PM, so I got dinner and, still in the dining room looking after the dog (and without my external hard drives, so I couldn’t back it all up), started putting the art work into the files. After a few goes, I noticed that there were some albums with tracks missing. I must have done something, though I’m not really sure. I checked the albums I hadn’t yet got around to and some of them had items missing, too. Anyway, I couldn’t find the bloody things. They hadn’t been deleted, because the waste basket was empty. But they weren’t ANYWHERE in my music folders.

I thought I remembered that, when I’d moved the ripped tracks to the new album folders, I’d sometimes by mistake copied them, so I went back to the original folders WMP puts the rips into. And there were all the missing tracks! All with their original file names and original tags. That was why I couldn’t find those tracks – I was looking for the new filenames. BUT some of the tracks contained the new album art I’d put on after dinner. So these weren’t the original tracks I’d left lying around in the original folder – they were tracks I’d altered already. And had been moved and the original titles and tags reinstated while I was adding album art.

How could that happen? I’ve no idea, but I had a few choice things to say to my computer

Anyway, I had about 15-20 tracks to redo. I did them finished putting on the album art (with no repeat of the incident) then added the discographies to each folder. By that time, it was nearly ten o’clock – twelve hours (less meal breaks) since I’d started!

So, if you buy this box (and I think there’s a little material in there that isn’t in the Verve box – an album that only came out on Stinson) think twice before you start to rip it. It’ll save time if you disconnect from the internet first.

The internet is not ALWAYS your friend

MG

[fent99]

Window media player has a setting which connects to the internet and "fixes" coding if it thinks it has better info... I think you can stop it from doing it but it is really annoying if it gets it wrong...

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Window media player has a setting which connects to the internet and "fixes" coding if it thinks it has better info... I think you can stop it from doing it but it is really annoying if it gets it wrong...

I don't think it was that. I would guess that Membran - a notable cheapo company - uses cheap labour to do its work for it and they, neither knowing nor caring since they're not paid enough to care, can't be bothered to get it right.

Anyway, it's simple enough to disconnect from the internet. Just switch off your router - my machine has a disconnection function if my wife were using her machine on the web, so I could use that, too.

[JSngry]

You might be getting a glimpse at what their source material was.

[J.A.W.]

Buying stuff on labels like that is always risky quality-wise

[CJ Shearn]

Absolutely, especially when a lot of the Pablo stuff is freely available still.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

You might be getting a glimpse at what their source material was.

Yes. Some came from Ace, some from Proper, some from Universal. A bunch came from a label with a wierd name which I've forgotten 'Gut something'.

MG

Oh, that would all be the material that WASN'T the Membran material, I guess.

[JSngry]

When I say "source material", I mean literally, as in they ripped it direct and then complied and packaged "as is" with no attempt to hide or clean up anything.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

When I say "source material", I mean literally, as in they ripped it direct and then complied and packaged "as is" with no attempt to hide or clean up anything.

I'm suire they do that, but the tags that were attached to my ripped tracks were from different albums, likely produced by the firms owning or licensing the material, such as Ace.

Perhaps Membran DELIBERATELY assigned their CDs to the wrong albums so as to obscure the firms' product that they used in their compilation. But one track doesn't seem to have been released on CD, as far as the discographies I've seen are concerned. That's 'How high the moon' from a Feb 1945 show, which only seems to have been released on Stinson SLP23 (in 1963) (and 3 Asch 78s). It's not in the Verve discography at Jazz Discography project.

MG

[jeffcrom]

But one track doesn't seem to have been released on CD, as far as the discographies I've seen are concerned. That's 'How high the moon' from a Feb 1945 show, which only seems to have been released on Stinson SLP23 (in 1963) (and 3 Asch 78s). It's not in the Verve discography at Jazz Discography project.

MG

I've got that Asch 78 album, and posted the question of CD reissue - probably two years ago. Someone (King Ubu?) said that those Asch sides were on the Verve Complete Early JATP box, even though they didn't come out on Mercury at the time. I don't have time to look for that thread right now.

[Big Beat Steve]

But one track doesn't seem to have been released on CD, as far as the discographies I've seen are concerned. That's 'How high the moon' from a Feb 1945 show, which only seems to have been released on Stinson SLP23 (in 1963) (and 3 Asch 78s). It's not in the Verve discography at Jazz Discography project.

MG

I've got that Asch 78 album, and posted the question of CD reissue - probably two years ago. Someone (King Ubu?) said that those Asch sides were on the Verve Complete Early JATP box, even though they didn't come out on Mercury at the time. I don't have time to look for that thread right now.

They are indeed (unless the same lineup recorded the same two tunes from the above Stinson LP at another occasion in 1945). They are on Disc 2 of the Universal Italia-issued 10-CD box.

[SwingItTrev]

I might be missing your point, but the track name/artist information is not stored on the CD. With something like iTunes or WMP, it looks up a database (such as Gracenote) that uses track lengths and numbers as a key to user-supplied data. If there are multiple albums with the same arrangement of tracks, it can assign the wrong one, or can assign another users' poor attempt at naming the tracks.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I might be missing your point, but the track name/artist information is not stored on the CD. With something like iTunes or WMP, it looks up a database (such as Gracenote) that uses track lengths and numbers as a key to user-supplied data. If there are multiple albums with the same arrangement of tracks, it can assign the wrong one, or can assign another users' poor attempt at naming the tracks.

Someone has to place the data in Gracenote; it doesn't appear by itself. I think it's a reasonable assumption that it's the record company in most cases. In Membran's case, it looks like this was done by a careless and ignorant employee. Ignorant because WE all know that there couldn't be a recording of Billie Holiday singing 'Billie's blues' for seventeen minutes. (Unless it was deliberate, as I suggested earlier.)

MG

PS The error on Billie Holiday, to my mind, proves that it can't be a case of Gracenote picking up another album with the same combination of timings, because there can't be any such thing in the database.

[David Ayers]

With gracenote you are stuck with what the company entered. With WMP you get what anyone has entered and often there is a choice. Sometimes a kind person has done all the work. If I can't get the results I need on gracenote I look to WMP and whatever their system is called.

Edited April 10, 2013 by David Ayers

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

With gracenote you are stuck with what the company entered. With WMP you get what anyone has entered and often there is a choice. Sometimes a kind person has done all the work. If I can't get the results I need on gracenote I look to WMP and whatever their system is called.

Sorry, I don't understand having a choice. Seems you get what you're given.

MG

[king ubu]

Well, sometimes when you pop in a disc into the computer drive, you'll get a list of two or three album titles from which you can pick the one that seems more fitting (that's similar with iTunes, I found). If there's only one set of data around, you won't get that choice.

I usually tag everything myself the way I want it to be ... but then with these cheapo Membran boxes you might find out more than they provide, so it's definitely worth a try (or rather, as you saw: a shot in the dark).

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Well, sometimes when you pop in a disc into the computer drive, you'll get a list of two or three album titles from which you can pick the one that seems more fitting (that's similar with iTunes, I found). If there's only one set of data around, you won't get that choice.

I usually tag everything myself the way I want it to be ... but then with these cheapo Membran boxes you might find out more than they provide, so it's definitely worth a try (or rather, as you saw: a shot in the dark).

iTunes, when I've used that to rip, has usually asked me if I want to use Gracennote, if I remember right - also asks if I want to send some data there, which I never do.

WMP never has offered me a choice of any kind. It always just goes off and gets the data.

MG

[Chuck Nessa]

I might be missing your point, but the track name/artist information is not stored on the CD. With something like iTunes or WMP, it looks up a database (such as Gracenote) that uses track lengths and numbers as a key to user-supplied data. If there are multiple albums with the same arrangement of tracks, it can assign the wrong one, or can assign another users' poor attempt at naming the tracks.

Sometimes the information is stored on the CD. This had become a standard in the last few years. The encoding is called ISRC and you can learn about it at http://www.usisrc.org/ . My last dozen discs are so encoded.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I might be missing your point, but the track name/artist information is not stored on the CD. With something like iTunes or WMP, it looks up a database (such as Gracenote) that uses track lengths and numbers as a key to user-supplied data. If there are multiple albums with the same arrangement of tracks, it can assign the wrong one, or can assign another users' poor attempt at naming the tracks.

Sometimes the information is stored on the CD. This had become a standard in the last few years. The encoding is called ISRC and you can learn about it at http://www.usisrc.org/ . My last dozen discs are so encoded.

Is that the system where the titles & artists come up on your normal CD player?

MG

[crisp]

It's not just cheapo PD CDs that show haphazard metadata when you rip. I'm currently ripping my Mosaics to FLAC (a big job -- it works out as about 400 CDs) and the metadata can be all over the place.

I just did the Berigan, which is a mixture of Sony and EMI-owned material. The first six discs (Sony) had no composer info; the seventh (EMI) did. The artist fields were blank when I wanted the names of the band names and the song titles had the years appended in brackets. A lot of retagging went into that one.

It's Venuti/Lang tonight, gawd help me.

Edited April 10, 2013 by crisp

[Chuck Nessa]

I might be missing your point, but the track name/artist information is not stored on the CD. With something like iTunes or WMP, it looks up a database (such as Gracenote) that uses track lengths and numbers as a key to user-supplied data. If there are multiple albums with the same arrangement of tracks, it can assign the wrong one, or can assign another users' poor attempt at naming the tracks.

Sometimes the information is stored on the CD. This had become a standard in the last few years. The encoding is called ISRC and you can learn about it at http://www.usisrc.org/ . My last dozen discs are so encoded.

Is that the system where the titles & artists come up on your normal CD player?

MG

Yup.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I might be missing your point, but the track name/artist information is not stored on the CD. With something like iTunes or WMP, it looks up a database (such as Gracenote) that uses track lengths and numbers as a key to user-supplied data. If there are multiple albums with the same arrangement of tracks, it can assign the wrong one, or can assign another users' poor attempt at naming the tracks.

Sometimes the information is stored on the CD. This had become a standard in the last few years. The encoding is called ISRC and you can learn about it at http://www.usisrc.org/ . My last dozen discs are so encoded.

Is that the system where the titles & artists come up on your normal CD player?

MG

Yup.

Thanks Chuck. Do you enter details like composer and 'Contributing artist' (as well as artist), year and genre?

MG

[erwbol]

I care more about making a secure rip than adding all sorts of metadata; consequently, I only use XLD on my iMac. My rips are primarily for archival purposes. Listening on a computer too often can make me grow tired of music I'd rather enjoy in more optimal sound quality the old fashioned way.

[crisp]

I'm also using XLD, but add accurate metadata as well. You've got to be organised and it's fun to use that data to make playlists of particular styles or artists/composers.

[Chuck Nessa]

The ISRC only contains Artist, Title Owner and Time as far as I know. I believe this was built to track internet traffic of downloads and streams.