Adding Music into MusicIP and Logitech Media Server
This section details how to rip music from a CD and add it into your MusicIP library and the Logitech Media Server (LMS) library.I will detail when to use the MusicIP GUI and Headless modes and the basic settings I have found work very well together.
Some basic pre-requisites are that MusicIP and LMS are working together, see previous sections.
Requirements
CD with Music to ripCDEx to rip the CD
Mp3Tag to check and tidy up Tags (optional but recommended)
First Steps - Ripping the CD
After using various ripping tools, I've found CDex to be one of the best and can be downloaded from;CDExos
Configure this to your liking. I rip at MP3 256k CBR for ease of moving my files between various players but use whatever suits your requirements. (Please no feedback on I should use Flac, ogg vorbis etc.
I also ensure that I create only tags that are ID3v2.3, see below for further details why!
I'm assuming you can handle ripping the CD so moving on... You now have your tracks ripped from the CD and in a folder.
Using Mp3Tag
Mp3Tag is a tagging tool for MP3 files and is downloadable from;MP3Tag
Although CDex grabs tags via CDDB. I always do a post check of the tags using Mp3Tag, there is nothing worse than a library full of garbage.
I always remove ID3v1 tags and ID3v2.4 tags, v1 tags only allow a limited number of characters so tend to look a mess if track titles are long as they get truncated. V2.4 tags don't always seem to display correctly in Windows Explorer in XP so I don't use them. I haven't felt that I'm missing anything so ID3v2.3 is good enough for the job!
These are my settings I use with Mp3Tag;
So at this stage, we have our tracks ripped and the tags up to standard and ready to be added into our music library.
Adding the music into MusicIP
Before adding the folder into your music library, you may wish to check the settings in MusicIP.I only use the GUI front of MusicIP to analysis music, as I like to see what is happening.
If you choose not to archive into the files, (its saved as a tag just like the normal artist, album etc) then the fingerprints are saved in a single database file which if it becomes corrupted you will have to re-fingerprint your entire collection again! Plus if you move files around they will need to be re-fingerprinted each time.
Previous versions of MusicIP sometimes chewed the tracks up and mangled the tags. This didnt corrupt the files, but just corrupted the tags. I've not found any issues with saving the fingerprints in the files since version 1.7 of MusicIP.
I set my music library to be scanned on startup for convenience, as shown.
Now closedown MusicIP
Copy the folder with the mp3 music files into your music library.Now open up MusicIP, you will see it now scan your music library and add the tracks into your MusicIP library.
The files will turn through 3 phases;
To be analyzed
Identified to be verified
Analyzed
Once all your new tracks have changed status to Analyzed you can now close MusicIP.
Open MusicIP in Headless mode
Now open up the Headless web page, this looks slightly different to the default as its my own web page (See relevant section) However the buttons are the same.
Hit the Reload Cache Button, this will now cause the Headless side of MusicIP to swallow up the changes that the MusicIP GUI has processed.
You will see the track numbers increase to reflect these new tracks in your library.
Now you can close the MusicIP Headless web page and kick off a LMS rescan.
Go off and make a cup of tea, LMS will now process the changes and update its own database. Once the scan has finished the added music will now be in your Music Library and selectable.