[jmarshall]

Someone likely broke it after Frodo - there were lots of changes to the music database and it hasn't yet been bug-fixed.

[djbarney]

Someone likely broke it after Frodo - there were lots of changes to the music database and it hasn't yet been bug-fixed.

Thanks for the quick answer jmarshall, that's what I get for wanting to run the bleeding edge versions to see what new & awesome stuff's gonna be added next Do you want me to file a separate bug report on this with debug logging etc. or is the information provided in my post enough for now?

[jmarshall]

File a bug report and cc me and night199uk. Attach the .cue sheet and a sample file (doesn't need to be huge) so we can reproduce.

[djbarney]

File a bug report and cc me and night199uk. Attach the .cue sheet and a sample file (doesn't need to be huge) so we can reproduce.

Just filed the bug report here. As the problem is easily reproduced for me with the current Gotham nightlies, by scanning the testfile to the library and opening the library view, do you also need the Debug Log for this specific situation?

[djbarney]

File a bug report and cc me and night199uk. Attach the .cue sheet and a sample file (doesn't need to be huge) so we can reproduce.

Just filed the bug report here. As the problem is easily reproduced for me with the current Gotham nightlies, by scanning the testfile to the library and opening the library view, do you also need the debug log for this specific situation?

Latest nightlies fixed it for me Thanks for the quick fix guys, you rock!

[bordonbert]

Hi guys. Apologies if this is not the place to post this but the thread showed up as the most relevant in my searching. If it is wrong I will open it as a new thread. I've followed this issue for some time now with interest and have become so frustrated with it that I thought adding my own experience may at least reduce my blood pressure a bit.

I have been using XBMC on a dedicated Revo/NAS drive over a 1Gb cabled network setup for a few years now. I only use it for music, no other media is involved. I always rip CDs using EAC to a single FLAC file for the whole album with CUE file. Like others, I prefer to have the album set out as the artist intended, not as a set of separate tracks. (My preference, not right or wrong, please don't preach.) My own experience has been that this worked perfectly for me for the vast majority of my 400 album collection. In more recent times, maybe the last year, this has become impossible.

With every album I have bought over the past year or so the cue file is generated exactly as before. I store the components as before, cue file to the XBMC in a single folder containing all the others and flac file onto the NAS drive in an artist/album folder structure. However, every new album now shows up in XBMC in the correct location and album art is correctly displayed but the album listing shows nothing but the second track name including numbering of '02'. It is always the second track! Accessing this plays the whole album but, of course, gives no control over which track to play.

The flawed cue files I now generate look to be structured exactly the same as those older ones which work. I have tried editing and saving these from a linux box in order to change line endings to that format but no difference. I have played around with Track 'Index 00' tags to see if they made any change, no difference. It occurred to me that I had started to embed the track lyrics found online by EAC at the time of ripping, (even though I currently have no idea how to access them on playback within XBMC). Not adding the lyrics makes no difference but as this must involve some additional available data structure in the background even if no lyrics are included, I wonder if that could be a factor?

Has there been any recent suggestion as to why apparently identically structured cue files would cause a problem like this after a particular date? If I have not caused the problem with my home setup which has not changed in any way, it must surely be a bug, (yes, I would say a bug, it consistently worked now it consistently doesn't), in either XBMC cue/flac support or in the EAC cue file generation or ripping process. Does anyone else have this problem using a different ripping process as that would tend to rule out EAC?

[evilhamster]

cue + single flac is the way to go, although it's kind of hard to convince the rest of the world about it

One odd thing I have been experiancing with EAC rips is that the tags of the single flac file has the title set to the second song of the album and tracknumber set to two. I usally clean up my flac files (set the title to the same thing as the album and remove the tracknr) and I haven't had this problem. Could you test if cleaning the tags this way sorts the problem for you?

[bordonbert]

I've just checked this and what do you know? I have the same thing. Foobar shows that the Title is set to the name of the 2nd track and the track number is set at 02. I have corrected a few of my albums now but this has only partially solved the display issue in XBMC. The album listing now shows a single album file, (correctly named and with no track number), it doesn't seem to access the cue file and list out the tracks as it always has.

As I said above, I save the .cue files onto the Acer Aspire Revo and keep the .flac files on a NAS drive which is accessible from the Revo. This works for all of my older albums.

At least we have started to get a view as to the initial source of the problem, sadly it seems to be EAC! I have just looked and I have my EAC options set incorrectly. The EAC Compression Options sections 4b/c/d, (look down the page for the pink blocks), advise not to include ID3 tags and I had mine set to do so somehow. I'll try ripping an album again with these options removed and report back.

Thanks for the support, it is much appreciated. I think we are getting to the bottom of this problem and could actually solve it without any great amount of work needed.

[bordonbert]

Well it seems that correcting the tag as we described is not enough. I only have Foobar to work with here and it may not be the best tag editor out there, but it seems to be helping. As we know, correcting the track number and title is not enough to get XBMC to display the listing. I have now tried embedding the cue file by opening the flac file in Foobar, right clicking on the file and selecting Utilities -> Edit cue sheet. Make sure "Enable embedded cue sheet on this file" is ticked, then Load the existing cue sheet in. It should import into the window but if you then [OK] to close the Cue Sheet Editor window the selection will not seem to hold until you close the flac file and reopen it.

After all this palaver the album now shows up correctly listed in XBMC. I'm now left unsure as to whether there is now a need for the cue file which is sitting on the XBMC Revo. If the cue sheet is embedded does it need to be present in its own right? I would have thought not. And there is another strange factor, all of my existing files which have always worked correctly with their external cue sheets seem to have their tags messed up in the same way! They have Track Number set to 02 as well but they display and play correctly.

Still, we're moving forwards slowly.

[bordonbert]

OK, I think I have the whole thing tied up now. I found a useful site which offered some advice on the EAC/flac/cue relationship. I set up my EAC to the same spec as his, with support for tag and block cue sheet embedding and it now seems to work. I have correctly listed albums which select and play as they should.

I have also ruled out the need for a cue file stored in XBMC. With ripping according to this new setup I need to copy the cue file to the same folder as the flac file on my NAS drive and it plays. If I have a copy of the cue file saved on the XBMC machine, I still get that single file entry for the whole album with a time of the total for all tracks reported. This is also present within the track list if the cue file is in both the NAS folder and the XBMC folder.

So there seem to be a few things I have learned and as this seems to be a quietly popular gripe here is the solution to my own problems in "FLAC for Dummies" format :

1) The problem seems to be caused by EAC not XBMC! Check that EAC is NOT set to support ID3 tags in any way in its Compression Options (F11). Use THIS LINK if you want to know more or be sure.

2) Follow the advice of the site in the link at the top of this post to set up cue sheet embedding as he advises. It is not immediately obvious to non-technical types but you may need to add --tag-from-file=CUESHEET="%YOUR-TITLE-TAG%.cue" --cuesheet="%YOUR-TITLE-TAG%.cue" to your Additional Command Line Options in the Compression Options dialog. The "YOUR-TITLE-TAG" macro, (just a text substitution trick), is set up at the beginning of the Additional Command Line Options field.

3) Use Foobar2000 to massage the tag situation. Open the flac file in Foobar, highlight either the single album file or all of the tracks if they are listed, right click and select Properties. Remove any superfluous tags such as the Track Title and Number if they show just any other single value. (I also removed the Disc Number for single disc albums as I prefer not to have it list tracks as "1.02" but it is useful for multidisc albums.) Once correct they should display nothing for a single track listing or <<multiple values>> for a list of tracks. (You can of course use a different tag editor but I can't advise on where that would go.)

4) Use Foobar2000 in the same way but this time select 'Utilities -> Edit Cuesheet' from the right click menu. Tick the "Enable embedded cue sheet on this file" box. Press [Load] and navigate to the cue sheet. Open it and, hey presto, the cue sheet appears in the dialog box. [OK] this. Nothing will appear to change! If you access Edit Cuesheet again to check you may be told that the cuesheet has still not been embedded! Do not panic, set it up correctly then select another file in Foobar, then go back to the one you have just edited. These options only seem to be saved when Foobar drops the file. Once you access it again you should find it displays all of the individual tracks as it should.

5) Save the flac file and cue sheet together to the usual place you store your albums. XBMC should now display that album with a track by track listing.

I hope this helps other who are not XBMC gurus. It took a while but I think I know a bit more about what is required to get flac file support up and running reliably again. If there is anything anyone can usefully add please do so, I may learn even more and be quite well informed at last!

[HeresJohnny]

Is this working for everybody in Kodi? I just tried my music collection today and a great many songs did not show up under their respective artists (they are visible in file mode, though). Amongst those are - seemingly randomly - MP3 and FLAC with cue sheets. The latter sometimes show up when selecting the *All Albums object but are not listed as individual albums. It's really weird, maybe a database update went wrong. I'l try and delete the music database and re-index everything from zero, see if that fixes anything.

Update:

The additional items under *All Albums are phantom entries and don't play. Something definitely got lost somewhere.

Update Update:

Started from scratch and flacs with embedded cuesheets are not scanned into my library.

[SpaceAgeHero]

Started from scratch and flacs with embedded cuesheets are not scanned into my library.

Albums are actually scanned to the library for me, but without tracks. :-(