[Abcde-users] Abcde and aiff

[Gabriel Rosenkoetter]

On 2025-04-20 23:16, Dry Martini Holding Company 😎 wrote:
> Mr. Rosen letter,

No need to Mister me. ;^>

> Greetings and thank you for your reply. Yes, I am running the rune audio server on a raspberry pi 3.

I think that part of the problem here may be that you are asking the 
wrong set of people the wrong question, although I don't think either of 
those "wrong" things are your fault.

I think that the question that you actually want to be asking is how 
RuneAudio needs audio files presented so that it can index them properly.

I don't know the answer to that question, so I don't know how to suggest 
changes to the way that you're running abcde in order to produce files 
that Rune will index properly.

(I did read through https://www.runeaudio.com/documentation/ and I 
didn't find anything resembling the detail I'd need to answer your 
questions. When looking for source code, I got as far as 
https://www.runeaudio.com/forum/help-the-project-f24.html and… kinda 
gave up for the night. It doesn't seem like they've chosen to make it 
easy for people outside their in-set to understand how their software 
works.)

For what it's worth, I routinely run abcde on macOS (of various 
versions), play the files in various ways (including Apple's Music.app, 
and synchronized to both a modern iPhone and a somewhat-dated iPod), and 
I don't have any problems indexing files by artist, album, genre, so forth.

I think that the problem you're having is that the way that you are 
running abcde is not populating the metadata on the files at all. That 
is something that is normally controlled either by command-line flags or 
by configuration file.

That's why both josh and I have asked that you tell us how you're 
running abcde, so that we can help you run it in a way that populates 
those fields that Rune is (we presume) looking for.

I'm also not simply sending you a file that you can save as 
~/.abcde.conf because I would have to do a lot of work to generalize the 
file that I have there so that it doesn't try to access directories that 
don't exist on your system and run programs that you keep in different 
locations.

It's possible that 
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1179179/abcde-what-is-an-abcde-conf-file-to-rip-to-multiple-formats 
may be closer to a turn-key answer for you, but I have not used the 
config file presented there personally, so I can't vouch for it.

> As for utf-8, that is what is required by the rune software, per the developers. As a contrast, I have in the past, used XLD for Mac to encode my music to aiff format, and when transferred to the Pi server, the music files are cataloged and displayed as they should be.

That is a helpful piece of information, but I don't think that the 
problem you're having is related to UTF-8 encoding of track metadata.

I'm also unfamiliar with XLD (I do see 
https://sourceforge.net/projects/xld/). I have no idea what it's doing 
differently with its output files than the way that you have executed 
abcde, and I also don't know how you have executed abcde.

> When they are encoded with Abcde and transferred to the server, the files are only displayed in alpha order. However, they are not cataloged under “album view”, or or album list view. I can access them as is, but this is a bit cumbersome as is.

It would help a lot if you could show us what command you used to run abcde.

> I really like Linux and I like the Abcde script for its capabilities, and want to solve this problem. The fact that XLD produces aiff encoded music that displays properly, tells me that the problem is with some particular setup of the Abcde script.

I understand how you got to that conclusion, but I think that your logic 
is missing several steps, because I don't think that you fully 
understand how the metadata about a given track is attached to the 
actual "music" content.

I also don't think that you should have to understand that in order to 
transfer music from CDs that you own to online digital storage that you 
own. Unfortunately, I don't think that one can perform that operation 
using abcde without understanding more than "should" be necessary about 
that.

-- 
Gabriel Rosenkoetter (he/him)
gr at eclipsed.net
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