Music Media Helper: New Tool to aid Penteo upmixers

[HomerJAU]

The new 'Update Penteo Files' tool added in MMH 3.8 automatically tags Penteo upmixed FLAC files, renames the files, updates album art and (optionally) remixes Quad upmixes to 5.0 or 5.1 (silent channels added for quads for compatibility with many AVRs).

This tool was added for Penteo upmixers to ease the pain of tagging the new multichannel files created from input files after using Penteo. Batch Penteo upmixing is hands off and easy but tagging the files is very much a time consuming and tedious effort, if you are upmixing many albums! Not any more!

For the tool to work as designed: (updated 12 Dec 2020)
1. All input files must be in stereo format (WAV, FLAC etc)
2. All input files must be tagged
3. The Penteo output files must have channels > input file channels (e.g quad, 5.1, 7.1 etc)
4. The input and output files must be in the same (album) folder
5. No. of input & output files must be equal

NOTE: Reaper has a Batch Mode that can be setup to do 3 and 4 above.

The tool can recursively load all the music folders that conform to the above rules into the tool's grid (showing basic info)

After loading your upmix folder(s) (The tool checks for valid files and shows any issues stopping the process on that album folder)

Users can edit two tags for each album: Comments and Album name. These update copied tags.

Clicking 'Process Files' does the following

- For each input file in each album folder:
--- Copies the tags from input file to corresponding MCH (output) file
--- Tags album cover art (if a file 'folder.jpg' or 'cover.jpg' exists in the album folder) into the output file
--- Renames the output file based on user preferences ('Title' or 'Artist - Title' both with track prefix)
--- Checks if output file is 4 channel (quad) file and if so remixes added silent channel(s) based on a user preferences (center or centre + LFE)

Each Penteo upmixed file is Tagged, renamed etc and ready for use.

The tool also has a recursive 'Delete all wavs' command to clean up all the input wavs, leaving the album folders with just the mch FLACs and art.

Examples:

Here's one of the album folders after a Penteo UM: (upmixed FLAC files are untagged - wavs are the input files)

Here's the same folder after running the new Penteo Tool: (FLACS are tagged and renamed)

Here's another view of the folder showing cover art has been tagged in the FLACs:

In this example all the files from the 5 ‘good’ album folders were processed in only a few seconds (on an SSD drive)

Here's the user preferences dialog:

Here's information on an error found during selection of folders to process. Hover mouse over error icon and you see the problem:

This new tool is available in the new Music Media Helper 3.8 release which is now online.

THX

 

[HomerJAU]

Although I’ve called this a Penteo tool it will work with SpecWeb and other upmixers since only requires wav and FLACs to be in the same folder. Wav tags get copied to FLAC tags etc, regardless of their origin. All the rules still apply.P

 

[HomerJAU]

So here's a few more screen shots of the next MMH update with version 2 of the Penteo/Specweb Tagging tool:

The main updated feature is adding support for finding and tagging Album artwork (both cover art and disc art):

Find Album Art from the Fanart.Tv website:

Smart/Fuzzy Search for album art on your PC or network (including NAS and external drives):

To save any of the album art images to the album folder, simply double-click on the image. If its cover art, it will be tagged to the FLAC when the files are processed.

To setup the Smart Search go into the Artwork Search Preferences dialog and add all the root music folders that may containing album art for other versions of the same album:

So in my screenshot above I have set 3 possible folders that could have album art for my new Penteo upmixes:
1. The original Stereo root folder with all my stereo FLAC albums
2. The Penteo UM folder where I keep all my completed upmixes for playback (I often redo one again, so the artwork will be there already)
3. My new Penteo UM testing folder. This is where I put all my UMs to listen to, sometimes maybe two or three of same album from different sources.

For this to work. MMH looks recursively through every sub-folder in every user set Root folder for a Full Folder Path that contains both the ARTIST and ALBUM names.

Examples that will be found for the ARTIST: Midnight Oil ALBUM: Diesel And Dust (The search is not case sensitive)
E:\stereo\Midnight Oil\Diesel and Dust\folder.jpg
E:\stereo\Midnight Oil\Diesel and Dust (1990)\folder.jpg
E:\stereo\old albums\Midnight Oil - Diesel and Dust (CD)\folder.jpg

The latest version of this Penteo Tagging Tool also adds:
Double-Click on 'Cover Art' or 'Disc Art' cell in the grid opens the Album Art dialog and displays any artwork already in the album folder
Double-Click on any other cell in the grid open the album folder in Windows Explorer (easy access)

Other new Features:
Version 3.8.2 also adds Search, Selection and Tagging of Cover Art in MMH's Musicbrainz Tagging dialog (Renaming Tool):

 

[tboomer]

Unfortunately I have been Penteo upmixing from flac input (not wav)... any chance of a rev that can recognize the input flac files for source tags?

Great work BTW you crazy .net guy.

 

[HomerJAU]

This tool can’t use FLAC as an input file, sorry.

To work out which set of files are ‘input’ (tagged) and which are ‘output’ (Penteo) it just looks for wav and FLAC. If they are all FLAC there’s nothing to differentiate them. (It then works out which are the matching file pairs by sorting them in file name order).

I guess I could change the code to look at each file’s channel count and ignore the file type. Stereo = input, >2 = output (The Penteo file). Probably not do difficult to do. I’m pretty busy this weekend, maybe I can do this next week?

Penteo recommends using wav as inputs, hence that’s what the code assumes. My workflow is to first use Foobar2000 to convert my source album files to wav. These are on my NAS and the wav conversions output goes to an SSD drive on my PC (NVME so it’s very fast). I then use Reaper with Izotope Imager and Penteo to create the MCH FLACs in the wav (input) folder, process with MMH (including MMH deleting the WAVs) then add ReplayGain and do a DR report.

 

[tboomer]

Hmm well I have lots of hi-res stereo SACD content that I have ripped to .dsf and then converted to 24/192 .flac with JRiver, which I then feed into the REAPER batch beastie (as documented by yourself!).. seems to me it is REAPER that digests the input file, not Penteo, so not sure that a WAV vs a FLAC matters to Penteo...

At any rate it would be amazing if you could make a mod to MMH to differentiate the input flac vs the output flac and do the output tagging! (I suppose the alternative is to get a REAPER mod which would preserve the input tagging info which it does not seem to do.)

Again, thanks for all the advice and insight.. it was your input and tutorials that convinced me to try out Penteo16 (not to mention a Christmas bonu$).

 

[HomerJAU]

I was using MMH to process a couple more Quad + LFE Penteo upmixes yesterday and was thinking of having a go at changing it to use the channel count. It should be easy so I’ll find some time on Monday or Tuesday to do the change. You could then use any stereo input files that Reaper supports that can be tagged.

Il’ll leave the wav support as is as I’ve also upmixed from 5.1 (to 7.1) not just stereo sources.

 

[tboomer]

Looking forward to this!

 

[HomerJAU]

I just uploaded a new version with these changes:

Music Media Helper 4.0.14 Released:

Version 4.0.14 (December 12 2020)
-------------
Fixes:
Rename and Tag Tool: Fixed CUE file creation where Album Name has an illegal Slash character (in filename)

Changes:
Update Penteo Files Tool: The tool now works with any stereo input file that can be tagged (previously only tagged WAV supported)
Update Penteo Files Tool: The tool now works with any MCH output file that can be tagged (previously only FLAC supported)
Updated PDF docs


Let me know how it goes. I did a bit of testing and it looks ok.

EDIT: Although I’ve documented this tool must have stereo input file and MCH output files the Rule is actually:

The number of output file channels must be greater than than input file channels. Stereo to 5.1 is common but this tool will support 5.1 to 7.1, Quad to 5,1 etc. MMH just finds all files in the source folder and groups them into input and output by number of channels. The least number become the input files.

 

[tboomer]

Tried it out... it works!

BUT: the Preferences dialog always goes to 'Global Preferences' after 'flashing' something else.. so I cant set any preferences...

It is surprisingly slow.. taking minutes (2-4) per folder of say 8-10 tracks. I am wondering if the quad remix option is kicking in (all my input is stereo and all output is 5.1)...

 

[HomerJAU]

I’ll check out what may cause the Preferences issue. Strange...

The Quad Remix options shouldn’t kick in unless your media files have 4 channels or one other Preference is set (which you can’t as per your post).

192kHz 5.1 files will be very large. Where are the stored? On a network drive will be (normally) quite slow, USB 2.0 drives also. Some Laptop drives can be pretty slow if not SSD etc.

I use an NVME SSD drive (read/write at > 2000MB/sec) on 96kHz files and tagging alone is very fast (< 30s I’d guess)

 

[HomerJAU]

BUT: the Preferences dialog always goes to 'Global Preferences'

Use the Copy Penteo Tags dialog, Menu command and select Preferences to access the Penteo tool preferences. (Not the Preferences in Main Launcher dialog)

 

[tboomer]

Duh!

 

[tboomer]

Use the Copy Penteo Tags dialog, Menu command and select Preferences to access the Penteo tool preferences. (Not the Preferences in Main Launcher dialog)

DOH!