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Roku Media Player Blues

Judge

Well-Known Member
V.I.P Member
Don't get me wrong, it works great. However it's taken me a very long time to understand what it takes for it to produce information pertinent to audio tracks and album cover thumbnails that correspond to the correct song or album in question.

In essence, for all those tracks to show exactly what you want to see, you have to be 100% accurate in properly spelling out the name of an artist, the exact album pertinent to a particular track, and the track itself. Otherwise it won't visually show an album thumbnail, but instead just a musical note icon.

With major music artists it just required to search for each track and the artist to match the proper album. But where it gets weird is when you're dealing with artists using the Internet without a formal music publisher. When you can find the artist, even an album graphic, but that Roku's Media Player database simply doesn't recognize it. Something I found in trying to connect a Celtic music artist to a specific piece of work.

Another problem that left me with the Media Player showing only those red musical note icon instead of an album thumbnail are music collections of classical music which are about major composers (Mozart,Beethoven, Bach...etc.) but may not be clear on the symphony or musicians involved. Which apparently "confuses" Roku's database and can't match them to a particular album, even if it existed as a vinyl record.

Though from Roku's perspective, they may simply lament, "Who cares?" I guess for most folks they will just deal with those red musical note icons and call it a day...lol. The short answer? It sucks to have OCD and actually be obsessed over the appearance and consistency of such things.

At least I managed to eventually find all the right database info required to make those album thumbnails show up. Except for my Celtic and Classical music categories which I chose to deliberately alter to make all of the show the red musical note icon just to be consistent. Oh well...
 
Have a play with Grip, it's in your standard repository.

It's primarily a CD ripper but can also be used to convert other formats to MP3 and it allows you to edit the exif information in MP3s. It will attempt to get album information from IMDB but if it can't find any it will ask you to fill in the information by hand. Sometimes it will find several similar entries in IMDB and present all of them to you and ask which is correct.
 
Have a play with Grip, it's in your standard repository.

It's primarily a CD ripper but can also be used to convert other formats to MP3 and it allows you to edit the exif information in MP3s. It will attempt to get album information from IMDB but if it can't find any it will ask you to fill in the information by hand. Sometimes it will find several similar entries in IMDB and present all of them to you and ask which is correct.

Interesting, though in my experience I found the Roku Media Player's database not necessarily uniformly correlating to any one particular source like IMDB. That I had multiple titles where I had to hunt, peck and most of all hold my breath to see if Roku would acknowledge what I input on a file's metatag.

I also have encountered similar issues with Mazda's"Gracenote" system, which interfaces with whatever is on my USB drive plugged into my Bose car audio system. It's real picky as well.

But it's all academic now, given I've pretty much got my entire music collection accounted for in such a way, except for classical and Celtic titles. And of course I've archived it all on multiple flash drives so I never lose it. I'm just glad that this project has come to an end. Something I've been wanting to do for a long time.
 
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This is a great post. I need learn more about Roku.

I love it...but then sometimes my OCD gets the best of me in trying to perfect things. But I love the idea that their MP3 media player connects directly into my TV, and that I can output it from there to both my 37-year old 2-channel stereo receiver, and my 15-year old 5.1 home theater system.

The beauty of it all is the convenience. Being able to make a few clicks with a remote and voila! You have access to an entire music collection showing on your tv screen. Much faster than I can fetch an optical disk and put into my DVD/CD player.

Plus the Roku remote has it's own 3.5mm headphone jack. Though I prefer to use the one on my 2-channel receiver as it doesn't eat up batteries, plus I can make critical use of the receiver's built-in graphic equalizer.

Another really cool thing about Roku is that can interface with my cable company, so I don't even need to turn on my old cable box any more. I just go through Roku to get to my cable tv lineup. In some cases some cable systems even offer streaming services, but with commercials at no additional charge. Works for me.

Seems to be a very real trend that cable tv systems who want to survive must migrate towards streaming media. Where I find way better programming in general.
 
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