As we were receiving such great responses from these features, we thought…”What about giving a music album recommendation, where not only you listen to the album tracks and that’s it, but you also get to know everything that comprises it, and in one single newsletter? This is exactly what here at Volumio did in collaboration with Music Expert Jacques Krischer.  Today I’m so happy to introduce to you this new initiative called Music Letter.

What is Music Letter?

A newsletter that gives you the chance to discover, or rediscover every weekend a music album. In today’s world there is so much information out, and to keep track of it can be such an overwhelming process, this is why we created Music Letter. You might have listened to an album, but have you thought about all the stories behind the process and growth of it?

We believe that not only the melody or the tracks; but the whole story, the thought process, the after-releasing events that go into the album is what makes it more fascinating to listen to it and enjoy it to the fullest. Each week, we choose one album and gather all the information associated with it (this is carefully searched, compiled and written by the great Musicologist Jacques).

You will find info such as Review, Production Facts, Links to listen to it on different platforms, events that happened on the day of the release, trivia about the album and artists, a fun treat, and much more!

Music Letter brings you all the fun and interesting resources behind the album you love or behind an album (or albums) you’ve never heard of… but might be your favorite one. You can expect albums we are sure you will enjoy, new or old-school artists, and a mix of genres to explore different music choices. One space to give you all the music resources and recommendations along the way, in an entertaining approach. Paid once for a year, and every weekend we will send the newsletter straight to your inbox.

The newsletter is €29 a year and to be more specific, this is what you will receive every weekend in the newsletter:

• Album Presentation,
• Review,
• Productions Facts,
• Links to listen to it on your preferred music server,
• Trivia related to the album/artist, and even
• Historical/Music Events with the date associated with the album/artist.

And to make it more entertaining, a fun quiz to test your music knowledge. 

Our goal with Music Letter is to give in one single space all the information related to a music album, in an enjoyable but detailed way.

Why is it going to be paid?

We are doing this because we love music and what we do. But unfortunately love does not pay for our email server, web hosting, the Music Letter team’s lunch… Jokes aside, as we are doing this in collaboration with a Music Expert, all the information you get it’s carefully searched, compiled and written, giving accurate material and what we believe is quality content.

Since you made it all the way here on this post, I would like to invite you to try it out and know what your thoughts are on it.

Sign up, receive your first newsletter (for free!) and let us know what your feelings are about it.

The post Discover a music album every week with Music Letter! appeared first on Volumio.

Let’s start the year as we always do, with great music!

Check below our weekly album recommendations. And if you missed our 2020 album of the week compilation, you can check it out here

Week #1

 Released in 2013, Aleph by GESAFFELSTEIN takes us to the genre of IDM, electro and techno.

Debut album for the French producer Mike Levy aka Gesaffelstein.

The best gift of Mike Levy is certainly the versatility, the epic IDM of Piece of future is a bit the summa of the album that ranges between EDM (Pursuit and Obsession), UK bass rhythms (Out of line and Hellifornia) and industrial ambient (Hate Or Glory) to testify the ability to grasp the creative core of each style.

Not all of Aleph’s explanations are complete (Duel and Hellifornia): reconciling the ambient minimalism of some songs with the dance explosiveness of others is a titanic undertaking, but Levy is a character who could give us surprises in the future.

Electro milestone!

Purchase it on Amazon: Aleph by Gesaffelstein

Week #2

Listen to some electro-pop and folk with Eivør and her album Slør (English Version), released in 2015.

The artist has graciously shown to the world the Faroese folk and ballad through her music. This album we have chosen for this week was firstly done in an English version but later released in a second version that would be in her native language, Faroese. Nonetheless, even when we listen to the English version, the Faroese heritage is still beautifully appreciated in the album.

Eivør combines in a mysterious and -you could somehow say in a darker way- a style of different genres: starting from ease folk, with a touch of pop and electronic. You will notice that Slør, comparing to previous albums, is more instrumental than vocal. She provides something new in this experimental album, although always keeping her essence she still continues to evolve over the course of her career.

In Slør you can listen to a mix of both the old and new. “Trøllabundin” reflects the traditional folk, showing us a glimpse of her heritage. In addition, a mix of contemporary sounds is found with electronic beats. In “Petti Fyri Petti” (Piece by Piece), the song delivers an intimate scene with only a guitar, her distinctive voice and humming, giving a serene sensation. 

A well-deserving recognition must be given to Eivør. One of the most important achievements of an artist is to show their country’s tradition and culture through music, and Eivør has long reached the dream of many, to put her dearest country in the music scene and to make their traditional music a global success.

If you are one who enjoys discovering new music, “Slør” is a must album to put on your playlist, and the best part is that there are two versions to enjoy. We’ll leave you below the links for both versions. 

Must-tracks to listen:

• Broken
• Into the mist
• Piece by Piece

Purchase vinyl on Amazon: Slør by Eivør

ORIGINAL LANGUAGE VERSION: EIVOR Slor (Faroese version)

Week #3

THE KNIFE Shaking the habitual – electro pop, dance, trance – 2013

This week we bring you an album from The Swedish sibling’s duo known for captivating listeners with unconventional and experimental music: The Knife. The band has unfortunately dissolved after the release of the album Shaking the Habitual, released in 2013. Regardless, it should be a shame not to continue to appreciate the core of the album, a political message sounded in tune.

The electronic and dance duo were back on their game with Shaking the Habitual, after a long 7 years since the release of their first album Silent Shout back in 2006. 

For some, the album can be difficult to be listened to at first, but the wide range of uncommon sounds and electric pieces they created and combined nicely in each song and the whole album, with songs such “A tooth for an eye” or “Fracking Fluid Injection” send the listeners to the point where normal and strange meet (where we believe it’s a good point to be at).

A 19-minute track seems not bearable to listen to all, but “Old dreams waiting to be realized” gives a dark and pensive ambiance to isolate you with only the sound and your thoughts. Additionally, it seems to split the album into two parts

Besides the eclectic sounds, their words manifest a strong political message about different aspects of some issues in our current society, the corruption, modern consumption, and the problems with privilege, among others. As they expressed in the “Shaking The Habitual – The Interview” video: “Lyrics are inspired by 70s protest songs from our childhood or maybe our record poses the question what can I protest song be today.”

A challenging but excellent album for the audacious listener.

The must-track you should not miss: 

• Full of Fire
• A Cherry on Top
• Ready to lose

Purchase the vinyl on Amazon: Shaking The Habitual by The Knife

Week #4

This week we present to you the album ANAKRONIC/KRAKAUER by Anakronic Electro Orkestra. An album with a mix of acid electro, fusion and alternative, released in March 2016.

Brilliant and dark is the Balkan fusion sound of the Toulouse-based collective, Anakronic Electro Orchestra, featuring clarinetist David Krakauer.

We find in this mix the audacity of combining acid electro with ancestral sounds, and the people’s tradition. The result is an electro-klezmer ensemble with a mixture of styles such as jazz, funk, rap, rock.

Improvisation has always been a distinctive trait of the clarinetist, the histrionic musical fantasy that is created by the close artistic collaboration is something that reveals unique aesthetic energy and communicative power.

This is music at the state of the art, beyond all frontiers!

Purchase it on Amazon: Anakronic / Krakauer by Anakronic Electro Orkestra

Week #5

This week, listen to hip-hop-electro French duo Smokey Joe & The Kid’s album Nasty Tricks, released in 2013.

Smokey Joe (the boss of the Bordeaux musical mafia) and The Kid (Parisian turntablist), are a duet that transports us almost a century in time with the artifice of modern magic made of groovy beats, scratches and samples. This debut LP brings with it sonic manipulation, experimentation and a lot of gangsta attitude. Here … the image of a cocktail between 2Pac and Al Capone in Brooklyn street NYC is the perfect curtain for this sound.

For connoisseurs here we have the honor of excellent collaborations: Puppetmastaz, Youthstar (Chinese Man), Sugaray Redford, Random Recipe and many more ..
Strong the influence of 90’s hip hop and the swing of the early twentieth century creates the perfect setting for a rhythmic, cheerful, but unforgiving urban poetry …. Bang!

Start with a bang!

Purchase it on Amazon: Nasty Tricks by Smokey Joe & The Kid

So, the most important question, what are your thoughts on it? Is it related to your music preferences?

Tell us in the comments!

Reviews are written by DED@Volumio

Do you enjoy Volumio Album of the week? Then you will love Music Letter! Check it out.

The post Volumio Album of the Week – 2021 appeared first on Volumio.

I work with a lot of different playback systems whilst supporting bliss and the one thing they have in common is a requirement to get your library organization right. That’s a subtle requirement; in general, music will play fine. But to get the most out of a music system it’s best to make sure your library is correctly organized. That includes Volumio.

Volumio offers a bunch of handy helpers to work around music library inconsistencies and incompleteness. For example, a cover art downloader is built into Volumio to automatically populate missing album artwork (in the UI; files are unaffected). But still, your Volumio experience can be improved by following a few simple rules to improve your library.

In this article, I’ll demonstrate some of these rules, and then show how bliss can be used to implement fixes.

Cover art

To some, cover art is an irrelevance. To many though it’s an essential part of a digital music collection; it helps with selecting and finding music as well as its enjoyment whilst playing.

Volumio first looks for artwork in an image file inside an album folder, and then, if enabled, inside a music file (cover art can be embedded inside a music file). If that fails, Volumio can look up the artwork online.

Here’s an example library I put together:

Looking good, except for that pesky missing cover art for Electric Music’s North London Spiritualist Church. These types of gaps can be frustrating!

The fix is to find the artwork yourself, and save the image with one of the following names in the album folder:

coverart
albumart
cover
Cover
folder
Folder

The images can be in either PNG or JPEG format with the usual file extensions, .png or .jpg respectively. The first character can be capitalized, as can the entire file extension.

Alternatively, I’ll show how to fix it with bliss later on.

Multi-artist compilations

Scroll down the list and it gets worse – my library is totally disorganized:

We can see an album has been split by its track artists. This is common in a lot of music players, such as iTunes.

The cause is that the album’s track artist varies from track to track. The fix is to either set one consistent artist for all tracks or (and this is better) to set an ALBUM ARTIST field for all tracks. Another approach is to mark the tracks as being within a compilation using the COMPILATION tag.

You can do this with any music tagger, common ones used as MP3Tag (Windows) or Kid3 (Mac); again I’ll show how to do this with bliss later.

Multi-disc albums

Multi-disc albums are those where the album contains multiple media in one of the release formats, such as multiple CDs. If you’ve ripped from a CD then, chances are, the files are separated by CD. If the album name tags are the same for both rips, this means the tracks will be grouped together, which is probably what you want; after all, it’s the same album.

However, if there’s no way of distinguishing that the tracks came from separate media then the ordering of the tracks will be mixed up. Here’s what Elvis Costello’s The Very Best of Elvis Costello looks like for me:

The track listing is wrong; it starts (What’s So Funny ‘Bout)… from disc one, which is correct, but the next track should be Oliver’s Army. Instead, tracks one and two from disc two interject.

There are two main solutions. The first, less acceptable one, is to simply rename the albums, splitting them, e.g. “The Very Best of Elvis Costello (Disc One)“. However, this loses the canonical spelling of the album and may make things like album art lookup more difficult.

The better solution is to add DISCNUMBER tags, set to 1 and 2 for the tracks in each of the discs respectively. Again, music taggers like MP3Tag can do this, alternatively I’ll be fixing it in bliss below.

Setting bliss up

bliss is a bit different to the other music taggers I mentioned. The latter tend to provide an interface to change what you like in music files, with some batch actions. bliss is different; instead you specify which constraints you want your library to obey. You do this by defining rules. From there it does the same job as a ‘vanilla’ music tagger: it writes to the tags inside music files.

There are many advantages to this; beyond the fact that there’s simply less work to do this way, it’s a better longer term solution because the same rules can be continually applied as a library develops.

That’s all a bit abstract, so applying this to this discussion, we can define rules from what we have learnt above (plus adding a bit of interpretation and determinism):

• Cover art should be called Folder This is a good choice for interoperability with older versions of Windows.
• Only JPEGs and PNGs are permitted.
• We want to use ‘canonical’ album artists.
• We want to use canonical album names.
• We want to ensure the DISCNUMBER field is populated.

Once bliss is installed, you can set it up. Click the settings cog, and enable the rules we have defined above. First, click the ON/OFF button for Cover art and enable the rule:

Now onto the bliss Tags rule. Click ON/OFF under Tags

Here we’ve specified we want canonical album and artist names, and also we require the DISCNUMBER and COMPILATION fields to be populated.

Once the settings are complete, you can begin bliss’s scan by clicking Apply Rules. At this point, bliss starts scanning the library. bliss will automatically fill in missing cover art, but all other actions can only be automated if an automation option is presented in the settings.

Once each album completes its scan, it is marked as being Compliant or Non-Compliant against your rules.

As the missing cover art rule is fully automatic, that missing cover art is filled in for us:

The Atlantic Soul album is marked non-compliant; not only is the disc number not part of the canonical album name, but the overall album name is incorrect too. In addition it’s not marked as a Compilation as it should be:

I’ll click the fix buttons to make the album compliant. In addition, I’ll set “Various” as the ALBUM ARTIST for this album using the web based tag editor:

Finally, on to our single artist, multi disc album. When checking the album detail page for The Very Best of Elvis Costello we see options to set the disc numbers to make sure playing order is preserved:

Clicking the Grouped fixes brings the album back into compliance.

Back to Volumio!

Click My Music from the settings cog, then the Update button to re-scan the changed music files. Occasionally you may need a full Rescan.

The cover art is now correctly completed:

The multi-disc album is no longer split:

And finally The Very Best of Elvis Costello now has a correctly ordered tracklist:

I hope that gives an idea of how bliss can help organize your Volumio music library!

BLISS HW WEBSITE

The post How to get a perfectly organized Music Library: a guide by Bliss founder Dan Gravell appeared first on Volumio.