Hi,
I am new to using this Forum and also FileFactory, so apologies if these questions seem stupid to some of the well-seasoned users of this Forum.

I downloaded a few Music collections from FileFactory and extracted the files. But the files are simply named Track1.flac, Track2.flac etc and inside ‘properties’ of the file there is no mention of the Track Name, Album, Artist.

Am I doing something wrong?

When I see the care and attention and hard work that goes into building this amazing catalogue and repository of Stones music, I find it hard to believe that the files don’t contain this information.

Does every single person who downloads have to manually rename each of the tracks themselves?

What exactly are all these DAC music files?

Are they recordings that someone has made at live concerts… or something more than that?

Is there any information or guide as to the ‘quality’ of the recording for each of these DAC files?

I am wondering why there are no file names, no track, album or artist names… at all for them within the files? Is it possible that other copies of them exist with the track info intact?

I am beginning to wonder whether the problem is with my extraction process which may be losing the track name, album and artist. I am using a trial version of WinRar.

There seems to be a list of DAC files from DAC 001 up to DAC 190. Is this some well-known list… or who has compiled it?

Will every download-source which mentions a particular number (say DAC 174) always be the same quality… or is there a best place to go to find the better quality that also include song names and album names?

Thanks in advance,
Dave

Welcome Dave,
I believe when these tracks are ripped from cd’s, track 01 etc is the default. To find out the ‘real name’ may need a google search

welcome dave,

"Am I doing something wrong?"
* no

"Does every single person who downloads have to manually rename each of the tracks themselves?"
* not manually: use a file-renamer program to rename the files. i use flash renamer

"What exactly are all these DAC music files? Is there any information or guide as to the ‘quality’ of the recording for each of these DAC files?"
* yes, there is.
f.i.: see bootleg comments of dac 174

"there are no file names, no track, album or artist names… at all for them within the files?"
use a tag program to put the meta data (artist, album, date, track#, filename etc): tag&rename

"I am using a trial version of WinRar."
* read the comments above: it's not winrar

"There seems to be a list of DAC files from DAC 001 up to DAC 190"
* take a look here:
.......dbboots: dog n cat records
.......iorr: post label / publisher "dog 'n' cat"

There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers :-)

DAC (abbreviation for "Dog 'n' Cat") is a bootleg label.
When you go here: [iorr.org] , you will see the list of bootlegs they published. Some of these are recordings made by people in the audience and a few are "soundboards" (labeled "Soundboard,"SB" or "SBN", or...).
Normally, you will get a soundboard (superior sound quality to an "audience tape"), when someone has been able to plug into to mixing desc or intercepted the IEM signal (IEM: In Ear Microphones) that is send to to the different band members, so they can stay in tune. Some venues also provide a sound signal to people with hearing problems; the have some sort of headphone, so they can hear the sound better. This signal can also be intercepted if you have the frequency that's used for this.

Some recordings are superb, others are in poor quality; it all depends on the original recording. If there's only a bad audience recording available of a certain show, they will try to work on it, but mostly the result isn't much better, LOL!

As for the track titles, description and so on; it all depends on the way someone rips his originals. A lot of people will just use a program that rips the CD and produces only numbered tracks. When people have (or take) the time, they can then put in the correct track title, but that's sometimes a lot of work, so very often it's not done.

When you download a recording and it only has track numbers, you can rename the tracks yourself by using the provided artwork. (if there's no artwork available, you can try to google it, or just listen to the tracks one by one and then rename them if you recognize the song)

Important; when you burn a concert to CD, use the DAO (disc at once) option, otherwise you will have a 1 or 2 second gap between tracks.

A download with track numbers or full track name will normally be the same, as long as the CD is ripped to a lossless format like wav or flac. When it's ripped to a lossy format, like mp3, the quality will be less (depending on the sample rate used, it can even be poor)

Hope this helps you some, I'm sure other long time members will give more info (or correct me if I made some mistake in this post)

Chris from Belgium

Thanks Midimanz, j.b.Goode, Coowouters for your replies and information!

To see if I am understanding this correctly…

Common practice is that Flac files on FileFactory or DAC don’t have Tags embedded within each track.
It appears that it is common practice for the person who puts the original collection of Flac files on FileFactory or within the DAC collections not to actually include the Track, Album and Artists names as Tags in the flac files. I must admit that seems very surprising, as this extra piece of work would save hundreds of people all having to that same work of adding Tags for each of the tracks.

Procedure to add these Tags
How to change the filenames from Track1.flac to say “1. You cant always get what you want.flac”

So we could use a program such as Flash Renamer but we will still have to manually
• search the internet for the track names of the album/recording in particular, or else look at the artwork within the collection to see the track names
• type each of the track names one by one into the Flash Renamer and save these tags to the files, as well as the album and artist name (only typed once)
• then convert the files to .mp3 (say 320 bps) if loading to iTunes using something like Switch Plus
• then add the folder to iTunes which would use the Tags to group the tracks into an album

Is there any program that would match the flac files to the correct Tags using the internet, and then insert these tags automatically?

Or anyone have suggestions that make this process as easy/quick as possible?


List mentioning the quality of the DAC files
As Chris pointed out… the is an excellent list of the DAC files
When you go here: [iorr.org] , you will see the list of bootlegs they published. Some of these are recordings made by people in the audience and a few are "soundboards" (labeled "Soundboard,"SB" or "SBN", or...)
It would be great if this list could be expanded to include whether the quality is Good or Poor for each of these recordings, or possibly some more info such as Stereo, low volume, crowd noise or other info.
Does anyone know of any plans to do this… or has it been done anywhere for this full list?
It would be great to know this info before having to download each collection… and then sift through them to find the good quality ones.

I am amazed at the amount of Stones recordings available, and really appreciate all the work that has been put into this Forum over the years. I’ve been listening to the Stones for over 40 years and it’s great to hear new tracks I have never heard before.

Now if I could only find a way to make adding these Tags as easy as possible, that will help downloading and copying these to library where I can listen to them.

Thanks again,
Dave

Hi Dave,

I'm under the impression that you are new to bootlegs (no offense meant!)

Filefactory is a File hosting/sharing service, where DAC is a bootleg label.

When a new bootleg becomes available (mostly thanks to the generous people here on IORR), it is also uploaded to filefactory, where it is stored, so when people are searching for a certain show (from whatever bootleg label), they can have a look if it's available in what we call "The Stones Vault" (Which is in fact the name that we gave the File Factory server where are stored all the titles we have), and if it is, they can download it.
You can find more info on the Stonesvault here: [iorr.org] .

As for Bootleg labels, there's a list here: [iorr.org] ; you will see that there are a lot of labels that produce bootlegs (many are from the same shows, but some labels work on the quality of the original recordings to try to improve it). So DAC is only one of many labels.

As for the renaming, there are a lot of bootlegs where the labeling is done by the uploader, but most programs to rip a CD will only produce track numbers, so the person ripping the CD has to do the renaming himself. And when he doesn't feel like doing that, it's up to the downloaders....

mp3 recordings are a no-go here on IORR, only Flac, wav and the like (what we call lossless) are permitted, unless there's only an mp3 version from a show available (but then it has to be clearly mentioned that it's a recording in mp3.
However, you can convert flac, wav,... to mp3 for your personal use.

There are thousands (!!!) of titles in the Stones Vault, so adding the quality and the like, is nearly impossible. People can upload directly to the Vault and then post the quality here on the forum.
But you have to know that the Vault is been run for 99% by 1 person, nickname: Stonesmuziekfan!

If you need more info, do not hesitate to ask; that's what we're here for!

Chris from Belgium

Renaming tracks is very time consuming.
Trackinfo usually can be found in the artwork.

Thanks again Chris,
Yes, the first bootleg I heard was about a year ago, so hearing new tracks with very good quality was great to hear.

Thanks for explaining everything clearly!

If any other readers know of a program or a process to add Tags that requires less typing, that would also be great to hear.

I am currently using MP3Tag to rename the FLAC files, and also enter Tags for track name, album and artist.

And then Switch Plus to convert to MP3.

I will make a donation shortly as the good work in this Forum should be supported.

Best Wishes,
Dave

I use foobar2000 to tag the files.

Then for song titles (via "Properties" -> "Tools") choose "Automatically Fill Values" and then "Pattern" -> %titles%

Works very fast! Of course, if the tracks are named "Track 1", "Track 2", etc., you have to name the tracks first.
But at least you only have to do it once (and often a file or page can be found from which you can copy-paste the song names).

Cheers,
Joyce

'...I said we...we are heaven bound...'

In the MP3Tag application you can rename multiple files with a text file.

If there is no info file with the download that lists the song titles you can find one on-line.

Create a text file with the song titles and in MP3Tag go to convert, text file-tag. Once you have done this you can create the other tags by using the other options in convert.

For artist, album etc fill in the fields with your preferred sequence, highlight all songs and click save.

This will save you having to do all songs/files separately.

Hi Breadfan,
Could you explain this in a bit more detail?


>>Create a text file with the song titles and in MP3Tag go to convert, text file-tag.

So I can simply make a list of all the track names in a text file (presumably one track name per row), and then MP3Tag will read this text file and rename all the tracks from it?

Dave

Hi Breadfan,
A big "Thank you" for pointing out that great time saving tip. It is very easy to use.

I used it in a very simple way to insert the Title Tag for every track on a download using MP3Tag

The Help section inside MP3Tag is terrible on explaining how to do this.

To do the above simple task of inserting the Title tag, one first creates a text file using Wordpad in the same directory folder as the collection of Flac or MP3 files.

Type the Title name of the first track in the first row, second title in the next row of the file and so on, so the file looks something like
01 Satisfaction
02 Brown Sugar
03 It's All Over Now

From MP3Tag, File, Change Directory to point to the required folder with the Flac files.

Select all the files, and select Convert, Text File - Tag.

Enter the location and filename of the text file, and for the Format String enter %Title% and then click Ok.

And this then adds the title from the text file to the Title Tag in each of the files in the directory.

This feature within MP3Tag is much more powerful and can do many other things... but this is all I want it to do.


After this MP3Tag can insert the Album name, Artist and any other tags you want, and then rename each of the filenames to the title name if you wish.

This saves me a huge amount of time.

There always a hard way and an easy way to do every task ;-)