My aim is to create a Dolby TrueHD version of a music album, using a MKV container. My input files are MLP files created with the Dolby Media Encoder from my original Dolby Atmos Master files. I have actually managed to create a single .mkv (or .mka) file containing my full album by adding the first track and then appending the following tracks. I make the input file names look exactly like my album track names (including the track number) and set the Chapter template to <FILE_NAME>.
So far, so good. VLC can play the file and I can see my song titles under Chapter.
But I would also like to add metadata, such as the album title, the artist, contributing persons etc. It seems reasonable that this information should go into the Global tags, but I haven’t yet found out what the xml file should look like. I have tried xml code using TagName and TagString, but without success.
I’m putting my hope to the Community to guide me on this
I’m sure dbpoweramp is a great tool to rip meta data. However, I am a music producer and I have all the meta data. The question is if it’s possible to include meadata into the mkv files.
I have understood from discussions with other people that there is no standardized way to do this (yet). Furthermore, players that can read audio from MKV files treat meta data content in different ways.
As you know MKVToolNix GUI doesn’t include a tag editor, simply because doing GUI work is not my strength (and I don’t enjoy it that much). I consider a good tag editor to require a lot of thought into its design, especially with easy of use & presentation of information. All work that I don’t want to do. Therefore you’re left with what you stumbled upon, editing XML files.
There are rather simple example files available here. There are more examples out there, e.g. on the Matroska web site. The format listed there is exactly the format MKVToolNix uses.
Additional general information about the tagging system can be found in the specification that’s currently in the formal specification process over on the IETF (I’m a member of that working group). That spec also includes of recommended tag names to use for better compatibility. You can still use your own names if you don’t find an official recommendation for something; they’re free-form strings inside Matroska.
Coming back to MKVToolNix GUI & mkvmerge: when you’ve got your XML file you need to hand it over to MKVToolNix. There are two places for it: track tags & global tags. The difference is pretty simple:
if you use it with “track tags” mkvmerge will automatically add the Matroska “target” elements (in XML speak: <Tag> → <Targets> → <TrackUID>) so that the resulting tags will be interpreted to be track-specific
if you use the “global tags” features mkvmerge will not do anything with the <Targets> element, meaning you can target however you want yourself — for audio+video files (aka movies) this is usually the way to go as you can target “the whole movie” by not targetting tracks/chapters; it’s also the way to go if you want to have multiple chapters & have different tags for different chapters
Note that there’s an unfortunate chicken/egg problem wrt. to targeting: the target elements require a UID (unique ID), and mkvmerge assigns those randomly the first time you merge something into a Matroska file (it’ll keep existing UIDs when you read stuff from Matroska files, though). Meaning you only know the UID of the thing you want to target after having merged it at least once. For tracks this isn’t a problem as there’s the dedicated “track tags” feature which takes care of that. But for targeting anything else via UID (chapters…) the workflow is currently:
merge once without tags into a temporary Matroska file
get assigned UIDs from said file with tools such as mkvmerge -J yourfile.mkv
construct tags XML file targeting via UIDs determined in step 2 and finally
merging temporary file created in step 1 together with global tags created in step 3 in to final file
Like I said, this is an area I haven’t spent too much development time on, and it shows.
Hope this is enough information to get you started, or at least to let you make a decision whether or not to go forward with trying to use Matroska. If you have more specific questions, shoot, and I’ll try to answer (hopefully somewhat sooner than this one).
Hi there again: I don’t personally get in this deep where all of my multi-channel albums are concerned. I prefer DTS -MA over Atmos, all the tracks of everything I’ve remixed are in individual Windows folders that store the entire album. I can load onto a flash drive that I can either play right on the PC (Media Player Classic -BE) or plug into my Blu-ray player that all goes into my Yamaha Aventage AVR. But putting all into a single mkv container is intriguing…will this help you out at all with the site owners permission… MKV Tag Editor - MKV, MKA, MK3D, MKS Matroska Tag Editor
