Description:

This driver is for the Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd media repository. CQC supports various external repositories, such as J.River and DVD Profiler. And those still have their benefits for some types of users. But the CQSL repository has many benefits as well, as long as your media usage patterns fit within those supported by our repository.

The primary benefit of using the CQSL repository is that we provide a CD ripping and metadata retrieval program that is tied directly into our repository driver. So, unlike the J.River and DVD Profiler repositories, there is not the need to work in a third party tool, export a database, and then import that database into CQC. When you use our repository and our repository manager tool, the changes are immediately reflected in the repository as soon as they are made.

• Note that there is a set of How-To videos on setting up the CQSL repository. Use the Learn tab and then the How-To Videos section. Do read the documentation here since it contains details that cannot be covered in the videos, but you can then view the videos to get the big picture flow of using the repository.
• You must have Windows Media Player 10 or later installed on the machines where you want to rip from, else you will not get metadata properly. WMP9 will not work correctly.

You can have multiple repositories, so when you load the repository manager, you will be asked to select a repository to manage:

Select the desired repository from the list and press the select button. Reload will search again for any available repositories. Once you select a repository, you will see the repository manage window (reduced in size here.)

This interface allows you to view the current contents of the repository, rip CDs and upload them to the repository, gather metadata on CDs and DVDs and add that information to the repository, and manage the arrangement of titles and the discs that make them up. The repository currently manages music and movie information, only one of which is shown at any given time. The Media Type menu item allows you to select the current media type to display.

Note that CQC media repositories are arranged in the following hierarchy.

Title Sets. The top level media format. This represents either single or multi-disc titles. If the title set contains five discs, they are contained within the title set. When you browse your media visually in CQC, you will see just the title sets initially. Each disc is called a 'Collection', so a Title Set contains one or more Collections.

Collections. Collections are generally the discs in CD/DVD sets. However, in the future, as we add more media types, such as pictures, then a collection could also be a collection of pictures. So we use the term Collection instead of Disc, to generically indicate a collection of some sort of fundamental media content units (tracks, chapters, pictures, etc...) These fundamental units are called Items, so a Collection contains one or more Items.

Items. Items are the lowest level media units. These are the things you actually play/view, such as a picture, a music track, or the movie itself in a DVD.

The repository manager reflects this hierarchy in the three list boxes at the top. The one on the left contains the title sets for the selected media type. When you select a title set, the collection list will be filled with the collections for that title set. When you select a collection, the items list will be filled with the items for that collection. Detailed information is displayed at the bottom. You can select the level of detail you want using the combo box in the top-left of the Details section. Normally it displays Collection level information, but you can display title set or item level information as well.

Adding Media

To add media to the repository, you must insert the DVD or CD into a drive on the local computer where you are running the repository manager. In most cases, the manager will sense that new media is available and ask you what to do with it. Else, you can use the Tools -> Scan Drives menu item to force it to scan for new media. It will only automatically see the new media if it is the active program. In either case, you will be presented with a dialog box that lists the drives with available media to select from.

Once you select a drive, the metadata for the media contents in that drive will be gathered. A small dialog box will pop up indicating that this is occurring. Once the metadata has been extracted you will be taken to the collection metadata editing interface.

Here you can adjust the metadata as needed. You must select a title set to add the collection to, using the Title Set button in the upper left. You can have it create a new title set (which would be the case if this was a single disc set or the first disc of a set), or add it to an existing set. At the bottom is a drop-down list that lets you indicate how you want to process this media. You will either rip and upload (if it's a CD), add it to a changer, or point it at some existing ripped content (external to the CQCL repository.) Some options will be disabled based on the media type. For instance, aspect ratio has no meaning for a CD. You can add a description for the DVD or CD, and if it is a DVD you can edit the cast list.

Rip and upload is the most common scenario for CDs. This will cause the CD to be ripped and then the metadata and ripped tracks uploaded to the CQSL repository. This means that you can rip CDs from any client that is running the CQC client tools. For all the other options, the media is stored somewhere outside of the CQSL repository and you are just pointing CQC at the data. If you choose to rip a CD, you will first see the ripping dialog, which indicates the ripping progress:

And when the rip process completes, you will see the upload dialog, which indicates the progress on uploading the data to the repository:

Once the rip is completed, or if you selected one of the other options, you will be taken back to the main manager window and the new media will be added and will be selected as the current media.

The settings used for ripping the CD are available in the Tools -> Settings menu. If you have not yet gone into the settings and selected a ripping format, the first time you try to rip a CD you will be told that this needs to be done and you will be taken to the settings dialog to make that choice. See the Settings section below.

Editing Data

Each of the levels of the hierarchy can be edited. Just double click on the item in its respective list box. If you double click a title set, you will get the title set editing dialog. You can adjust the order of collections in that title set, or remove a collection from a title set, and adjust the artist name or the sort title. The sort title is used when displaying title sets and will leave out leading words like The and A and so forth, and will be all in upper case so as to avoid differences between upper/lower case when sorting.

You can also set title level cover art. For instance, the Star Wars Trilogy box set has separate art for the overall trilogy, and the individual collections have their own covers. If you don't set title level cover art, you will get the cover art for the first collection in the set. So if it is a multi-disc set and you want to have set-level art displayed, set it here.

If you double click on an item, you will go back to the main metadata editing window that you have already seen. The only difference is that the storage mechanism settings at the bottom are not available now. If you double click on an item, then you will get the item editing dialog. Here you can adjust the title and artist names, the duration and the year.

Note that in both cases above the artist name is separated into first/last. This is important for sorting correctly (which is done by last name.) But, it is sometimes gotten wrong because of the many forms of artist names out there. For instance, if the band name were Moody Blues, it would think that those are the first/last names of an artist, and split it into Moody and Blues. So you may need to adjust that to put both words into the last name. The rule is that if there is only one 'name' then it must be in the last name field, since that is used for the main sort level, and the first name is used to sort within any ranges where the last name is the same.

Repository Settings

The CQSL repository is purposefully kept quite simple and easy to use. So there are just a few settings. If you use the Tools -> Settings menu item, you will be taken to the settings dialog:

You can set the encoding options, which control the format of ripped CD data, you can enable jitter correction, and you can have the drive be automatically ejected after ripping a CD (or adding a DVD.)

You will generally not need jitter correction. It makes up for errors in reading CD data during ripping. The CD file system format is not terribly good, and sometimes the data asked for by the ripper isn't what is returned. Jitter correction will attempt to figure out when this happens and adjust for it by asking for more data than it really needs and finding the overlaps between each read chunk of data. It adds a fair amount of overhead to the ripping process.

The encoding options allow you to select a codec (an encoder/decoder) to use when ripping CDs, and once you pick a codec, to select one of the formats supported by that codec. Currently WMA is the only available ripping format. So you will be allowed to choose from the available WMA codecs that support 2 channel PCM (CD format) data. Generally, there will be two. One will be a lossy format, which offers a number of levels of lossiness. The other will be a lossless format, which will generally only provide a single level of quality (since lossless is lossless.)

Hot Keys

There are some hot keys to allow power users to more quickly get around the repository manager. These are documented in the following table.

Hot Key	Description
Ctrl-A	Add the currently selected item to a playlist
Ctrl-O	Select the movie media type
Ctrl-M	Manually add a collection to the repository
Ctrl-U	Select the music media type

 

Quirks and Limitations:

The CQSL repository only supports disc based metadata retrieval. I.e. you must put a CD or DVD into the drive in order to get metadata, even if you are not going to rip the data into the CQSL repository. So if you do not have a disc oriented collection, you would probably be better off with the J.River and/or DVD Profiler repositories.

Currently only the WMA (Windows Media Audio.) format is supported for ripping CDs. Others will likely be added in the future.

You must have Windows Media Player 10 or 11 installed on the machines where you want to rip from, else you will not get metadata properly.

Connection Details

There are not really any connection issues. The media repository driver just looks at a directory in terms of reading/write the repository. The media repository manager inherently knows how to talk to CQSL repository drivers.

Driver Fields

This section lists the fields that the driver makes available, their types, minimum and maximum values, etc... The CQSL repository driver has the same fields that all repository drivers provide. These are very few because you don't really deal with media repositories via the field interface.

Name	Type	R/W	Description/Limits
Loaded	Boolean	R	Indicates whether the repository is loaded or not. It is set at the end of a scan of the XML file. If the scan fails, this will be set to false.
ReloadDB	Boolean	W	Write true or false to this field to make the driver re-load the XML file.
Status	String	R	Indicates the current repository status. If all is well it indicates that the data is loaded. During the load process it indicates progress status as the load continues. If no repository has been loaded, it indicates that.