ID3 v.2 tags not working
 

Hi

New n900 user and this is my first post.

Today I posted in the Bugzilla two comments about ID3 tags :

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6660#c2

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6593#c2

It seems that the media player does not recognize my usage of ID3 v.2 tags and relies solely on v.1. It would be nice if anyone could confirm or shed some additional light upon this subject.

I have read this thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=14312 It touches upobn the subject matter, but is quite old now and there is no discussion about v1 vs v2.

Re: ID3 v.2 tags not working
 

I cannot confirm your problem.

I also have the n900, and have loaded my entire music collection to it and all, or at least most of the files have correctly loaded the metadata. Out of ~5000 tracks loaded, only 25 have unknown artist.

Which id3v.2 version are you using? I quickly checked which tags some of my files had. Found files with no id3v1 tag, and id3v2.2 or id3v2.4 tags. The n900 loaded the metadata correctly.

Re: ID3 v.2 tags not working
 

In the second case where the ID3 v.1 tag "won" over the v.2 it was 2.4.

In the second case I may be wrong upon closer inspection. It seems my flac files use a different kind of tags, set/manipulated by Mozilla Songbird.

OK. Closer inspection and some googling. It is <edit>flac metada</edit> that the media player does not recognize. My bad. Sorry.

(However, it should, IMHO, but since it does not support Vorbis formats out of the box, this might not be high on Nokia's radar...)

Re: ID3 v.2 tags not working
 

I was confused by Kid3 as explained in this image. I would like to file a bug with them. Anyone who can help.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2780/...98224d_o_d.png

Re: ID3 v.2 tags not working
 

I don't know if it is the same problem you have but the tagging on my device is well off. It only recognises album artist over actual song artist. This means for example if I am listening to an album by Whitney Houston every single song will show on the device as Whitney Houston and never tells me the artists that feature on any of her songs.

However that is not where it gets fully annoying. The most annoying is when I am listening to a compilation album. The artist for each and every song will show as Various Artists so I can never tell the artist that sang any of the songs.

I will give a very huge present to anyone that can help me solve this problem other than me actually having to go back and incorrectly put the song artist in as the album artist for each song.

Re: ID3 v.2 tags not working
 

I need some advice now on how to add ID3 tags to my flac (and perhaps ogg) files. A script to extract the metadata and then add it back in id3 format is my goal. Any tools that can help me. Google gives me nothing of value, having tried a dozen queries.

Re: ID3 v.2 tags not working
 

I have no fix. But I can confirm this problem. Yet another bug in the player, I'd guess.

Re: ID3 v.2 tags not working
 

I don't have a solution to your problem, however your comment enlightened me on the issue, now I know what's going on here. Too bad the media player doesn't support the AlbumArtist tag.

Thanks!

Re: ID3 v.2 tags not working
 

Use the freeware MP3Tag to remove the album artist which is probably set as "Various Artists".

I think the N900 looks at the album name and collates all of the artists with the same album name. If there is more than one artist, it displays as "Various Artists" otherwise it shows the Artist name. Leaving the Album Artist blank (which seems to override everything) will show the Artist (not Album Artist) on the "now playing" screen with all the other songs queued up. A lot of trial and error led me to find this.

A side effect of the N900's treatment of tags can cause problems if you have lots of Greatest Hits albums. Make sure you prefix or suffix the album title with the artist name (or some other differentiator) or you'll get one Greatest Hits album labelled as Various Artists.

MP3tag will let you load ALL songs with the Album Artist as Various Artists (or just re-order), then batch-change all of them, while keeping other things like song title, artist, album, genre etc unchanged. You can batch-change multiple fields at a time as well.

Re: ID3 v.2 tags not working
 

MP3Tag will let you do this too.
You can use masks like for the song, eg. with the following filename:

Whitney Houston - Whitney's New Album - 21 - Million Dollar Bill (Frankie Knuckles remix) (bonus track).mp3

using the mask:
%artist% - %album% - %track% - %title%

will populate the tags for Artist, Album, Track Number, Song Title.
You can batch these as well. You can also export the tags to the filename and then back to tags again. Or use the freedb/Amazon search (does anyone know how to add Amazon.co.uk to MP3tag?) which will usually populate the important tags (Artist, Album, Song Title, Track No., Year, and sometimes Genre) as well as download album art. You can choose to embed the album art, or do what I do, and automatically save the album art to the folder with the filename cover.jpg

Hope that helps!

Re: ID3 v.2 tags not working
 

On Linux EasyTag supports bulk processing, very easy to use. Unfortunatelly, it doesn't support non-standard tags (like AlbumArtist), for editing non-standard tags I use ExFalso

Cheers!

Re: ID3 v.2 tags not working
 

I think whoever designed it needs to release the user guide as to the hierarchy of how the tags are given priority.

At the moment, I've found - via trial and error - that Album Artist seems to have higher priority over Artist. This *is* annoying when you want to see which artist sings the song on a compilation album.

Perhaps it was done this way for searching when you select artist and not to have too many separate entries for <artist> featuring <artists> when you want it filed under just one artist. This seems to be the biggest problem with tagging files. I guess having comma-separated artists won't work - not just because that would be too complex for iPhone users - but for artists such as Earth, Wind & Fire for example.