Tag sequence in file code important?

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Tag sequence in file code important?

2004-10-13 08:36:22

Is there any reason for the various track tags to be in a specific order in the APE tags FB2K creates? I’ve hunted around a bit, and can’t seem to find an answer.

Up to now, I’ve only used FB2K to write RG values to MP3s which I’ve then been playing back in Winamp with Otachan's in_mpg123. But in the past 3-4 days I’ve started to familiarize myself with the complexities of FB2K, and start using it in earnest.

One of the 1st problems I noticed was that the playlists were only displaying the truncated character strings in the ID3v1 tags, and not the full, long character strings for artist, album, tracknumber, and title tags that I’ve set up in the Id2v3 tags. This I see as by design because of the problems associated with ID3v2 tags.

Unless I missed something, because of those ID3v2 peculiarities, there are no components that will allow FB2K to read values from the existing ID2v2 tags I've configured in my MP3s, and write them to APE files when running RG.

But I found that by running the following simple script, I got those long strings written to the APE tags that until this point only had RG values, and the short character strings from the ID3v1 tags:

--------------------------------------------------------------
‘Guess at values from file name’

%artist% - %album% - %tracknumber% - %title%
--------------------------------------------------------------

Now when I look at the data in a hex editor &/or file compare software, I see that the APE tags are out of order. That because there were existing %data%, %comment%, & %genre% tags that had been there since 1st running FB2K’s RG on my library last year.

Without thinking things out well the other night, I ran the above script on my entire library of 5000+ MP3s. So the order of tags in the APE tags is now:

%date% %comment%. %genre% %artist% %album% %tracknumber% %title%

Instead of as they were:

%artist% %album% %tracknumber% %title% %date% %comment%. %genre

Is this going to cause any problems for me down the line either with FB2K, or other MP3 players?

Tag sequence in file code important?

Reply #1 – 2004-10-13 10:31:53

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Is this going to cause any problems for me down the line either with FB2K, or other MP3 players?[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=247508"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

No. The order of individual tags in an APEv2 chunk is totally irrelevant.

Tag sequence in file code important?

Reply #2 – 2004-10-14 06:28:26

Thanks for that foosion.

But now I’ve discovered what may have been a bit more problematic result of running that simple masstagger script without thinking. For some albums with long strings in %album% and %title% tags, I had specifically written special, shorter ID3v1 tags after setting the full strings in the ID3v2 tags. The filenames were made to match the ID3v2 tags. So I lost all the work I had put into setting up those special ID3v1 tags.

But there was my backup MP3 library on another drive that I had just finished syncing a few days ago. So I’m just copying all the backups back to the original drive again.

But that begs the question that must have been asked here a lot: Is there any method for syncing ID3v2 tags with APE tags in FB2K? I know there’s more than a little hostility towards the ID3v2 format, but I’ve found it nice to be able to have all my MP3s tagged for ID3v1, ID3v2, and APE to be able to be read in the various hardware and software MP3 players I’ve been using along the way.

I recall looking at the The Godfather a while back, and found it at least as daunting or more than FB2K to get a handle on very quickly. Would that be a good way to go for syncing these and other tag types in MP3s that would assure accurate tagging?

Tag & Rename seems to be another option. Any opinions on these or other apps that may serve my purposes here? It may be less time consuming to just re-sync tags in the future if this ever happens again.

Thx

Tag sequence in file code important?

Reply #3 – 2004-10-15 07:54:01

The MP3 input reads the first tag it finds, in the order of APE, ID3v2, Lyrics3, and ID3v1. If you do not have an ID3v2 reader installed, it will skip that step.

Naturally, if something is writing mostly empty APE tags to your files before Foobar2000 reads the tags, it will only see the APE tag and ignore the ID3 tags.

You could try Case's Tag to combine and convert the tags, as was the norm before I got bored and wrote the ID3v2 support which seems to be failing you now, or may even be irrelevant if the core or input aren't getting to the ID3v2 tag in the first place.

Tag sequence in file code important?

Reply #4 – 2004-10-15 22:08:46

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The MP3 input reads the first tag it finds, in the order of APE, ID3v2, Lyrics3, and ID3v1.

That would explain why I can re-edit ID3v1 tags after running FB2K's RG, and FB2K then will still just display the APE tag data in its playlists.

Quote

If you do not have an ID3v2 reader installed, it will skip that step.

I leave the ID3v2 component out most of the time. That way the ID3v2 tags remain intact when I modify RG values.

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Naturally, if something is writing mostly empty APE tags to your files before Foobar2000 reads the tags, it will only see the APE tag and ignore the ID3 tags.

Well... It'd be nice if I could find something other than FB2K that can write APE tags to MP3s based on data in the ID3v2 tags.

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You could try Case's Tag to combine and convert the tags,

I did download that and Speeks frontend. But nothing in the tag.txt readme seemed to indicate that it has the capability of copying ID3v2 tag data to APE tags. I'll have another look.

Tag sequence in file code important?

Reply #5 – 2004-10-16 01:57:51

You could also use ID3v2 tags for primary metadata storage, with the proper component installed. Though, you will lose unsupported fields, such as images and other binary data.

Regarding Tag, it can be used for recursively updating the chosen output tag format(s) from all tags it reads.

tag --force id3v1 --force ape2 --recursive *.mp3

The order of "--force id3v1 --force ape2" is essential for proper compatibility with applications which understand ID3v1 but not APE tags.

Tag sequence in file code important?

Reply #6 – 2004-10-20 09:31:11

Yeah... I want to preserve my ID3v2 tags, so 'ID3v2 tags for primary' isn't an option.

'Tag' is no good either, as I'm looking for a way to sync ID3v2 tags with APE tags... and that seems to be a huge no no even though I just want to sync the basic 6-7. Tag only reads and displays ID3v2 tags. It doesn't copy the data anywhere that I can see.

Tag sequence in file code important?

Reply #7 – 2004-12-23 19:54:27

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Yeah... I want to preserve my ID3v2 tags, so 'ID3v2 tags for primary' isn't an option.

'Tag' is no good either, as I'm looking for a way to sync ID3v2 tags with APE tags... and that seems to be a huge no no even though I just want to sync the basic 6-7. Tag only reads and displays ID3v2 tags. It doesn't copy the data anywhere that I can see.
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Sorry to resurrect the old thread.

Have tried Frontah?

[a href="http://home.vxu.se/mdati00/frontah/]http://home.vxu.se/mdati00/frontah/[/url]

I'd liked to have all my stuff triple-tagged as well for portable use.

Tag sequence in file code important?

Reply #8 – 2004-12-24 15:26:20

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Sorry to resurrect the old thread.

Have tried Frontah?

Funny I just checked my Hydrogen subscriptions for the 1st time in quite a while and found your post from yesterday leland.

No... I wasn't aware of this program. But the author goes by the handle madah on the Hydrogen forums if we have any questions about it. Have just downloaded it and will give it a try.

Interesting his FAQ explains ID3v2 as being the most complex tag, and can break other tags. I was originally just thinking of using ID3v2 to tag the basic Artist, Track Title, Track Name, and Album Title specifically in hopes of making the process of cross-tagging from ID3v2 tags to other tags more stable. But then at one point I found myself adding cover art and lyrics in ID3v2 tags.

At this point though, I've switched to putting the lyrics to APE tags with the ReplayGain values. And using the "Cover TAG for Winamp5" plugin for cover art, I've just been putting the art .jpg file in the folder with each album's MP3s. So I'm back to just having the 4 basic ID3v2 tags.

Let's see if Frontah can manage to sync all of the tags I'm using, ID3v1, ID3v2 and APE.

Tag sequence in file code important?

Reply #9 – 2004-12-24 16:19:53

Let me (us) know how it works out.

Tag sequence in file code important?

Reply #10 – 2004-12-24 16:40:44

Okay... From 1st trail run, Frontah doesn't seem to provide the capability to edit the tags individually. It seems to be able to write to most types of tags. I don't see anything there that will specifically sync ID3v1, ID3v2, and APE tags either.

Because I use APE tags not only for the basic 4 tags (see my last post), but for Replaygain... I can only guess that the RG values might complicate the process of syncing ID3v2 tags.

Reviewing my MP3 tags, I now see that the Winamp WinLyrics plugin is writing to Lyrics3 tags, complicating things a bit more.

Frontah is also having problems reading tags accurately. It's not seeing some APE v2 tags in MP3s of complete albums I've encoded as a group. And it's reporting LAME 3.92 MP3s originally encoded at --alt-preset 128, as being encoded at --alt-preset standard. So at this point of development, it doesn't provide the tools I'd like for managing my MP3 library.

Tag sequence in file code important?

Reply #11 – 2004-12-24 17:07:51

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Okay... From 1st trail run, Frontah doesn't seem to provide the capability to edit the tags individually. It seems to be able to write to most types of tags. I don't see anything there that will specifically sync ID3v1, ID3v2, and APE tags either.

<snip>

Frontah is also having problems reading tags accurately. It's not seeing some APE v2 tags in MP3s of complete albums I've encoded as a group. And it's reporting LAME 3.92 MP3s originally encoded at --alt-preset 128, as being encoded at --alt-preset standard. So at this point of development, it doesn't provide the tools I'd like for managing my MP3 library.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=261517"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Ah, this is a pity. I posted a message on the TGF website asking if he could add the ape tagger to work with mp3s...

My current workaround is copying files that I'm transferring to my portable (Rio Karma until it dies for the last time) to a new directory, then loading in the id3v2 module. I then rewrite the file tags from the database, load onto my portable, and delete the directory.

It's not a great solution at all, which is it would be much easier to have all 3 in the file co-existing happily.

I have slowly been ripping everything I have to lossless, then I transcode to ogg, thus avoiding the id3v2 problem ;-) Unfortunately, I will probably always have some mp3s floating around.

Tag sequence in file code important?

Reply #12 – 2004-12-26 21:49:46

Good news! I was just reading back through the thread on Otachan's in_mpg123, and found a post from Nov 5th saying that a new version of the mp3infp Ver.2.47e Winamp file info plugin is now available that supports editing APE as well as ID3v1, and ID3v2 tags, as well as syncing from either ID3v1 or ID3v2 to APE tags.

Don't know if it supports mass tagging though. That'd be nice. But for now at least editing and syncing these tags individually in MP3s is a welcome feature.

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