I've got quite a few albums encoded in .ape format for archival and I'd like to encode them directly to .mpc, but keeping the APE tag info.

Mppenc encodes directly the .ape file, but does not keep the APE tag. I've read somewhere in this forum that Frank implemented that feature because somebody requested it, but mppenc 1.04 does not have it. Where can I find that binary?

Also, I was unable to encode .ape files with the MuseDrop frontend, I had to use the commandline window. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks a lot

Jaime.

MuseDrop filters files by extension, so, until layer3maniac updates it, you will only be able to encode wavs using the frontend.

Regards;

Roberto.

Try MPCencT by ErikS. It should keep the tags when source file is APE.

Wow! This is the first I've even heard of this feature. I just updated MuseDrop to handle ape files, it should be available at the usual place soon...

Hello, layer3. Good to see you around again.

I'd suggest you take a look at Frank's page
http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/
to check all formats supported as input for mppenc.

It seems lpac (.pac), optimfrog (.ofr ?) and shorten (.shn) are suported as well, among others.

See you.

Regards;

Roberto.

The feature I was talking about was added by EricS to mpcenct (see http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/showth...p?threadid=1680 ) but I don't know if it made its way to the downloadable version or it was just a custom version emailed to the requester. Anyway I get an error when I try to encode an ape file with mpcenct :

Access violation at address 0040E196 in module 'mpcenct.exe'. Read of address 00
000004
Press Enter to exit

¿Any Idea? ¿EricS?

Thanks layer3maniac for quick update. That was fast!!
Thanks everybody else.

Jaime

Yes. It is fixed in v0.31 which you can download from the chalmers address.

Latest version of mpcenct already available at my server.

Regards;

Roberto.

I already use mpcenct v0.31, so I did some more testing.
I found that mpcenct produced these results:

ape file with id3 tag (encoded with EAC & mac.exe v.3.96b6):
- passes along Title, Artist & Album info to mpc file
- removes Track, Year, Genre & Comment fields
- mpc winamp plugin does not display any tag type. Is it an APE tag?

ape file with APE tag (encoded with EAC & macdll.dll v.3.96) :
ERROR:

Access violation at address 0040E196 in module 'mpcenct.exe'. Read of address 00
000004
Press Enter to exit

It seems that mpcencT doesn't read APE tags, and reads only part of the id3 tag.
Also, when it writes the tag something strange happens, as winamp plugin does not show the tag as an APE tag.
mpcencT works perfectly to me when encoding tracks directly from CD with EAC, so the problem is only when encoding .ape files.

Regards

Jaime.

Latest version of Musedrop already available too.

Now with APE input support.

Regards;

Roberto.

OK, I've just downloaded mpcenct from Roberto's site and no more errors occur when trying to encode an ape file.
Can't remember where I got the v0.31 I had, but it was different.

Still, only part of the tag is copied to the mpc file and winamp plugin does not display the tag as an APE tag (the Tag Type field is blank). Maybe in v0.32 ?

Regards

Jaime.

For natural reasons I haven't bothered with ID3 tags, so I'm surprised that it pass any fields in the ID3-tag to the APE-tag at all... It shouldn't I know that the winampplugin writes ID3 if it can... What tool do you use to encode your ape files? Can you force it to write APE tags?

Regarding the bug, please download v0.31 again anyway. I made a mistake with the version numbers in a file that was there for a couple of hours.

Aha. Actually no tag data is copied. What you see is Case's plugin in action trying to guess artist, title etc from the filename.

Se if you can force your APE encoder to write APE tags. If it's not possible, I can add ID3 tag reading to the next version of mpcenct.

Edit: or alternatively use Case's Tag 2.0 to change ID3 to APE.

Yes, I was confused by Case's plugin guessing file info. There was no tag at all in the mpc files.

But this only makes things more strange.

My APE encoder writes the APE tag, that is sure, I can see the whole tag in winamp when playing the ape file.

But mpcencT doesn't write the tag to the mpc file, even though it is supposed to (don't know much about programming, but it seems to be in the source code, after "//if the input file is an ape file then just transfer the tags" comment line).

Any idea? Does this feature work for you, Erik?

I dont really need id3 reading support, since I encode ape files with APE tags (EAC + macdll.dll), but somebody may like it. I just encoded an ape file with id3 tag just to see if the error disappeared that way.

Regards,

Jaime.

1. The winamp plugin for ape uses ID3 if it can fit all the fields in 30 chars. Check at the end of your ape file if you have an ID3 tag (there will be letters TAG near the end) or APE (look for letters APETAGEX).

2. You have to include --tags or --tags2 at the end of the mpcenct command line to write out the tag. Even if you will not add any tags this is necessary.

Does that help?

Great! That was it!

I have added --tags2 in the command line and everything works as expected.
I thought that mpcenct would do that by itself when encoding an ape file and copying tag info..

Sorry for not thinking about that before.

Thanks you all for your great and FAST help

Jaime.

I don't know whether to call it a bug or a feature

What are your settings in Musedrop? I keep getting a file not found, so somewhere between musedrop and mppenc the file info is getting lost.

G

More info please?