Hey, I was wondering if foobar can add padding when creating artist / album / etc tags? I ripped my entire CD collection to OGG format, and as time went on, I did less and less error checking for artist / album / title import errors (initially I checked over every last detail, after a dozen or so CDs I switched to just running "capitalize all first characters", and shortly after that I completely gave up and used whatever freedb provided).

So now I have thousands of files that I'd like to update the tags for, but I'm finding it's a pretty slow process (can take 1-3 second per file, depending on the length). Since the time it takes seems to be related to the length of the track (so also the size of the file), I'm assuming the problem is that foobar has to rewrite the entire file each time.

So that leads to my question, can I tell foobar to rewrite the tags for all my files in a 1k block so that if I decide to make changes later, whatever tags I enter will fit in that 1k (hopefully anyway), so it won't have to rewrite the entire file?

Or, if I'm completely off track and the slowness is caused by something else, can you make any suggestions on what I can do to speed the process of updating tags up?

Thanks,
Rick

Sorry, sort of answered my own question after searching more on Google. I see (unless minds have changed) the problem will not likely be fixed for OGG files in the near future, so I have a second question.

Can I add APEv2 tags to all the files, and remove the vorbis comments? Would there be compatability problems if I did this? (I only plan on using foobar2000 so that's not a big issue, but it'd be good to know. Kind of like it would have been good to know about the need to rewrite OGG files when making vorbis comment changes!)

Rick

You're right: there are no plans to support padding for ogg files as long as it's not implemented in the libraries from Xiph.

Adding APEv2 tags to your ogg files is a bad idea. The only tag format allowed for ogg files are Vorbis Comments (foobar2000 won't write any other tags to your files).

Oh well, guess it sucks to be me. Thanks for the quick reply.

So I stopped messing with my collection for a bit after hearing this news, but this morning I had another idea....

Maybe I could create a .cue file for each of my CDs. I wasn't sure if it would work since I had multiple .ogg files per CD, and in the past I'd only ever used .cue files where the CD had been ripped to a single .wav file, but I thought it was worth a try.

So I just tested this on one album, and it sort of works. It works in that the artist, album, and tracknumber can be saved/edited, but I can't seem to add custom tags.

Does the ability to add/edit custom tags in .cue files already exist and I'm doing it wrong? If not, is there a possibility for adding this feature? I see ReplayGain information can be saved by REMing it out, so I'm wondering if the same thing could be done to allow for the custom tags?

Rick

If you want another option rather than having to wait for Foobar to have the feature you need there is a program called Tag and Rename which can add padding, also it has native support for ID3v1/v2 APEv2 M4a/Mp4 WMA Ogg and FLAC.

you can get a trial at www.softpointer.com

I use Foobar as a media player, however I find this program better as a Tag Program, as its quick, and easy to use (once you get used to the interface)

Cheers.

Did you read the topic? It's about padding for VORBIS files, your program can't do that either.

Vorbis uses vorbis tags, and nothing else. You can't use anything else without breaking it.