I use Foobar2000 for virtually all of my tagging needs, including MP3s. A question I have is: how does people on here handle the use of more & more non-standard tags, such as extended Date tags (like YYYY-MM-DD), Album Artist, Disc Number, Total Discs, Total Tracks, and more? Unfortunately, Foobar2000 seems to never let the user know that a non-standard tag is being used & never offers a substitute tag for the required information.

Lately, I've been using the Band tag along with Album Artist in my Various Artists material that is in MP3 format, so my Rockbox-running portable can pick up AA info in an MP3. I have not been able to deal with the Disc Number tag yet, so I'm still plugging that info into the Album tag in the form of '(CD 1)', for instance. I hear others put this info in the track number field, so it may still sort on a music player, but seeing numbers like '201' may be taken as something else other than 'Disc 2, Track 01'. That's why I don't do that format on my MP3s.

Some of the metadata you refer to has a place in the id3v2.4 specification (which fb2k uses). Does Rockbox firmware support v2.4? The wiki ( http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...ID3_Tag_Mapping ) and the frames document ( http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames, http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-structure ) might be helpful here.

Date tags: foobar maps "DATE" to TDRC, or the recording date. 'Extended' dates are supported.Disc number: foobar uses DISCNUMBER and TOTALDISCS. these are both mapped to TPOS.
Tracks: foobar uses TRACKNUMBER and TOTALTRACKS. they are both stored in the TRCK frame.
Album Artist: I can't help you there. Use whatever works with your firmware.

Of course, all this assumes good support for id2v2.4--not a good assumption. At any rate, I hope the links above are useful to people who want to get under the hood a bit with id3 tags.

Well Foobar2000 seems to be putting the YYYY-MM-DD dates in the TXXX (user-defined text) spot.

Thanks again. This does answer a lot of my other questions about (current) ID3 tagging.

Hey, you're right. Sorry to spout bad/ambiguous information.

I wouldn't mind stripping the date to just YYYY if the other fields would cause MP3s to have that TXXX field in it, as long as Foobar2000 can still rename files to my desired format (%album artist% - %date% - %album%[ Disc %discnumber%][ - %track artist%] - %title%.extension) before tagging the MP3s.

Sorry to drudge up an old topic... but is 0.9.5 different in how it maps fields to tags? Using autonumber on the properties window, I cannot get fb2k to write %totaltracks% to anything other than a TXXX frame. Is there a setting to force fb2k to use the TRCK frame? Also, is there anyway to force leading zeros with the autonumber? Foobar, of course, is smart enough to zero-pad when displaying, but most other programs are not.

NOTE: I just asked this in the FB2K forum (more appropriate location) in case anyone finds this and wants to follow along.