I use EAC to rip from CD's to MP3 using LAME 3.90.2 as the external compressor. It works fine but the tracknumbers when less than "10" are encoded in the ID V 1.1 tag as single integer. Rather than "01" I get a "1"; rather than an "02" I get a "2" and so on. This is a problem when using tracknumber as a part of a sort string in FB2K.

I can use FB2K to manually change the value of single integer tracknumbers to carry a leading zero. But I wonder is there a way to force the extraction process to provide this leading zero? If there is not I will go forward using APE tags.

Is there a way to change all the current single digit tracknumbers to double digit track numbers with a leading zero? If there is, what is it?

ID3v1.1 tags store the track number as a single byte (00-FF) so AFAIK is up to the software to interpret this as either 01 or 1.

In Foobar's sort string just change %tracknumber% with $num(%tracknumber%,2)

My FB2K is set up this way already. When I do a "show file info" for a file I will get a one digit number if it is less than 10 for tracknumber. This screws up a sort. But I can manually change this through "show file info" and "update" and then I get a correct sort.

There has to be a way to force two digit, leading zero when less than 10, track numbers. I am stumped. I have gotten all sorts of answers on the EAC list but no solutions. I want to avoid manually changing all these files. I have thousands out on my HD.

well, you could add APE2 and keep the ID3v1 tags copying the ID3v1 and add zeropad the track number with Tag:

tag.exe --force id3 --force ape2 --zeropad *.mp3

then reload info in foobar

OK, I tried what you said, exactly. The DOS window had results from Tag which indicated that it did create APE tags with leading zero padding on single digit integers, creating all double digit integers. But, after I close and re-open FB2K I get the same tags. Am I still reading the ID3 V1.1 tags? How can I make FB2K accept the APE tags?

I have set the "Input - Standard Inputs" to APEV2 tags only" but am not sure that will accomplish what I want. I am stumped. What next?

TIA

FB2K reads the info from it's own database.
You need to refresh the data - rightclick the files and choose "database->reload info from files". (I use version 0.5x - I assume it work similar in 0.6x)

yes 0.6 works exactly this way, you can either nuke the database or add all the files to the playlist and do a : right clic --> 'Database' --> 'Reload info from file'

@nephaestous - yes, it all works as advertised. Thanks for the help. Gracias para todos; animo!