Issue With ID3 Tags - Album Information is Missing

[Strife89]

(Yes, I did a search- several, actually. )

This has been going on for quite a while: No matter what I do with my database, a number of my songs have their album information filed as under Rockbox- and only their album information (out of the three primary fields, at least, said fields being Artist, Album, and Title). This issue, though minor, really bothers me when I load a song for which I know I have album art. While I only recently "installed" album art, the tag issue has been persistent since I first installed Rockbox last December. What's more, the affected songs are always the same, regardless of whether I update, initialize, or use a different build (after deleting the database beforehand). Plus, virtually all of my songs are fine in the original firmware's database (my player is a Sansa c250).

I have used Audio Tag Tool (on Ubuntu 7.10) to tag many of my songs, and the results Rockbox reads are inconsistent; I double-checked a recently retagged album before loading it, but a few of the songs refused to reveal to Rockbox their album of origin. (I recently got a used Windows XP laptop, and so have used Windows Media Player 10 to tag some songs. Rockbox has read those without a hitch so far.)

So my question boils down to whether there are known problems with Audio Tag Tool, as it's possible it's using a tag version (or something else) incompatable with Rockbox (it's merely an idiot's guess, though ); however, I always have ATT tag files with both version 1 and 2, and I often use the bulk retag feature for Artist and Album.

I plan on updating Rockbox shortly (current version is r16460).

That's everything I know. Any suggestions?

NOTE: You can bet there'll be a new feature request on Flyspray shortly, if there isn't one already: a built-in tag editor!

[MarcGuay]

Sometimes less is more, friend, I don't quite understand your problem.  Is it simply that a few files don't display the Album tag properly?  But you also mention album art?

[Strife89]

Disregard the Album Art, it's not the problem. Here's a shorter explanation.

Basically, several of my songs, even though they are fully tagged, do not show up with the Album name in Rockbox; that name shows up as "Untagged" instead.

I tag all my files with the same programs, but even in the same album, some files tags get in the database properly, while others do not. Even if I update or reinitialize, it's always the same songs.

All the tags are fine in the original firmware and my desktop, so I'm not sure what's wrong.

[bascule]

Do the tracks have embedded album art or very long track/album names? Rockbox can only deal with a certain size block of metadata and, obviously, embedded art takes a big chunk of that.

On a similar note, do the tracks have a very long filepath (directory names plus filename)? I think that can cause the metadata reading to be screwy (but I'm not so sure about this one).

[Strife89]

None of my tracks have embedded album art (I recently used the Rockbox Album Art utility to build a small collection of .bmps, though ). Again, album art isn't part of the problem here.

Do the tracks have [...] very long track/album names? Rockbox can only deal with a certain size block of metadata [...]

I never really thought about that. I haven't noticed a pattern, but it's possible. I'll look into it.

On a similar note, do the tracks have a very long filepath (directory names plus filename)? I think that can cause the metadata reading to be screwy (but I'm not so sure about this one).

I doubt this is likely, as all of my music is stored under /AUDIO (no subfolders) and //AUDIO (again, no subfolders). ALL of my files are named with the format "Artist Name - Track Name.mp3". I'm pretty sure the tag problem is inconsistent with file name length.