Genre Displayed as number with iTunes - "not a bug" ?

[mhebsacker]

Hi,

there was Bug 8723 which dealt with the problem that the Genre sometimes is only shown as Number.

I have this same problem with iTunes - for sure not the most standard conform program but well, let's say not the most exotic one? - that Rockbox only displays the genres as their genre ID / Number. Only if I invent "my own genre" - let s say "Pop_1" instead of "Pop" so iTunes does not find an ID Rockbox will display this genre as text.

Bug 8723  was closed because it's an " issue with files tags, not Rockbox."

Still, the comments say "Rockbox does interpret the codes, but it is a little picky about the format."

Well - would'nt it be so hard to make Rockbox a little less "picky"? For sure you're right if you say it's an Bug/non standard behaviour concerning the program which was tagging the file, but I am sure it's a lot easier to make Rockbox more tolerant than to convince Steve Jobs to change iTunes?

Would be great.

Matthias


P.S. When checking the Rockbox Forums with http://validator.w3.org W3.org found 7 errors. Should my webbrowser stop to display this page for this reason?

[Llorean]

It's really best if we adhere to the specification. If we don't and people expecting us to try to do things technically legal our software could misinterpret it since they're expecting us to use the specification.

As for the website validation, try again and it should be fixed.

[bluebrother]

P.S. When checking the Rockbox Forums with http://validator.w3.org W3.org found 7 errors. Should my webbrowser stop to display this page for this reason?

Well, being correct is one thing. Being tolerant against errors is another one. While it isn't bad to be tolerant against errors to some degree being too tolerant is quite problematic. If Itunes writes numbers in a field that takes strings this is simply wrong -- and what if a user intentionally writes numbers in that field? It would break, and this would clearly be an error.

[afruff23]

I use 5 different programs to tag my files (sometimes a combination, sometimes only 1) and I get this same problem. The problem only shows up on my player, so what can I do to make the genre tags show up correctly in Rockbox?

I use Tag&Rename, foobar2000, winamp, ID3-TagIT 3, and musicbrainz picard.

[soap]

Does this happen only when you have only a ID3v1 and not an additional ID3v2 tag?

[Lear]

Does this happen only when you have only a ID3v1 and not an additional ID3v2 tag?

This cannot happen with ID3v1 tags, so the answer is no (despite what is mentioned in the bug). It only happens when reading ID3V2 tags that doesn't quite follow the standard.

[mhebsacker]

Hi,

I have the problem with iTunes ID3v2.4 Tags, the problem is corrected when I load the MP3 s into MP3Tag and simply press the "save" button (which means MP3Tag rewrites all the tags).

I set up MP3Tag to also use ID3v2.4, so propaply the rewritten tags are simply standard conform where iTunes might write the tags in some non standard way.

But I never investigated the differences.

Anyways, it seems that MP3Tag & rockbox works well. http://www.mp3tag.de/

Matthias

[thesavster]

Noticed that I also had a problem with genres showing as numbers. This seemed to be a result of foobar2000, since I used this program to apply ReplayGain to my files, and also manage my ogg files. I saw the following at foobar2000's site:

"MP3 tags (ID3v2) added or modified by foobar2000 are not read or are read improperly in application X or portable player Y. What can I do?

foobar2000 writes ID3v2.4 tags encoded as UTF-8 by default. To deal with broken software/hardware with partial support of the ID3v2 standard, an “ID3v2 writer compatibility mode” has been added ('Preferences → Advanced → Tagging → MP3 → ID3v2 writer compatibility mode'); it results in non-standard-compliant tags being written (ID3v2.3 instead of ID3v2.4, UTF-16, no unsynchronization, no padding), but attempts to dodge known bugs in other ID3v2 implementations."

I followed the directions in the Preferences dialog on foobar2000, rescanned the files, and re-applied the replaygain info to my tags--result, genres all fixed.

I am not very well-versed on the different tagging formats, but it would seem that foobar2000, among others, may have a different idea of standards than Rockbox.

[Chronon]

It seems clear to me that they are not complying with the standard on purpose.  This should certainly not be a standard setting for Foobar2k from where I stand.  I use this program to apply replaygain tags too.  I have not noticed any problems with Rockbox.