Sorting Database by disc number

[colonel32]

Rockbox 3.6
iPod 5g
240Gb disk
iTunes 6.0.5 OS X (PPC).

I use iTunes to sync my iPod, which works beautifully on v6, even when the iPod is booted into Rockbox. I am fixed on v6 for several reasons, not the least of which is that any later version has always given errors when syncing (while booted into the apple firmware) on second and subsequent times, ever since I bought the iPod 5 years ago.

I tag all of my albums using iTunes. Those albums with multiple discs are tagged (for example):

Track 1 of 3, Disc 1 of 2
Track 2 of 3, Disc 1 of 2
Track 3 of 3, Disc 1 of 2
Track 1 of 4, Disc 2 of 2
Track 2 of 4, Disc 2 of 2
Track 3 of 4, Disc 2 of 2
Track 4 of 4, Disc 2 of 2

When booted into the apple firmware, these albums play in the intended order. But when accessed through the Rockbox database, all the track 1s play first, followed by all the track 2s, etc.

As far as I can tell by reading around, Rockbox 3.6 should not be doing this, as the default sort string is set up for single digit disc numbers and double digit track numbers. Am I correct?

Which makes me think iTunes is not setting the same tags that Rockbox is looking for. Is there a program (either Mac or Windows) which will display the raw tags, including both the tag names and values? And what tag names should be set in order for the database to sort them properly?

This is purely a database issue, as File browsing does not really work with iTunes-synced content. As you may know, iTunes distributes music randomly into three character folders and four character files, e.g. F01/FECK.mp3, F03/ARSE.mp3 and so on.

Or am I on the wrong track? Should I instead be trying to set a custom sort string? Not at all sure how to do this without some help, though.

[colonel32]

Does nobody have any advice about this? It seems very odd that I'm the only person hitting the problem.

I started to retag all my albums so they were single disc, but it's so destructive to the tags I'm really reluctant to do it.

[Chronon]

If you insert a multi-disc album that is tagged properly, it should populate the playlist in the order you expect.  You do not need to tag all as a single album.

I can't recommend a specific tagging application (since I don't use OSX), but all of the ones that are dedicated to this task have worked acceptably in my experience.  iTunes, in my experience, will sometimes write info to its iTunesDB rather than changing the metadata in the files themselves.  It's possible that you are running into this.

[colonel32]

Thanks for the pointers Chronon. I've now established that iTunes is writing to the file's id3 tag rather than the iTunesDB, and it is apparently using a standard id3v2.2 tag.

Using ID3 Raw Tag Viewer I can see that the bad tag generated by iTunes uses the ID3v2.2 tag TPA, and looks like this:



Multi-disc albums with these style tags sort and display like this in the Rockbox database browser:

01. Disc One's First Track - mm:ss
01. Disc Two's First Track - mm:ss
02. Disc One's Second Track - mm:ss
02. Disc Two's Second Track - mm:ss
etc

If I re-tag copies of the same files with Tag & Rename, it looks like this in ID3 Raw Tag Viewer, it uses the good id3v2.3 tag TPOS:



And then displays and sorts properly, like this:

1.01. Disc One's First Track - mm:ss
1.02. Disc One's Second Track - mm:ss
2.01. Disc Two's First Track - mm:ss
2.02. Disc Two's Second Track - mm:ss
etc

As far as I can find, Rockbox claims to support both id3v2.2 and id3v2.3 tags. So what is happening here?

Is the TPA tag somehow malformed? Can anyone confirm or deny this from the hex example?

Or is it a valid tag but the Rockbox id3v2.2 parser can't cope with it?

Happy to supply example files on request if anyone wants to test themselves.

I really, really don't want to have to retag many thousands of existing files, and switch to using a different file tagger just because of this. Unless I absolutely have to after exhausting other possibilities!

[torne]

Try build r28181. I've added support for TPA to the id3 parser.

[colonel32]

Yes, r28181 has fixed the problem. Thanks torne, you are a star!

By the way I love your automated build system - new builds for every platform after every new revision: awesome! 

[torne]

We thank you, rather, since your tests above showed exactly what was wrong and let us fix it for everyone. Also for testing it, since I didn't