I don't tend to synchronize my PC and my empeg very often, mainly due to laziness. Besides, with thousands of titles in the car, I'm usually pretty happy.

Anyway, many months ago, I switched from my previous PC setup with EAC and lame to a PowerMac with iTunes and all that. I've been using iTunes to correct the tags, and they look fine from within iTunes. However, I recently loaded all these files onto my empeg (Mk2, v2.0 final, using jemplode to push them over), and I've noticed that tags occasionally disappear.

Digging further, I threw some of these files at the Perl MPEG-ID3v2Tag library. When I look at files created by EAC, everything works. When I look at files created by iTunes, the library gives up on parsing the files at all. I imagine this has something to do with ID3v2.3 vs. 2.4 or something, but I'm not sure.

Anyway, I've put one such MP3 file online for anybody to play with. This particular file plays fine on my empeg, but the artist line is blank. Is this a problem with jemplode? With the empeg itself? Any thoughts? (Should I just dump the Mac and go back to a PC?)

I imagine this has something to do with ID3v2.3 vs. 2.4 or something, but I'm not sure.

I have noticed the same problem and I believe that is exactly it. I think id3 2.4 is fairly new and some stuff doesn't like it. The id3::tag perl module that I use in my tagging scripts has the same problem. I just use version 2.3 tags to get around the problem. You can have iTunes batch convert all your tags down to 2.3 if you want (look for Convert Tags under the advanced menu).

-Mike

to play with

That file has ID3v2.2 tags, with the three-character codes instead of four-character. Emplode v2-final should deal with it; beta 13 won't.

Peter

Interesting. Didn't recall seeing that one in the release notes.

I thought a V2 tag was a V2 tag, I didn't realize there were sub-flavors. I thought the V2 spec was extensible enough to not require revisions like that.

Gah, why are they making things hard for us by upgrading the tag specs all the time?

Interesting. Didn't recall seeing that one in the release notes.

Oops, that's probably my fault; I backported the change from the trunk (it was put in for Marlin).

I thought a V2 tag was a V2 tag, I didn't realize there were sub-flavors. I thought the V2 spec was extensible enough to not require revisions like that.

ID3v2.2 was, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, the first version of ID3v2. They got several things wrong (e.g. desynchronisation of size fields) and rapidly obsoleted it in favour of ID3v2.3, which is overwhelmingly the most often-encountered form of ID3v2. ID3v2.3 is suitably extensible and is readily understood by software aimed at the newer, still quite rare, ID3v2.4.

Peter

i just recently ported the Emptool ID3 parser, but it's ported off the 3.0 branch... What are the rules here for release for jEmplode? Does that need to wait until the 3.0 Emptool is officially released or did tag parsing not change much between the two (enough to hold up the release, anyway)... I had to port yours because RID calculations required that my parser and your parser came up with the exact same results for things like offset and trailer, and the original jEmplode parser was off by a couple bytes sometimes (which caused differing RIDs)

They hate us.

I always run mp3clean (it's some perl stuff) and nuke all the old tags, then retag, before trying to upload. Made life so much simpler.

iTunes write MP3s in ID3 v2.4 format. I found that Jemplode wasn't able to read these correctly, at least not all the time. I went into my iTunes library, performed a "select all" to highlight all files, and then clicked Advanced | Convert ID3 Tags... and downgraded to ID3 v2.3. Everything worked fine for me after that.