Okay, I just got bitten by the tag bug.

I just rebuilt my empeg after losing a hard disk. I didn't realize that many of my files had V2 tags on them because I'd never looked to see. I never needed to check at the time because, since this only applies to my older MP3 files, the empeg didn't accept V2 tags at the time. It happily used the V1s that I'd added to the files.

I thought I was done rebuilding my old playlists and uploading my old songs. But suddenly I've discovered a bunch of incorrect tags that I need to hand-fix. Ick. The new software used some V2 tags I didn't know existed.

I think it would be really really neat if emplode did this:

- As it's processing a file for addition, see which tags it's got.
- If both are there, compare the V1 tag to the V2 tag.
- If the left$(30) of each V2 tag field is the same as the corresponding V1 tag field, then use the V2 tag and move on.
- If any of the fields do not match, put up a dialog showing the two tags side by side and ask which one you want to use.
- In that dialog, have a checkbox that lets you say "V1 to all" or "V2 to all"... but only for that particular drag-and-drop operation. The next drag-and-drop, reset it.

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Tony Fabris

Currently, we can't. The id3lib software doesn't give us the option to treat the v1 and v2 tags separately. We just ask it for the artist, and it does its own thing to get it.



Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

This would require you to babysit your uploads, I think. If you uploaded 8GB of music (say you were rebuilding your empeg after a HD crash ), you couldn't leave it unattended.

If you left it to itself, and after 1GB uploads it finds a conflict, it would be waiting at the prompt, instead of finishing the 7GB left.

I guess this could be another option in emplode that you could enable...

Has anyone checked to see if there is software which does this, as a pre-processing event?

-Trevor

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Mk 2, Green 12GB 080000349

If you left it to itself, and after 1GB uploads it finds a conflict, it would be waiting at the prompt, instead of finishing the 7GB left.

You'd be given the prompt at the time you drag-and-drop onto emplode, not the time you press sync. Presumably.

Peter

The id3lib software doesn't give us the option to treat the v1 and v2 tags separately.

Crap.

And by the way, WinAmp must be using a different version of ID3lib, 'cause it came up different than Emplode did on these files. Some of these files had their tags EDITED by WinAmp, and it correctly updated the V1 tag while leaving the V2 tag alone.

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Tony Fabris

Currently, we can't. The id3lib software doesn't give us the option to treat the v1 and v2 tags separately. We just ask it for the artist, and it does its own thing to get it.

id3lib is open-source, you know...

Borislav

Does anyone know the website for id3lib?

Does anyone know the website for id3lib?

http://id3lib.sourceforge.net/

Borislav

Hi. I'm the current maintainer of id3lib. This is a good idea. I'll look into of putting this kind of functionality into id3lib. However, as someone mentioned, it is open-source, so feel free to suggest any improvements or, better yet, add them yourself and submit a patch.

Thanks,

-Scott

PS If there's anything that would make id3lib easier to use for the empeg team, I'm happy to listen and will try to accomodate.

To the best of my knowledge, winamp doesn't use id3lib. I don't even think it supports id3v2, other than skipping over than skipping over them reliably.

-Scott

Cool. I make a suggestion to the Empeg guys, and get a reply from the ID3Lib guy. Makes me feel "connected" or something.

Thanks for the reply, Scott. The person who's making use of ID3Lib right now is [email protected] I believe. Let's gang up on him, shall we?

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Tony Fabris

Roger,

If there's some functionality that you would like in id3lib, please let me know. I'd be happy to help in making it easier to use for empeg.

-Scott

I didn't know until about 10 minutes ago that empeg even used id3lib. Someone sent me a link to this discussion. I'm certainly not about to "gang up" on Roger, but I'm happy to take any suggestions for improvements and such. I didn't write id3lib; I'm just the current maintainer, although I've put a good amount of time trying to improve it. It doesn't have the most flexible interface in the world (personally, I hate it), and I do my best to break the damn thing with every release. Hopefully, though, with some good feedback from those that are using it in big projects like empeg, it can be made as useful and easy-to-use as possible.

-Scott

BTW It's officially still unstable. Reaching a stable release is my current top priority, along with decent documentation...

I'm sure Roger will comment, but one of the things he was mumbling about was makign it work on streams, not files - so we can retreive tags from files already on the player to update the database if necessary.

Hugo

This shouldn't be terribly difficult. One of the changes from 3.7.12 to 3.7.13 was to change all of the internal processing from FILE*'s to fstreams. The next step to full stream handling shouldn't be too painful. I'll look into it.

Thanks,

-Scott

This shouldn't be terribly difficult. One of the changes from 3.7.12 to 3.7.13 was to change all of the internal processing from FILE*'s to fstreams. The next step to full stream handling shouldn't be too painful. I'll look into it.

Cool!

There's one other feature that'd be really neat for solving Tony's problem (though, as others have said, it's really a bug in his other software rather than ours or yours -- if both V1 and V2 tags are present it's surely the Right Thing to believe the V2 ones).

That would be to have each value (each, er, ID3_Frame in id3lib parlance) know what version of tag it came from. This would let emplode say "There's a V1 album tag saying this, and a V2 album tag saying that -- which is best?"

We could work round this at the moment by doing two complete Links to the file, one with V1_ONLY or whatever the flag is called, and one without -- but that's expensive and icky.

Peter