I loaded some MP3 albums on my Fuze with roughly 40-character names and, as is MusicBrainz tradition, “(disc 1)” through “(disc 3)” appended to the end.
They’ve been lumped together under the same album, three track 1s, three track 2s, etc. If I look at the tracks on the Fuze, the album name seems to cut off at the 32-character mark.
There’s a couple solutions I can think of, both involving munging the tags. One: shorten the album names. Two: throw the good old “101, 102… 201, 202… 301…” track number convention into the mix. (Probably go with this second one, actually.)
Was curious, though, if anyone had a solution for this, or indeed had ever seen it.
Sounds like they might be tagged with ID3v1 tags, which have a limit of 30 chars (http://www.id3.org/ID3v1).
Mp3tag (or EasyTAG on Linux) will show you which tag versions you have in the MP3 files. It might be that you have v1 & v2.4 tags (seems to be quite a common combination for rippers to use), and a version of Fuze software that does not handle v2.4 tags.
The latest firmware version is supposed to cope with v2.4 tags, but I haven’t tried it myself. All Fuze firmware versions will handle v2.3 tags.
To update the firmware, see the sticky at the top of the forum.
Or Mp3tag (or EasyTAG, or a ton of others) will allow you to change from v2.4 to v2.3 in bulk.
I have noticed the truncation of ID3 field strings too. For a better understanding I decided to make a defined test case and like to report my findings. Sorry for the loooooooong post, it might look a bit confusing, but there is no simple answer. You might of cause skip to the last paragraph which is a summary of all.
Here it goes. I edited the ID3v2.4 tags of a first example mp3 file (A) as follows:
title: “id3v2: a long and unusual title name of 53 characters”
artist: “id3v2: a long and unusual artist name of 54 characters”
genre: “My Genre”
The fields album, year, track I left empty. Later I used a slightly modified version of the mp3 file (B) with only the artist field changed to
artist: “id3v2: a long and unusual artist name of 88 characters, 1234567890 1234567890 1234567890”
The ID3 tag fields are used on several places on the Fuze. I tried to catch most of them and here are the strings as they appear for both files A and B:
Music -> Genre -> Artists Selection
1.A
Play All
id3v2: a long and unusual artist name of 54 characters
1.B
Play All
id3v2: a long and unusual artist name of 88 characters, 1234567
Music -> Genre -> Artists -> Albums -> Songs Selection
2.A
id3v2: a long and unusual title name of 53 characters
2.B
id3v2: a long and unusual title name of 53 characters
Main music playback screen with album art and time bar
3.A
id3v2: a long and unusual artis
id3v2: a long and unusual title name of 53 characters
3.B
id3v2: a long and unusual artis
known
id3v2: a long and unusual title name of 53 characters
“Next Song:” info on playback screen
4.A
id3v2: a long and unusual title name of 53 characters
4.B
id3v2: a long and unusual title name of 53 characters
Track Info
5.A
Filename long tags.mp3 Artist id3v2: a long and unusual artis Album Unknown Genre My Genre Duration 00:01:55 Size 1MB CODEC MP3(ID3V2.4) Bit Rate 96 Kbps Sample rate 44100 Hz 5.B
Filename long tags.mp3 Artist id3v2: a long and unusual artis Album known Genre Unknown Year My Genre Duration 00:01:55 Size 1MB CODEC MP3(ID3V2.4) Bit Rate 96 Kbps Sample rate 44100 Hz
“Now Playing” line
6.A
Now Playing: id3v2: a long and unusual artist name of 54 characters-id3v2: a long and unusual…
6.B
Now Playing: id3v2: a long and unusual artist name of 88 characters, 1234567-id3v2: a long and un…
Short summary : In selection menues the ID3 strings are fairly long, they are truncated at about 63 characters. The “Now Playing” line may get as long as about 100 characters (the limit differs by a few characters, which was verified by a third example file). But on the main music playback screen as well as on the Track Info screen the artist field only shows 31 characters. In addition the track info gets really confused by a long artists id3v2 entry (see the odd Album/Genre/Year info under 5.B).
I tried a similar test using ID3v2.3, on internal memory and uSD.
I used 100 character fields for Album, Artist and Title.
Generally I got similar results.
Some interesting features I noticed were:
After initially loading the tracks (via MTP) the Fuze would not play ANY track. I had to switch off & on before it would do so.
In the ‘Artists’ menu, the artist name is limited to 31 chars for tracks on internal memory, but 63 chars for uSD resident tracks. So although the tracks on uSD and internal memory had the same artist string in the tag, they actually showed up as different artists in the ‘Artists’ menu.
On the Now Playing screen, the uSD track album string was limited to 63 chars, BUT not the first 63!! The first 2 chars were missing, and an extra 2 were added at the end.
Finally, the Track Info display was garbage for the uSD track. See images below (apologies for crappy phone image, didn’t have a decent camera to hand). Note especially, the Genre (which was set to Pop), the Year, and the Track and Disk Numbers…
And why on the “play by folder” threads do people keep saying “But tags are so easy!”
THis is yet another case where, having left home and computer behind for a week and wanting to pass the voyage with your newly loaded material, you could just switch to play by folder.
And why on the “play by folder” threads do people keep saying “But tags are so easy!”
THis is yet another case where, having left home and computer behind for a week and wanting to pass the voyage with your newly loaded material, you could just switch to play by folder.
The “play by folder” has some (weeker) limits too, of cause. If you are playing some music (the “Now Playing” line is shown) and you are navigating to a folder than its name is scrolling across the screen. After some (hard-coded?) time of no user activity the screen jumps back to the playback screen. It is about 12 seconds in my case which allows to read approximately the first 60 characters of the folder/file name. So, if you are lacy and put the most significant part of the folder/file name after that then you are in trouble selecting the right one. In short: you can even make the “play by folder” unuseable, if you want
At first I thought the amount of time before it jumps back to the playing screen might be the same as the backlight timeout. I tried changing it and it still jumped back somewhere between 12 and 15 seconds. So, it apparently is hardcoded into the software.
I don’t remember, did it always do that even with the previous firmware?
