As some of you might already know, I’ve had ID3 tag problems with my clip from day 1. I have a collection of MP3s that’s been tagged, and tagged again in various utilities, and they all look perfectly fine in the tag editor (Easytag, Amarok, etc), but when loaded on the clip I usually get the dreaded “Unknown” in one or more places.
I’ve been running an older version of Ubuntu on both my laptop and desktop since before owning the Clip, but over this past weekend I bit the bullet and upgraded the laptop to the latest version. Rather than do the automated updater, I wiped and installed from scratch.
Once the upgrade was done, I ripped a CD to MP3 as part of my testing of everything. Loaded the MP3s onto my Clip, and for the first time ever, the tags looked correct. I opened the files up in Amarok, and everything was in the right place. Then I opened up some of my older files in Amarok, and that’s when I noticed something different. All the tags were correct, BUT there was a funky, high ascii looking character at the beginning of each tag label.
I copied one of the offending MP3s to my desktop (still on the old ubuntu) and the character didn’t show up. So I “fixed” the tags on my laptop, then copied the file over again, and it looked the same. However, the new “fixed” file now looks correct on my Clip.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t fix the tags using a batch routine. I could for the artist and album by selecting them as groups, but I had to fix the song titles one by one :( It took quite a while.
I have no idea how that ascii character got there, but it was probably from one of the tag editors I used. But now the files are all “fixed” and I don’t have to have 200 playlists anymore. It’s very exciting!
Not sure if anyone else is bound to run into the same problem, but I thought I’d post about it anyway. What a PITA that was!
