I tested this with foobar2000 v0.9.4.5 and the newest firmware, and aside from some odd behavior regarding Foobar’s tagging from freedb, it worked fine. By default, it uses both ID3v2.4 and ID3v1. The Express doesn’t understand ID3v2.4 but it works with ID3v1 just fine. I needed to change a few tags around (strangely, foobar was using the album artist tag, but wasn’t putting the artist name into the artist tag, which is unusual) but the Express had no trouble reading the ID3v1 tag that Foobar created. I did some more testing with Mp3tag and found it to work fine with ID3v2.3 as well (both UTF-16 and ISO-8859-1.)
EDIT: If you want to make Foobar work properly with the Express, there is a way to force it to use ID3v2.3 tags instead. Go to File, Preferences, and under Advanced, go to Tagging, and check “ID3v2 Compatibility Mode.” The description is unclear, but Mp3tag says it’s now creating ID3v2.3 tags, and the Express reads them without a problem. You’ll still need to fix your existing files, but this way, new ones, or files you edit in Foobar later, will all work fine in the Express. Also, once you make this change in Foobar, you can use it to fix your files - just select the files in question, right-click on them, go to Tagging, and select “Rewrite File Tags.” The only catch is that if you were using just ID3v2.4, and disabled the option to create ID3v1 tags, it seems that it won’t create ID3v1 tags this way - but you will get the ID3v2.3 tags that the Express can actually read.
You can also use a free program called Mp3tag to fix your files. You may wish to test this on a small set of files first, just in case, and keep a backup of any files you can’t replace until you’re sure that you’re comfortable with the program.
Import the files you want to fix into Mp3tag, go into the program’s Options, and under Tags > Mpeg, make sure that all options under Remove are checked, and that under Write you have both ID3v1 and ID3v2 checked (the radio button for ID3v2.3 (either one) should be selected.) Once everything is configured correctly, feel free to use Mp3tag to make any corrections to your files’ tags if you like. When you’re done, under the Select menu, click Select All, then under File, select Save. Mp3tag will then rewrite all of your tags to the correct format for use with the Express.
If your player persists in not correctly reading ID3 tags, try formatting it. It should be working just fine, and up until now when I tested this stuff out, I’ve never seen my Express have difficulty with ID3.
Message Edited by kennyj on 11-05-2007 07:31 PM
