ID3 tags ?

MP3 players All other MP3 players
21

So it’s been about a year since this topic has seen any activity, but I hope maybe some of you (especially pei1) will happen to see this because I’m having some issues with a SE I just got. It basically sounds like the same problem pei1 was having. Most of the songs (but not all) that I copy from my XP machine to my SE do not have readable id3 information. I am copying them to the internal storage of the device using windows explorer (thus I’m in MSC mode, if I understand correctly).

I have tried using mp3tag and other similar programs to rewrite the tags on the device to different id3 versions (such as id3v1 and id3v2.3) with no luck. I also gave the SE to my roommate who has a Mac and had her copy some random songs from her itunes library to the device. Miraculously, all of the files copied (besides one which was m4a, and so wasn’t read at all) showed up fine in the player’s music browser!

From this, I feel like it’s an issue brought about by windows copying the files. Tomorrow I will try transfering some songs from my windows machine to her mac machine and then copying the files from the mac to the SE to test this. Anyone have any suggestions or possibly routes of exploration to get this fixed? I just upgraded to the latest firmware today (01.01.12a) and have formatted the drive with its built-in format tool (Settings -> Format). I have not formatted with windows for fear that it might mess up the player… maybe I should try this though.

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Hah, so just after posting this (which I posted after several hours of messing around with it) I seem to have found out why rewriting the id3 tags was having no effect. It seems that if you copy the files over to the player, unplug it from USB and start it up normally so that it rebuilds its database, and then plug it into the computer again and mess with the tagging, it doesn’t bother reading the tags again when you start it again. I guess it compares the current list of filenames with what it remembers, and if they’re the same then it assumes everything else is (tags included).

All this means is that you will have to make sure you rewrite your tags on the copied files before unplugging the Sansa Express since it seems unable to update its internal database on files that undergo tag changes but not filename changes. I am unable to do a batch retagging of my entire library, so I guess this will just be one more step in the process of transfering new music to my SE.

For the record, I stripped the files of id3v1 and rewrote the id3v2 tags in version 2.3. I’m not sure if id3v2.4 tags work with the Express, but I will check it tomorrow. I know some combination of id3v1 and id3v2.4 was the issue in the firstplace. 

Message Edited by fibby on 04-11-2009 02:33 AM