got my 8 gb fuze a few weeks ago. my previous player was an old sony walkman (~4 years old) that sorted uploaded files by the windows file structure i had them in (ahh, the old days…). so this is my first player that uses MP3 tags for organizing by album, artist, etc.
in the past week, i’ve been slowly going through my collection to edit tags on songs so that they suit my preferences (taking “the” from the beginning of artist names, etc.) for easier search on my fuze. i’m using winamp (5.63, current version) as my comp’s MP3 software, and sometimes use it’s “AutoTag” feature to fill out the tag info. after uploading some of these revised MP3s this morning (through MSC), though, i noticed that some albums are reading as “Unknown” on the fuze, and after looking at individual tracks, i notice gibberish characters (and some japanese, oddly enough) for the track name. everything plays fine, just the albums and track names are messed up (artists listed correctly). i haven’t done any deep research into what connects the “bad” tags to each other (the AutoTag feature, maybe?). I’m just wondering if anyone else has seen this problem.
hi, I’ve had problems with winamp’s autotag feature before. I was fixing 20gb+ of id3 tags and when I used winamp’s feature it didn’t even update the artists or albums. I suggest trying a batch id3 renamer program (search google, cause I can’t think of any off the top of my head). you’ll have to play around with maybe 10 files first to see if the program works, otherwise move onto trying another program, cause there are a lot. find one you will like.
also I’ve been using media monkey to also batch rename my id3 tags, and they also have an auto-tag from web feature. but lately I’ve been noticing some of my id3 tags don’t get updated properly, not sure if this is media monkey, or some other program cancling out what I’ve done.
anyways search around and try out different programs (be sure you have some virus protection like AVG free)
thanks for the info. i’ll check into media monkey or some other program.
winamp is seeing the tags properly, though, and this isn’t a case of the AutoTag mislabelling things (when using the feature, i am making sure that the info is being filled in correctly. if it doesn’t, i revise to my preferences). on my computer, everything is fine. after uploading to the fuze, not so much. it’s like the player can’t properly read the track title and album portion of the tags for some reason. encoding issue?
I believe that if there is a conflict between id3v1 and id3v2, the fuze will not display properly, as it does not know which id3 version to take priority with. try a program called “id3kill” and remove only id3v1 tags. that way only id3v2 tags are present.
@thoma wrote:
I believe that if there is a conflict between id3v1 and id3v2, the fuze will not display properly, as it does not know which id3 version to take priority with. try a program called “id3kill” and remove only id3v1 tags. that way only id3v2 tags are present.
no dice, even when using the id3kill on the tags via MSC… but i found that if i go in and hand edit the tags via MSC/winamp, it reads them correctly. all it seems to require is a minor change, like type an extra letter into the track and album tags, delete, and save.
i did find that files that had bad tags via MSC are fine when transferred via MTP. so to me, it looks like there’s something not-cool happening when transferring some files via MSC.
i would have preferred MSC, but this issue is too annoying to deal with. any sansa service people browsing this? got any ideas?
Were you able to identify any specific characters that cause the Unknown artist, unknown album issue? I have a number of files that show up with the proper ID3 tag information on my PC and other MP3 players but are thrown into the unknown pit by the Fuze. Do they have to be one of the specific ID3 versions to be recognized? I just find it weird that in an album that was imported and tagged at the same time 2 or 3 of the tracks are labeled unknown artist/unknown album by the Fuze but display the song title. Any help would be appreciated.
@thoma wrote:
I believe that if there is a conflict between id3v1 and id3v2, the fuze will not display properly, as it does not know which id3 version to take priority with. try a program called “id3kill” and remove only id3v1 tags. that way only id3v2 tags are present.
Thanks for this information. I have the problem that my Fuze displays ID3v1 tags (and cuts off song names and artist names due to its limited size) instead of using ID3v2 tags. I’ll try id3kill and hopefully that’ll solve my problem.
no dice, even when using the id3kill on the tags via MSC… but i found that if i go in and hand edit the tags via MSC/winamp, it reads them correctly. all it seems to require is a minor change, like type an extra letter into the track and album tags, delete, and save.
I had the same problem with a couple of sings and I did the same thing to fix it. I just went in Winamp, copied and re-pasted my tags and it displayed fine in the Fuze after.
I have no idea what’s causing this problem or how I fixed it…
Another problem I have, I don’t know if any of you can help me with this, but I have a few songs by AC/DC that I want to put on my Fuze. The problem is, they are tagged (in both ID3v1 and v2) with an artist name AC/DC, but only the AC shows up on my fuze. Anyone know what it cuts off the /DC?
I noticed that all songs I downloaded from eMusic.com get dumped into the “unknown” genre. Peeking inside with a hex editor, I noticed that the ID3v2 genre field used the “(xx)” notation (xx is: 0=Blues, 1=Classic Rock, 2=Country, etc., same values as ID3v1), and the files had a proper IDv1 tag at the end. WinAmp reads these fine, but the Fuze did not.
Running them through MP3Tag (no changes, just select the files and hit the “Save” button) fixed them so they work fine on the Fuze. Again, peeking inside shows MP3Tag writes the genre as the full text string (“Blues”, “Classic Rock”, etc.). Maybe there is a problem with handling the numeric type genres? (Both formats are legal in ID3v2.3, in fact they can be combined as “(2)Country” ).
Had I read the preceding messages in this thread beforehand, I would have looked at the other fields, as well as the Artist and Album categories on the Fuze to see if they were in error as well, bit I didn’t. Soon as my quota is refreshed at eMusic, I’ll download some more songs and check them more thoroughly…
