Hello to all. I’ve recently purchased a Clip and found this wonderful forum. It’s great to see a community working together alongside a manufacturer to support and improve a product. I’ve updated my Clip to the latest firmware and it is much faster and more responsive than the older firmware that came on the player and I’m looking forward to future releases for this very nice product.
Now, on to my issue. My clip doesn’t seem to recognize all of the ID3 genre codes. Several of them just show up as unknown. The specific codes in question are for the christian tags, ‘Contemporary Christian’, ‘Christian Rock’, ‘Christian Rap’, even ‘Gospel’ doesn’t seem to register. There may be others, but these are the ones I’ve tried. Is this a known problem or am I having my own little issue?
If it matters, I’m connecting to my Clip as MSC using Linux. I’m using the EasyTag editor.
Is it possibly an issue with the type of ID3 tag being used (V1 versus V2)?
I believe that the Clip uses ID3V2 tags. In any case, you can experiment with this by using your tag editor to change a known genre tag ( eg, pick a song and change its genre tag from “Rock” to “Christian Rock” ). Then see if the genre for that song has changed on the Clip ( does it still show up in the “Rock” genre? ). If not, you may be changing the wrong type of ID3 tag.
I *think* that the Clip doesn’t care about the text of a genre tag, other than it meeting basic requirements like length, ASCII encoding, etc.
Message Edited by PromisedPlanet on 01-10-2008 09:33 AM
The Clip definitely can be picky here. Not knowing much about ID3 tags, I had tagged my audiobooks as “Audiobooks” in the genre field. They showed as “Unknown” under genre. Switching to the singular “Audiobook” resulted in them appearing as such under genre.
Hmm … maybe an MSC versus MTP thing, then? Otherwise, who knows what the rules are. I usually sync my Clip in MTP (it’s faster), and I have genres on my Clip like:
This is interesting. ID3 tags do support “gospel” but not “Christian” anything. See http://www.id3.org/d3v2.3.0 for the list of genre tags supported directly by ID3 v2.3 tags. It is possible that the OP’s songs were tagged with “nonstandard” tags (WinAmp has “extended” the specification’s genre tags somewhat, for example, and the Clip may not follow these extensions). EasyTag may also provide unsupported genre types.
If these are WMA files, I’m not sure what the genre types are but I’m sure that wading through Microsoft’s developer resources could uncover that list as well… What the Clip actually supports is anyone’s guess (this would be nice “high level” information, if Sansa could provide it for those of us who care).
You might try retagging them as “gospel” and see if the Clip handles that OK (assuming these are MP3 files). At least then you could partition them off from the Death Metal and Porn Groove selections in a playlist
I believe that the genre text is married to an index number (as defined in the id3 spec, linked) and even if it is not, altering the file headers is not as simple as going in with a hex editor and overwriting the existing tags; there is also a text field length byte that would need to be changed, and even then I’m not sure it would work if the clip picks up on the index and uses hardcoded tag texts in the database structure (instead of actually reading the text and displaying it). Oddball texts would still need to follow the index structure, or the database would go kablooie…
I’m not saying the Clip adheres strictly to the id3 specification; it may support additional “extended” tags (which is apparently the case), omit some standard tags (which is possible), or…who knows.
As I said, if Sansa could publish a listing of V2.3 genre tags supported by the Clip (heck, ALL supported tags), then we would not be speculating about it, and troubleshooting issues such as this would become far easier.
Click wrote:
I’m not saying the Clip adheres strictly to the id3 specification; it may support additional “extended” tags (which is apparently the case), omit some standard tags (which is possible), or…who knows.
As I said, if Sansa could publish a listing of V2.3 genre tags supported by the Clip (heck, ALL supported tags), then we would not be speculating about it, and troubleshooting issues such as this would become far easier.
Click;
Forgive me for not understanding what you’re saying …
I just now set the ID3V2 genre on a song to “asdasdaf”. It seems pretty unlikely that this genre would be in such a list published by Sandisk. I’ve confirmed that this string exists only in the ID3V2 genre tag, using the MP3tag utililty. I synced the song to my Clip, and now I have a genre on my Clip named “asdasdaf”.
If I’m able to do this, why wouldn’t it be possible to set the genre tag to “Audiobooks”, or “Christian Whatever” etc.? Why would an MP3 player need to restrict the value in a Genre tag to a particular set of strings?
Message Edited by PromisedPlanet on 01-10-2008 02:44 PM
Well that’s pretty cool - and shows that the Clip database is extensible and will accept “what ever” as a genre. This naturally leads me to ask "if you can tag a file with random chanracters, did you try tagging any with “Christian Rock” etc.? They should work - if MP3Tag’s id3 V2.3 settings are appropriate - the Clip has some issues regarding V2.3 tag text encodings - try retagging your files in a manner along the guidelines provided here (I also use MP3Tag BTW, very good utility):
Thanks to everyone for debating this issue back and forth. I’ve got it sorted out now, sort of. The problem was apparently with my tagging software. Taking someones suggestion from the thread, I booted Windows and installed mp3tag. When I loaded the files in question, mp3tag reported the genre as ‘140’, which is apparently some sort of code. I changed them to ‘Christian Rock’, saved, and the Clip picked up on them properly. Too bad mp3tag is Windows only. Guess I’m back to searching for a tagger for linux.
Thanks for the tagger suggestions. EasyTag is actually what I was using. It’s a great tagger and very easy to use, but it won’t allow you to type in the genre. It has a drop-down menu that you select from, but won’t allow freeform entry. By writing some tags with EasyTag and then reading them with mp3tag (under Windows…), it seems that EasyTag is writing some sort of code number instead of a text string. I don’t know how it’s supposed to be done, but the Clip responds much better to the string.
If someone else has had a different experience with EasyTag, please let me know and I’ll check to see if it’s a bug in the version that I’m using. I’m using 2.1.2, which is 0.0.2 versions old, but I tend to go with stability over cutting-edge (and it’s what’s in the repositories).
I like mp3tag. It’s a great tagger that runs under the wrong os (for me). If I can’t find something else native, I’ll have to try it under Wine.
