id3 genre tag bug?

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Fuze™
1

Some time ago I noticed, that several of my audio files didn’t show up under the expected genre entry. I didn’t care too much as I navigate by folders most of the time. But recently I was curious to see what’s going on. To my surprise I found that all of the mp3 files oddly ending up under genres “Unknown” or “Unknownk” have proper id3 genre tag “Folk” (genre id 80).

I decided to make a test case as follows.

First I created several test files with genres “Folk” and “Jazz” using different id3 versions:

  file        artist      album       title           track   genre   ID3-version
  folk10.mp3  artist 1    album 1     title folk 10           Folk    1.0
  folk11.mp3  artist 2    album 2     title folk 11   1       Folk    1.1
  folk23.mp3  artist 3    album 3     title folk 23   01      Folk    2.3
  folk24.mp3  artist 4    album 4     title folk 24   01      Folk    2.4
  jazz10.mp3  artist 5    album 5     title jazz 10           Jazz    1.0
  jazz11.mp3  artist 6    album 6     title jazz 11   1       Jazz    1.1
  jazz23.mp3  artist 7    album 7     title jazz 23   01      Jazz    2.3
  jazz24.mp3  artist 8    album 8     title jazz 24   01      Jazz    2.4

Next I formatted the fuze. Now I copied all files into the MUSIC folder on internal storage using MSC USB connection to my PC. Again the tag browsing is pretty strange for files tagged with genre “Folk” whereas all “Jazz” music files are in right place! This is what I get:

  Genres  Artists
  Jazz
          artist 5
          artist 6
          artist 7
          artist 8
  Unknown
          artist 1
          artist 2
  Unknownk
          artist 3
          artist 4

Can somebody else confirm this bug?

How about other genres with similar issues?

Message Edited by ewelot on 11-13-2009 12:49 PM

2

Are you using ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 ? Maybe “fol” does something funny in Unicode.

3

Maybe the Fuze has the same ‘smut’ filter as here on the forum built-in and it’s mis-interepreting the ‘folk’ genre as in

4

Answering my own question: How about other genres with similar issues?

Yes, other genres are affected too, e.g. “Swing” and “Opera”.

An interesting point is, that all of the affected genres have high genre ID numbers. So I went to read the id3v2 specifications and came across this genre id list. And indeed there is a difference: genre ID’s from 0 to 79 are defined by id3v1 whereas ID’s from 80 to 125 (including Folk, Swing, Opera) are Winamp extensions!

Maybe the fuze is capable to interpret the limited range of id3v1 genres only …

But than again, any user defined genre tag strings are working fine, e.g. “MyFolk” instead of “Folk” just works (therefore it is not considered a  **** word, tapeworm :stuck_out_tongue: ). Strange, isn’t it? 

5

@black_rectangle wrote:
Are you using ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 ? Maybe “fol” does something funny in Unicode.

Sorry, forgot to answer …

Yes I’m using ISO-8859-1 in ID3v2.3 and even with ID3v2.4 tags in all of my example files.

Moreover, I just installed the current firmware version 01.02.28 and the problem persists.