SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Adding MP3s truncates custom genre tags

#1

Hello Paul,

I’ve spent many hours searching everywhere (forum & google) and trying various combinations of settings, but I can’t seem to figure it out.

Every time I add an MP3 file to Jaikoz, that is correctly tagged in iTunes (id3v2.3) and in the way i need it to be, it gets truncated automatically in Jaikoz.

“DJ Chill House (0-Starter)” -> “DJ Chill House”

The brackets and its content disappears.

Obviously, while being imported, the audio file experiences a serie of tag autocorrections. What is happening to it? Where can I change it.

That’s very frustrating, the genre tag is kinda the most important tag to me since thats the way I find my way through my track collection when deejaying.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I’m working on OS X 10.6.5, iTunes 10.1

Thanks a lot,
schraep

#2

Hi, nothing gets autocorrected during load.

I think the problem may be that you have both an ID3v1 and and a ID3v2 tag in the mp3 file, Jaikoz will use the ID3v2 tag but the value you what is the ID3v1 tag.

The best way to find out in Jaikoz is select View/Show View Pane and View/Show ID3 Tabs, then you can look at the values for title in the ID3v1 and ID3v2 panels. If that doesn’t solve it you could email me a problem file so I can resolve this.

#3

Hi Paul,

thanks a lot for the super fast reply (even on a sunday morning), i really appreciate your support.

and thanks a lot for your super software, i’ve been using it a lot successfully till lately. Maybe things dont work as expected because of all the additional data stored in the file. I switched from serato to traktor pro, both programms write their custom data into the mp3s, like stripes and so on.

just to let you know:

  1. the issue only appears in jaikoz (mac, win). tag&rename , mp3tag, winamp, taktor pro,… all show the genre tag correctly.

  2. when saving the changes in jaikoz on the test track, the genre tag gets truncated definetely, and other apps show only the new shortened genre name.

actually, i accidentally messed up my whole collection because of that, when saving and not double checking the changes made by jaikoz, but i of course had a backup.

  1. a fresh install on mac, deleting all support, preferences files didnt solve anything.

  2. Here is the link with my test track

File name: jaikoz test track for genre truncation.mp3 File size: 16.65 MB

schraep

#4

Hi, originally I thought you were talking about the title field, sorry.

What is happening is that Jaikoz is reading the genre as two different genres
DJ Deep Tech and 4-Down, if you look at the genre field in Jaikoz you’ll see that there is a little ‘2’ to the left of DJ Deep Tech in the genre field, double clicking on this will show both genres - DJ Deep Tech and 4-Down.

Why is Jaikoz splitting into two genres:

From ID3 v23 Spec:

References to the ID3v1 genres can be made by, as first byte, enter "(" followed by a number from the genres list (appendix A) and ended with a 
")" character. This is optionally followed by a refinement, e.g. "(21)" or 
"(4)Eurodisco". Several references can be made in the same frame, e.g. "(51)(39)". If the refinement should begin with a "(" character it should be
 replaced with "((", e.g. "((I can figure out any genre)" or "(55)((I think...)".

so brackets are used as refinements (if you hadn’t used brackets they wouldn’t be split)

I think it makes sense to show refinements as separate genres this makes working with multiple genres more useful, and when we look at the ID3v24 specification we can see the concept of refinement has been dropped in terms of just multiple categories

 The 'Content type', which ID3v1 was stored as a one byte numeric
   value only, is now a string. You may use one or several of the ID3v1

   types as numerical strings, or, since the category list would be
   impossible to maintain with accurate and up to date categories,
   define your own. Example: "21" $00 "Eurodisco" $00
#5

Oh ok, I see.
Is there any way to avoid this behaviour?

In splitting the custom genre in two genres, when saving, it’s keeping only the first split genre as main genre, with the mentioned truncation effect.

Should I maybe take off the brackets when custom tagging to avoid this issue ? I will do a few tests, or use some workaround copying my custom genre back and forth from another field.

I must admit though, that’s not ideal, since it restricts the freedom of choosing custom genre tags, a technique used by many people/djs for sorting music. This detail is maybe worth to think about in future releases.

In any way, many thanks.

have a nice sunday.
schraep

#6

Yes, if you don’t use ( brackets you wont have this problem, you could use square brackets instead. Were you actually aware that round brackets have special significance for genres ?

Testing this further I see that when its saved we insert a null separator like is done for ID3v24 tags, now this isn’t really part of the official ID3v23 spec but it is understood by a number of players such as Foobar 2000, I should make this optional and probably disabled by default.

However if you’re player does support this (or you convert your tags to ID3v24 which does support this) then this is actually much more flexible than your current situation because you can treat each refinement as a separate genre in your song and then create a playlist where you can AND/OR the refinements

i.e. Deep-Tech OR 4 -Chill

whereas with your method you can only search for

i.e Deep-Tech 4 -Chill

#7

I’ will be going for the no-brackets way. I wasn’t indeed aware of the significance of brackets in this case.

but thanks for the tips regarding id3v2.4 and the multiples tagging option. I’ll check out how i can integrate that in my workflow.

in any case… you made one more happy customer :slight_smile:

peace, schraep