Tags look fine in Jaikoz, show an odd error when read by Sonos

[bobm]

I used Jaikoz to re-tag a huge group (7000+) of tracks.

The entire group of tracks was set to a single genre tag, and to be doubly sure, I did a copy/past of the desired genre tag in the entire genre column.

I then let my Sonos system index these tracks.

Oddly, around 15% of the tracks show up in Sonos as genre “8”, rather than the desired genre tag which shows in Jaikoz.

Admittedly, this could be a Sonos issue rather than a Jaikoz issue. But whether or not the problem began in Jaikoz, I would hope I can use Jaikoz to find and fix the problem.

Upon investigation I find that the “8” genre shows up in the Sonos index if and only if the track-file format is mp3. The majority of these files are FLACs, with a small number of other formats. But only the mp3s have produced this odd result.

Looking carefully at the offending files in the details pane, and in the view and view audio panes, I can’t for the life of me find anywhere where this “8” data could be coming from. All tags look correct, particularly those fields which I understand are used by Sonos in building its index. All the genre tags, including the misbehaving ones, show a “1” as the number of entries for the genre field. Indeed, I can’t find any "8"s anywhere when looking with Jaikoz.

A true puzzler. Suggestions, anyone?

[bobm]

OK, I figured this out.

In case anyone here with similar problem is looking at this thread, this situation has to do with the differences in how MP3 tags are stored between the two standards ID3 v1 (old standard) and v2 (new).

Sonos, and presumably some other systems, want to see ID3 v2. What caused the problem was that these MP3 tracks’ tags were ID3 v1, which apparently stores genre (and other tags?) internally as numbers, and Sonos is not set up to map these numbers to fixed text values in display.

To resolve, in Jaikoz I simply needed to set

preferences:save:ID3 Tag V1 to “Delete tag”
preferences:save:ID3 Tag V2 to “Always write tag”

When files were saved, things got fixed.

Note, in preferences:save:compatibility I also have all three options checked, but don’t know if this was part of solving my little problem or not.

[pped]

My issue is that Twonky lists a large number of albums with Genre Unknown despite all tracks showing the correct genre in Jaikoz (posted as a question in a separate thread).

Since I can see other users have Genre related challenges I just want to add that I tried your solution but it did not work for me. My issue seems to be specific to non-flac files.

It is frustrating because I am convinced it is a fairly simple solution once you know what to do.

[Alfg]

@pped
Try: Preferences -> Save -> Save genres is an iTunes-friendly format
Maybe it helps.

[paultaylor]

Yes, this will ensure they are written as text instead of numbers and then do Force Save to force the files to be resaved with new format, usual save will not work unless any of the metadata has changed.