Problems with Genre ...
I just got my iPod 30gig, and immeidately connected it and began syncing it with iPod...to my surprise ephPod seems to have messed up some of my Genre tags (by messed up I mean left out)
I have checked the tags (with tag&rename) over and over again, they show up on tag&rename...I have tried removing v1 tags...re-writing the genre tags with the XP compatibility option enabled...the only thign that I have gotten to work is disabling the "attempt to read id3v2 tags" option...and I'd rather not do this as I have some genre's that are not supported by the id3v1 standard...anyone have any idea of what I can do to fix this problem? ... I'm about to try MusicMatch...and I REALLY hate that program lol...any help would be appreciated
[757 byte] By [
Spoonman] at [2007-11-9 12:22:54]
# 1 Re: Problems with Genre ...
I hate to say it but the only thing that's worked for me as far as the genre problem is to use musicmatch
# 2 Re: Problems with Genre ...
After you made your changes to your tags (i.e. deleting the id3v1 tags) did you delete and reupload the song from your iPod?
See, ephpod does not automatically update tag data when you sync/upload. All it does is check to see if the file exists. If it does (even if it's an older version) it won't reupload it, nor will it change the entries in the iPod's database.
Xplay and MC9 do support this, but ephpod and MMJB (as I remember it) don't.
If you did delete and re-upload the files, then it's a bug in ephpod. Report it on the listserver over on ephpod's web site.
Adam
# 3 Re: Problems with Genre ...
I'm having exactly the same problem. I've noticed that others have had the problem too, but have never seen any clear resolution.
I used WMP 9 advanced tag editor to edit my tags (most are "Jazz" or "Rock" (without the quotation marks). But when viewed via Ephpod and uploaded to my iPod, the Genres are blank. (Both when viewed with Ephpod and on the iPod screen itself).
I tried changing the tags on some of the songs with WMP9. Then I deleted those songs on the iPod and used Ephpod to upload them again, but that didn't help.
Another thing I noticed is that the Comment field has a strange string of characters in it when the songs are displayed via Ephpod, but the Comment filed is blank when viewed via WMP9.
Here's an example of the character string in the Comment field:
9+0690E2BC4C79A23F64C2D8991B4D4007+450277
All of the strings are unique, but have a similar format. the first digit may be the track number, because in all cases it seems to correspond to the tranck number.
My best bet would be that there is some kind of bug in Ephpod that's causing it to misread tags and place the data in the wrong fields or omit it completely when moving the info to the iPod. The reason I believe the bug is in Ephpod rather than in the software originally used to create the tags is that I have read posts from several different people (in this forum and on an Ephpod list-server) who have experienced similar problems -- but these people were using a variety of different software packages to create the tags, including WMP9 and MusicMatch. Unless all of these packages have bugs in their tag writing software, this would lead me to believe that it's Ephpod that's having problem reading the tags. (But let me say Ephpod is an amazing and wonderful program -- this is a constructive post in the spirit of helping make a great program even better!)
Anyway, that's just my hypothosis.
Any suggestions or any details about similar experiences would be really appreciated so we can solve this problem. Thanks!
# 4 Re: Problems with Genre ...
One thing I do not suggest doing is using WMP 9 to tag. MS just likes to do things differently and doesn't follow all the tagging standards correctly.
If you edit the tags in a good editor (tag&rename, id3tagit) and they still aren't showing up on the iPod correctly after a reload, my guess is that you have run into an ephpod bug.
Don't use it anymore myself, but I do seem to remember genre's being somewhat messed up.
MC9 & Xplay don't have this issue if you're into switching. I know w/MC9 that you also don't need to reupload tunes to process tag changes. With Xplay I think it does it on some tags (maybe all).
Adam
# 5 Re: Problems with Genre ...
Good suggestion. I'll try one of the other tag editors and see if that helps. I'll report back within a day or two -- first I better get some work done! :-)
Doug
# 6 Re: Problems with Genre ...
This isn't a solution but if you highlight a group of files in EphPod using shirt/ctrl keys, you can press F5 and change the genere for the entire group. Makes things go a lot faster.
BigIzz at 2007-11-15 17:27:30 >
# 7 Re: Problems with Genre ...
BigIzz -
Ah! Great tip!
So I can help troubleshoot this further, I'm first going to try changing the tags with a non-WMP9 tag editor to see if that helps. Then, if that doesn't work, I'll change them from within Ephpod using your tip.
Doug
# 8 Re: Problems with Genre ...
You can also use the same method to mass change track titles, albums, artists, coments and composers, just look at the function key in the column title.
BigIzz at 2007-11-15 17:29:33 >
