Free Trial Does Not Work

[Longblades]

I just downloaded Power Pack for the 30 day free trial but as soon as I try it I get a message saying it cannot be used until it is registered. I'd like to try it first, to see if it will do the ID Tag editing I want. Here is what I want to do:

I have copied several hundred LPs (old vinyl record albums) into WAV and mp3 format. Of course there are NO ID tags. I need ID tags in order to copy this information over into an mp3 organizer. So, I want to see if the Power Pack ID Tag editor will save me many hours of manually typing the ID Tag information in. Thanks for your help.

[ChristinaS]

Is it possible you've had Power pack installed as a free trial previously? Then it has probably expired and won't let you use even a new trial version installed on top of it.

You should uninstall Power Pack from Control Panel through Add/remove Programs and reinstall the new version you've downloaded.

[Longblades]

Tried that, still no go. Will the Power Pack do what I want for editing tags? If you can tell me that then it might forestall a lot of useless trying.

[ChristinaS]

Tried that, still no go. Will the Power Pack do what I want for editing tags? If you can tell me that then it might forestall a lot of useless trying.
Well, I read your other post on this same subject. I don't know if you can carry over the file name to the tag, I haven't been able to do this myself in my tests. But I am new to Power Pack and haven't explored all the features yet.

I know you can edit the tags of several files at once so that you may set common elements like album name, year, etc..

As for your not being able to use the trial Power Pack without registering it, hmmmmm....., unless there's a new bug in the latest version, I can't see what may be wrong. I cannot try it as I have a regsitered version already. There's a program somewhere with a way to reactivate it, maybe it will work.... http://www.dbpoweramp.com/bin/ReactivatePP.exe

[Wayne]

Which version of dMC are you using?

You'll need a working powerpack to be able to manually edit the id tags. However even without the powerpack it should be possible to create tag information from the file name using the appropriate codec:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codecs/dBpowerAMP-codec-tag-from-filename.exe

Though this depend on how your files are named.

Wayne

[ChristinaS]

Aaaah! Why was I blind and didn't see it despite staring at all Codec Central umpteen times? Too obvious I guess:p

[Longblades]

Wayne and Christina, thank you both for your help. I was able to try the "filename to Tag" feature of power pack out this weekend. Unfortunately it does not seem to work on many of my files. I used space hyphen space (ie. Mason's Apron - 46 - Alaisdair Downie) as my separator and perhaps it does not like that.

Also, I did a mass ID Tag edit of some files and put in some comments and genre that applied to several of the songs. The mass edit wiped out whatever tags had been previously written from filename and the filename to tag feature could not correct them.

If you have any ideas on this I sure would appreciate hearing them. Thanks again.

Oh, and I discovered that some of my old, old songs (with my funny naming so I know they are not from a CD data base) do have ID Tags. I guess Explorer writes them, wish it would do them all.

P.S. Wayne, I'm using the latest version I think, dMCr10

[Spoon]

Miss out the spaces in the tag from match, ie:

[artist]-[tracknumber]-[track]

(you will have to double check the names above).

[Longblades]

Nope, Spoon, it still doesn't work.

[ChristinaS]

Just on a hunch, for having encountered similar problems with ID Tags.

1. Highlight a bunch of files, right click and select Edit Tags.

2. Then delete all tags.

3. Rerun dMC for those same files and select Tag from File Name.

4. Highlight the files again and Edit Tags for them. Change whatever common tags they all have.

I hope this works for you better than it does for me most of the time.

I must say that this process appears to work with some difficulty on my PC, often either Windows Explorer bombs out or dMC bombs out. I haven't found out why dMC bombs yet. By now I'm used to Explorer doing a belly-flop when I right-click or just plain hover over certain media types, though I have no clue either why.

I may need to do a massive cleanup of all the versions of dMC & Co and install clean latest versions of everything. I'm thinking there might be version conflicts.

[Longblades]

No, that does not work either. I'm trying out four "filename to Tag" programs on my computer right now. Only one seems to work, and unfortunately it is not db. Even the one that works still misses a few songs. I like the db setup though.

[ChristinaS]

No, that does not work either. I'm trying out four "filename to Tag" programs on my computer right now. Only one seems to work, and unfortunately it is not db. Even the one that works still misses a few songs. I like the db setup though.
Sorry, I'm fresh out of any other ideas.

[Spoon]

>Mason's Apron - 46 - Alaisdair Downie

was this one of the files (exact filename) that would not tag from db?

[Longblades]

No, here's one that won't go, it's set up the same way though.

San Antonio RoseFXT - 60 - Boston Pops 4.05.mp3

Path is C:\My Documents\Power Pack Test\

I didn't want to take a chance on screwing up any songs so I've copied a bunch into this new folder to test things out on. Of the 14 songs currently in this folder six need ID tags fixed or created from new and db will not do any of them. A few are title - # - artist and some are title -#- artist

All go through all right in Tag&Rename, using only the latter separator designation for all, but none work any way in db.

[Spoon]

I will try to look when I can.

[ChristinaS]

The file name San Antonio RoseFXT - 60 - Boston Pops 4.05.mp3 strikes me as possibly being invalid in many instances, due mainly to the presence of an extra period in it. Normally a period separates the file name from it's extension. Some applications will accept it, some may not. The same may happen with file names containing other reserved or invalid characters like: \ / : * ? " < > | .

[Longblades]

The .mp3 is being put on by some other program when I carry the file over into an organizer. The organizer then says the file name includes the .mp3. It specifically puts this as part of the filename so I included it for you, sorry if that has made things more confusing. I have put on only the 4.05 (which is the length of the song) and it converts as part of the artist name in the one "filename to tag" program which is working for me.

[ChristinaS]

The .mp3 is the actual extension of the file name, however having the other periods in the file name before the extension may confuse a lot of programs. Try renaming the file wihtout the periods in 4.05. and see if that helps. But do keep the period before the mp3 extension.

Other than that, I have no clue, sorry. :o

[Longblades]

I don't think that's it, Christina, because one of the six songs in my Power Pack Test folder that will not convert to Tag does not have the time extension. However, it is a copy of one that does have a time extension. I took the time extension off because I thought that might the reason too. And, I only recently started putting that on. Many songs that will not convert do not have it, and, as I say, most of them will convert in Tag&Rename, whether the time extension is there or not. I have looked at the songs that will not convert, even the few in Tag&REname, and can find no common denominator.

[ChristinaS]

Just another crazy idea I'm having.

Right click on the file name you would like to change the tags for and select properties. Is Read only checked by any chance? In that case the file cannot be written to, which is what the tag editor has to do - although I'd expect an error mesage of sorts if attempting to write to the file. Just uncheck that and tagging may work again.

[Longblades]

Nope. The only thing checked for the six is Archive. And System is grayed out. Too bad, eh? It would be nice to convert from wave to mp3, normalize and write tags all in one fell swoop.