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View Full Version : Converting with the "/" character in tags



mbotis987
07-25-2008, 06:13 PM
Hi,

I have a bunch of ALAC encoded files that I'd like to convert to MP3s. Many of them have a "/" character in one of the tags (song title or genre mostly). Unfortunately, when I try this (v12 reference), the / seems to get converted into a carriage return and everything after the slash gets cut off. I can still see the info after the slash through dbpoweramp if I mouse over the MP3 file, but it is on a separate line and not readable by my MP3 player. Does anyone know if there a way to set up the conversion so that it keeps the slash in the tag?

Thanks!

Spoon
07-26-2008, 09:25 AM
What should be happening is the / should be change to \.

garym
07-26-2008, 10:01 AM
what is your mp3 player. It is correct behavior for the mouseover info that dbpa displays to show the different items (multiple artists, genres, etc) on different lines. But when I play the file in, for example, foobar2000, I see the multiple artists handled correctly (both listed in the artist tag (and displayed) with a comma between the artists). In itunes the multiple artists are displayed correctly with a "/" between the two artists.

I suspect you're seeing a limitation of your mp3 player not correctly reading tags or working with multiple items within a tag.

mbotis987
07-26-2008, 08:26 PM
Hi-

Thanks for the replies. I'm using a Creative Zen Xtra 60 gb. And the problem is that the / in my library isn't to designate multiple genres or artists or anything. I have a genre "singer/songwriter" for example. It's easy enough to just change the genres, but in song and album titles there are some slashes all over the place (like "short skirt / long jacket" by Cake) and I have about 500 gb of lossless files. I'd rather not go through and change all of the slashes although it is do-able.

I'm going to look at the files in some different software audio players to see if I can find observe anything else, and I'll post back this weekend

Thanks for your help.

DazBYorks
07-27-2008, 04:50 AM
Hi,

I have problems with this, but only with AC/DC (the band) and iTunes, WMP, MP3Tag, MediaMonkey and getID3 (php) all handle it without seeing it as a multiple item tag. Some may have an exceptions built in, but AC\DC isn't acceptable to me.

Daz

Spoon
07-28-2008, 08:48 AM
We will look into this.

mbotis987
07-28-2008, 11:24 PM
Hi,

I just double-checked everything. In my dbpoweramp configuration, I have it set to tag creation ID3v2, version 2.3, and Unicode-16 encoding. I don't have any devices or software that require ID3v1 tags, so I leave that off. I converted an Apple Lossless file with AC/DC as the artist tag. In foobar2000, I get the behavior described by garym - which is it shows up as AC, DC. If I import it into iTunes, it shows up as AC/DC and looks fine. If I put it into my Creative Zen Xtra, it says the artist is "AC." And as before, if I mouse over it with dbpoweramp, It is:

AC
DC

on two lines.

I noticed that foobar2000 now has a new version of the ALAC decoder component. I loaded the ALAC file into foobar2000 and converted it to an MP3, and the tag comes out fine - AC/DC is the artist. Mousing over it with dbpoweramp shows this too. And on the creative zen xtra, it shows up as AC/DC as the artist.

I should have known better than to use a slash in my genres. However, my two cents is that slashes show up in tags often enough, and I think the behavior should be that dbpoweramp takes a slash in a tag to be a slash in the converted file too. There may be some older convention that goes against this, but that's my vote if this is a vote.

Just for the record, I love dbpoweramp, and I really appreciate the attention to this.

Thanks a lot everybody!

garym
07-29-2008, 06:46 AM
Note regarding multiple artist display in itunes. If I have multiple artists (i.e., showing up in foobar as artist1, artist2), itunes will display this by default as artist1/artist2. So setting multiple artists as AC, DC will display in itunes as AC/DC. But of course this is merely a coincidence that this turns out to be the correct artist name.

DazBYorks
07-30-2008, 06:25 PM
Hi,

I have just ripped an album with an AC/DC track on it and the resulting tags are;

Title: DC / Big Gun
Artist: AC

Whilst it's obvious why this has occurred, why not follow the XMCD route and only see a slash as a multiple item separator if it has a space either side?

Daz

Spoon
07-31-2008, 04:32 AM
>Whilst it's obvious why this has occurred,

Not to me, for those two to be on seperate tags the meta data provider must have had it wrong.

DazBYorks
07-31-2008, 07:48 PM
Hi,

Whilst CD Ripper gets the data from the default source, I maintain a local CDDB* file structure - so I know it is providing a correct and valid XMCD file. I have to therefore assume that whatever is splitting on the first slash in the string to get artist/title, where it should only ever split on a slash with a space either side.

* Still no Unix format support?

Daz

Spoon
08-01-2008, 04:03 AM
That makes sense, if using freedb only as it sperates the artist from track with /