Why do certain tracks or albums contain only numeric "genre" tags? Example enclosed

[alan9990]

More refining this. Overall everything is excellent.

Now that I can use the served database as a means to go through the many years of tagging of files, with a view to more standardising, I've noticed that just a few tracks are appearing under the "genre" folder with nothing but numbers?

Below is a screencap of one entire album. Points to note:

Having selected all tracks in the tag editor, one sees that "genre" is the same across all tags.

The tags are ID3v2.4.0, applied to tag2 only.



Yet this entire album appears under "genre" as simply 159 There's nothing else, just that number. I cannot find anything attached to the file tags that include that number (obviously no BPM or similar). The album tagged is the only instance of the artist in my entire library.

I have a couple of other loose tracks that appear as 127, and 162 respectively. I can no doubt sort those out once I understand what's going on with the above.

p.s. I have just deleted and rebuilt the database.

[Spoon]

Please email one of those files to the address shown on this page:

https://www.dbpoweramp.com/about

[alan9990]

Please email one of those files to the address shown on this page:

https://www.dbpoweramp.com/about

Many thanks,

please feel free to pm me an email address or other. Not clear from the link exactly who I'm supposed to be contacting.

[simbun]

Have your tags been converted from ID3v1?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ID3v1_genres

[alan9990]

Have your tags been converted from ID3v1?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ID3v1_genres

oh! Neat. No, I don't believe they have. "back in the day" when I began this, I'd attach both 3v1 and 3v2 tags, but it fairly soon became obvious that ID3v1 was a bit legacy.

I've opened the album/files in 3 different tag editors, run them through mp3val, done everything I can to ensure there are no 'surprise' tags anywhere. I've not found any reason for these files (and the other odd ones also giving numbers) to be as they are.

Doesn't stop them at all from being correctly indexed through "Artist" or "Albumartist". But as an oddity I'm keen to remove these entries from "genre".

[Spoon]

Sorry the address is on this page:

https://www.dbpoweramp.com/email

[simbun]

I've opened the album/files in 3 different tag editors, run them through mp3val, done everything I can to ensure there are no 'surprise' tags anywhere.

Indulge me, give eyeD3 a try as it's very likely to be due to ID3v1:

eyeD3 -1 filename.mp3

To remove ID3v1:

eyeD3 --remove-v1 filename.mp3

If you're sure there aren't any ID3v1 tags, check the value in the ID3v2 tag (maybe a bad conversion):

hexdump -C --length 2048 filename.mp3

NOTE: I'm not sure if ID3 tags are always written to the beginning of the file.

You're looking for the TCON field:

00000080  30 31 2f 30 31 00 54 43  4f 4e 00 00 00 0b 00 00  |01/01.TCON......|
00000090  01 ff fe 50 00 6f 00 70  00 00 00 54 49 54 32 00  |...P.o.p...TIT2.|

[alan9990]

simbun again, all extremely helpful and good to know!

I ran eyeD3 on the full album

No ID3 v1.x tag found!

Ran the hexdump, no TCON field anywhere.

I'll send a file to the address that Spoon posted above.

[Spoon]

The file you sent contains a TCON tag containing 3 genres, null separated:

159; Dance; Techno/House

[simbun]

Ran the hexdump, no TCON field anywhere.

It'll be there somewhere though it may be split over two lines e.g.

00000060  4f 32 00 00 00 06 00 00  03 41 42 42 41 00 54 43  |O2.......ABBA.TC|
00000070  4f 4e 00 00 00 18 00 00  03 31 35 39 00 44 61 6e  |ON.......159.Dan|
00000080  63 65 00 54 65 63 68 6e  6f 2f 48 6f 75 73 65 00  |ce.Techno/House.|

After adding "159; Dance; Techno/House" to an ID3v2.4 genre (TCON) tag, puddletag displays "Electro\\Dance\\Techno/House" which is why it's so important to look at the raw data if you really want to know what's being stored.

The file you sent contains a TCON tag containing 3 genres, null separated:
159; Dance; Techno/House

The ID3v2.4 spec states that textual and numeric values are acceptable in TCON tags, so shouldn't AssetUPnP be applying the transformation?

TCON
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

https://id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames

[Spoon]

We shall look into it.

[alan9990]

wow. Awesome the pair of you!

I'll be more careful in future. Plus, I will now address the offending files. Thank you!

[alan9990]

would like to ask however... with all the tools I've recently been introduced to re tags and tag manipulation:

a hexdump has shown that there is indeed some ID3v1 information. Clearly this is likely to be present in many other files.... I can hear some batch processing calling! But eyeD3 said there was no such tag information on the files.

My question therefore: what's the recommended approach to mass process files with some cmd magic that will tell it to remove any chosen frame information from files?

[simbun]

a hexdump has shown that there is indeed some ID3v1 information.

Encoding genres as integers was introduced in ID3v1 but is still valid in ID3v2.4, though not recommended.

Clearly this is likely to be present in many other files.... I can hear some batch processing calling! But eyeD3 said there was no such tag information on the files.

You don't have ID3v1 tags (ID3v1 is stored at the end of the file whilst ID3v2 is stored at the beginning), you just have genres stored as both numeric (introduced in ID3v1) and textual (introduced in ID3v2), so I would recommend swapping out the numerics.

[alan9990]

Encoding genres as integers was introduced in ID3v1 but is still valid in ID3v2.4, though not recommended.


You don't have ID3v1 tags (ID3v1 is stored at the end of the file whilst ID3v2 is stored at the beginning), you just have genres stored as both numeric (introduced in ID3v1) and textual (introduced in ID3v2), so I would recommend swapping out the numerics.

Thank you! Yes, I belatedly realised yesterday that this is what's going on. NO idea at all how or why this happened, but for certain I am now super careful to review every single bit of tag information before I commit.

It did occur to me that some of the problem files (it's true - a bunch of 127 "Genre" were just that... 127 is the number for "Drum & Bass") were shared with me by a Mac owner, with those files purchased on a store.... so no telling exactly how they got tagged.

Super impressed with all the help and support for this! Many thanks indeed