FLAC > MP3 or M4A loses lyrics

[RainDawg]

I have been scouring through the internet, this forum in particular, for a clean solution. Like others, I have a huge CD collection ripped to my hard drive as FLAC, all neatly tagged with embedded art and unsynced lyrics. I want to be able to make on-the-fly conversions to MP3 or M4A to play on my iPhone, and it's important the the album art and the lyrics tags get transferred over.

Using dbPowerAmp (via the wonderful command line interface) I am able to automate both of these types, but the lyrics tags somehow get screwed up each time. In the case of the Nero AAC codec, line breaks are substituted with with a backslash and the total length is truncated. When converting to mp3, the lyrics field disappears completely. What is important is, with either of these two formats, that the lyrics are viewable in iTunes.

I know that in MP3, the lyrics that iTunes views are storned in the USLT frame. In M4A they are stored in the LYRICS tag. Can dbPowerAmp write to either of these?

From what I see in these posts, others have run across this. I am wondering if the developers or any of the others users have found a solution, whether it's inside of dbPowerAmp or otherwise. I know I am not the only person who uses FLAC for CDs but has fallen in love with the graphical interface and lyrics display ability of the iPhone.

I am absolutely sold on the power and ease of use of dbPowerAmp, and would love to be able to support continued development. Please let me know if there's just something I've missed in my research.

[Wayne]

Re: FLAC > MP3 or M4A loses lyrics

What tag settings have you got on the Advance Codec Settings within dBpowerAMP configuration especially for mp3 and m4a?

[RainDawg]

Re: FLAC > MP3 or M4A loses lyrics

For mp3 I have it set for:
id3v2.3, ANSI

For m4A the only option I see is to set the padding, which I have set to 2KB.

I am guessing that dbPowerAmp doesn't support id3v2.4, nor is there a way to write to the USLT frame. Is this correct?

[RainDawg]

Re: FLAC > MP3 or M4A loses lyrics

Well, without being able look under the hood a little more, I am relatively certain that the deficiency is in dbPowerAmp's not supporting id3v2.4. In a FLAC > MP3 conversion, the tag is indeed brought along, but I am guessing that it is putting the lyrics into a user-defined frame rather than the USLT frame, which is where iTunes looks (and where the id3 standard says it should be).

Using foobar2000 to take the mp3 and just do a tag rewrite puts the lyrics back in the right place, and iTunes does see them then. I suppose my questions is: where exactly is db putting the lyrics in this conversion?

[Spoon]

Re: FLAC > MP3 or M4A loses lyrics

Currently we have minimal support for lyrics, like other items in dbpoweramp, when they are implemented (such as multiple artists) they will be supported correctly.

[RainDawg]

Re: FLAC > MP3 or M4A loses lyrics

I realize that the current status of lyrics tag standards constitutes a morass of mutually exclusive cases overlapping each other. What I was hoping for was a an ability, at least in the tagging plugin, to be able to map a tag in the source file to a tag in the copied file as a custom configuration. Power users like myself who know exactly what they need and have a very specific list of usage requirements could setup it to do what we need without it really requiring your development team to endorse any of the current lyrics implementations.

Granted users like myself are a minority; but there is a very real need for programs that are slick and powerful like db, but also contain a customizable backend so that people who have specific needs can do what they need. I've managed to find a solution to this issue with another program, but the solution there isn't nearly as robust as I'd like it to be either....

...just something to consider .

[mphuie]

Re: FLAC > MP3 or M4A loses lyrics

A power user might develop a work around...

Try finding a command line util to save off the lyrics to a text file, then once encoding is done, retag the output audio file with the lyrics?