Converting with the "/" character in tags

[mbotis987]

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]

Re: Converting with the "/" character in tags

What should be happening is the / should be change to \.

[garym]

Re: Converting with the "/" character in tags

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]

Re: Converting with the "/" character in tags

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]

Re: Converting with the "/" character in tags

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]

Re: Converting with the "/" character in tags

We will look into this.

[mbotis987]

Re: Converting with the "/" character in tags

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]

Re: Converting with the "/" character in tags

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]

Re: Converting with the "/" character in tags

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]

Re: Converting with the "/" character in tags

>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]

Re: Converting with the "/" character in tags

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]

Re: Converting with the "/" character in tags

That makes sense, if using freedb only as it sperates the artist from track with /