Problems with Conversions (Flac>MP3)

[dvdr]

Re: Problems with Conversions (Flac>MP3)

Just another suggestion: from own experience I know, that tag&rename sometimes does weird things...
Mayne, you also want to try the following: take any recording device (windows recorder or similar) and record just 2 seconds @ 44.1kHz/16bit silence as wav.
Process that file as you used to - convert it to flac, then to mp3, tag it, whatever you do. From each step, save a copy.
These short files, you can open in notepad - at least, you can see in the first lines (before the unreadable "audio"), what kind of headers or tags there are written. That way, I discoverd, what changes tag&rename makes to certain tags....
Maybe, that helps you a bit further...

[a.wright]

Re: Problems with Conversions (Flac>MP3)

Please send an effected mp3 file:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/email.htm

(with the tag <ENCODER> before it is removed)

Done

[a.wright]

Re: Problems with Conversions (Flac&gt;MP3)

Just another suggestion: from own experience I know, that tag&rename sometimes does weird things...
Mayne, you also want to try the following: take any recording device (windows recorder or similar) and record just 2 seconds @ 44.1kHz/16bit silence as wav.
Process that file as you used to - convert it to flac, then to mp3, tag it, whatever you do. From each step, save a copy.
These short files, you can open in notepad - at least, you can see in the first lines (before the unreadable "audio"), what kind of headers or tags there are written. That way, I discoverd, what changes tag&rename makes to certain tags....
Maybe, that helps you a bit further...

I can't see it is doing anything odd apart from creating a tag called <BAND> when it should be "Album Artist". It also seems to add a "Music Match Preference" tag which seems to be read by foobar as the "Comment" tag.

However I know it's not this that is causing a problem because I did a test by removing all tags (using foobar) and then re-tagging with T&R and I have been using T&R for the past couple of years without any issue.

[a.wright]

Re: Problems with Conversions (Flac&gt;MP3)

It looks like I can salvage my MP3 files by using the following procedure:

• Copy ID3V2 tags to ID3V1 tags
• Remove all ID3V2 tags
• Copy ID3V1 tags to ID3V2 tags
• Add back Album Art
• Add back Rating, Disc Number etc

Luckily I can do all but the album art & rating etc as one big batch so it should not take more than about an hour or so to sort out. I don't really use many other tags anyway. As my MP3Gain tags are stored in APE format, they don't get touched so everything is fine in terms of normalisation too.

Also some more tests this evening showed that if I only add basic tags to FLAC files at the ripping stage (i.e. just the ones shown at the top of the CD Ripper screen + album art) then conversion to MP3 seems ok and the files play. I had been including all the accuraterip, encoder, source etc tags when ripping so I am guessing it must have been one of these that caused the issues when converting as it was written into the MP3 files.

Unfortunately I don't have enough technical knowledge to draw any scientific conclusion as to the reason (especially as the rogue files played off a USB pen but didn't stream) and I certainly don't have enough time to test every permutation of possible tag combination to see which caused the problem!

My only concern now is that I have masses of FLAC files which potentially might not convert to various formats due to similar tagging issues and whilst I can delete alot of the tags that I can see, I won't know if there are any hidden ones that I can't access.

Need sleep....