Issue with album artist and unicode characters

[apb1]

I'm having 2 issues with dpPowerAmp.

First of all, I have my entire music library as wav files in MediaMonkey and most of it, until recently, was created with EAC. When I look at the file properties under ID-Tag for any of the wav files, I see most of the tags show up appropriately, however, dpPowerAmp doesn't seem to find the the "Album Artist" tag. This is a major problem for me because I'm trying to convert my library from wav to flac and the "Album Artist" is the only field that has the correct information for the hierarchy that I want, but since it's not found, it is ignored during batch conversion. I'm currently exporting both idv1 and v2 tags. I also notice, that after conversion, the correct "Album Artist" information is overwritten with the incorrect "Artist" information.

Also, unicode characters seem to be getting mangled during conversion. For instance, when I convert files with Björk, they get mangled to Björk everywhere after conversion. Also, directory names based on album artist get mangled in a similar manner. It seems likely that unicode isn't supported in tags, but at the very least one should be able to keep a byte perfect copy of the data, rather than modifying it.

Any help resolving these would be greatly appreciated.

PS I'm using a purchased copy of R13.3.

[Wayne]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

Does dBpowerAMP recognise the album artist if you look at the properties of your wav files in windows explorer? Are you sure that the tags added to the wav files by EAC are standard?

[apb1]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

>>> Does dBpowerAMP recognise the album artist if you
>>> look at the properties of your wav files in windows explorer?

No it doesn't.

>>> Are you sure that the tags added to the wav files by
>>> EAC are standard?

I have no idea, but I would assume so. It would be more work and cause them more pain to not follow the standard than to follow it probably.

[Wayne]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

I've just performed a test and converted a mp3 file to wav using dBpowerAMP. Both files have the same Album Artist tag information present (different to the artist value).

Could this be a result of how the tag is held. "ALBUMARTIST" instead of "Album Artist"?

[apb1]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

Try something like:

1. Rip a wave file with EAC
2. Open it with Media Monkey and set the Composer, Artist and Album Artist fields (make sure that Artist and Album Artist are different).
3. Use dbpa batch converter to convert it to a flac file, and the Album Artist information will be replaced by the Artist data and the Composer filed will be empty when opened in Media Monkey.

[Spoon]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

Media Monkey might be only using LIST tags in the Wave, and there is no standard for Album Artist / Composer on LIST tags, if they used the 'id3' chunk then there would be a standard.

[apb1]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

So I tried adding the "Album Artist" information by hand using dbPowerAmp explorer tag editor. Not only does dbPowerAmp not understand the "Album Artist" that is already saved by Media Monkey in the nearly 1000 albums in my collection, it silently fails to edit these files using its own explorer right click ID Tag editor. It looks like everything is added fine, but if you close the tag editor and reopen it, then all the information is lost.

[Spoon]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

Duplicate one file, try clearing all tags, then drop the file in media monkey, does it show tags? (ie has dbpoweramp not identified id tags in the file)

[apb1]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

I'll try that. Also, I came across this information:

MediaMonkey uses the following non-standard IAAR tags:
iaar - album artist
itgl - track gain
irva - peak level
iagl - album gain

See:

http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=5932

Is there some conversion I can do from non-standard IAAR tag name to the standard one when I do a format conversion in dbPowerAmp?

[apb1]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

I just cleared the tags with the dbpa tag editor, closed the editor and and reopened with the same editor...all the tags where cleared. I opened it in MediaMonkey and all the tags where clear there as well. I was then able to add the Album Artist tag with the dbpa editor and it remembered the change (however, this would be an amazingly inconvenient thing to do on my entire library). MediaMonkey was not able to read the Album Artist data saved by dbpa.

OK I think I found the issue with the data being reverted. If I make the changes to the files, with MediaMonkey closed, then the changes are remembered.

[apb1]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

Actually, it looks like I can't add the "Album Artist" tag in dpPowerAmp until after reset the ID tags even if MediaMonkey is closed 8-(.

[Spoon]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

There is an Update ID Tag utility codec which removes the tags and re-adds them to the file.

Really MediaMonkey should use the ID3 chunk for non-standard LIST tags, rather than adding new fields which nothing will read.

[apb1]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

Assuming I find a way to deal with the Album Artist issue (which still isn't 100% clear), is there a way to have dbPowerAmp deal transparently with already existing unicode characters? This is a very major problem. About 15% of the tracks that I have tagged include unicode characters and the data becomes munged once dbPowerAmps touches it. Both MediaMonkey and Tag & Rename allow unicode in tag data (whether or not that is the standard, it is the reality that people need a way to deal with unicode characters in tagged data).

[apb1]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

Really MediaMonkey should use the ID3 chunk for non-standard LIST tags, rather than adding new fields which nothing will read.

I'll open a bug with them about this, but there is no guarantee that they'll agree with this and then my data is stuck in this format and I have no way of converting to something more standard.

[Spoon]

Re: Issue with album artist and unicode characters

LIST tags cannot be unicode, they are ansi code page only. It is possible MM is saving as UTF-8 which is not in the spec.