Did something in the tagging engine change from 13.x to 14.x?

[ZPrime]

Here is my situation...

I have a Volkswagen with the RNS-510 nav system and the VW "Media-In" unit for portable player support (usually abbreviated MDI).

The MDI is iPod-capable, but with my iPod Classic 160GB it has issues with charging, so I have stopped using that a long time ago.

I instead am using its USB support, where it will play MP3, WMA, M4A, and even OGG files via USB stick or small HDD.

I keep my library in FLAC, ripped originally with EAC, but more recent stuff has been ripped and tagged by dBpoweramp.

When I first switched to the USB drive for audio, I was using LAME VBR MP3s around 200 Kbps. However, the MDI system can't correctly display song length or give an accurate "position slider" with VBR MP3s (annoying hardware limitation). So, I switched to AAC / M4A via the Nero encoder and dMC.

I mass converted everything to AAC quite a while ago. Most of it shows as Nero AAC version 1.3.3.0. Those files correctly display all track info on the MDI system. (It displays Artist, Album, and track name from the tags. If you feed it a file with no tag info, it displays the raw filename instead.)

I have been ripping albums recently (using the ripper and the "multi-output" plugin to go to both FLAC and AAC), and from these recent rips, the Artist and Album tags are not being displayed by the MDI in the car. My first thought was that something changed in the Nero AAC encoder and blamed that, since I am using the latest version now (1.5.4.0).

So, I re-transcoded from FLAC to OGG, since the player nicely supports it. However, the problem persists with the OGG file, which dMC has its own writer for rather than a 3rd-party drop-in exe. I did actually convert using the "special" SSE3-optimized version of the OGG encoder, but the tagging is still done by the main plugin, and the fact that something is wrong with both OGG and M4A makes me think perhaps something has changed within the tagging engine in dMC that has made this break.

I have examined files that "work" and ones that don't with a tag viewer, and nothing immediately stands out to me as being different, other than the version of dBpoweramp I had installed at the time. I can re-encode a file from the original FLAC with the latest dMC and it will be broken now, but I have an older version of the same file sitting around that works fine.

I am not sure which versions of dMC were used, because unfortunately it's not in the tags (only the encoder itself, the Nero AAC writer, is mentioned on the AAC files). I know that the main batch of transcoding was back in October 2009 when I stopped using the iPod. I believe I started to see problems some time around Feb. 2010, but I don't know what version I was on at the time.

I'm running the latest release, I believe 14.1, and it's still giving me tag problems on the MDI system.

The tags look OK in normal software, and even opening a file, editing a tag, and re-saving doesn't seem to get the MDI unit to display Album or Artist. It *always* seems to be able to read the track name tag though. It makes me think it is something specific in the tags causing the problem, maybe re-tagging program is leaving it there because I haven't completely removed the tag header and re-written from scratch with no other details. (I don't know how tag editors work, if they copy the old values from the tag and re-write entirely, or if they just edit the bits in the portion of the tag you have changed.) The fact that the behavior persists across two formats also makes me think it isn't something specific to the encoder or file format, rather a value that dMC is putting in the tags or something.

Spoon, any ideas here? I'm at a complete loss. :cry:

[Spoon]

Re: Did something in the tagging engine change from 13.x to 14.x?

dBpoweramp cannot possibly get the ID tags wrong in two separate formats, so lets assume the tags are stored correctly. Perhaps the player does not like an embedded album art, or other Tags.

[ZPrime]

Re: Did something in the tagging engine change from 13.x to 14.x?

The files all have embedded album art, both the working and non-working files. It must be some other tag that wasn't on my old stuff (ripped by EAC), and it wasn't on my older dBripper files either (I know that older discs ripped with older dB releases didn't cause the problem).

There are definitely far more tags on the newer files than older ones though, so at least I have an idea what to look into now.

[dbfan]

Re: Did something in the tagging engine change from 13.x to 14.x?

It could be the size of the art in kb

[ZPrime]

Re: Did something in the tagging engine change from 13.x to 14.x?

It's not the art size, as I had functional files with 500KB art in them, and I have non-working with the same. I actually figured it out today -- it is the "Style" tag (it was actually displayed in a different tag editor as "Grouping" as well). When I remove that tag, everything displays correctly, but a file with the Style tag included doesn't display Artist or Album info (only track name).

I wonder why the player can't handle it, maybe the semicolons used as separators in the tag? :confused:

Now that I know this, is there any way I can exclude that tag from the AAC output when using multi-encoder for a CD rip? I don't mind having it in the FLAC files for archive purposes, but if the only way to exclude the tag is to exclude it from all codecs when using multi-encoder, I can deal with that.

[Spoon]

Re: Did something in the tagging engine change from 13.x to 14.x?

ID Tag Processing DSP