tag displayed as unknown.

[mathfeel]

I have a very weird situation. I have a classical CD consisting of six tracks of two pieces: three movement each. The files are in FLAC.

I use mp3tag to tag them all. When I upload them to P3, the first three track (the first piece) have all the tracks displayed correctly, but the last three tracks (the second piece) are all shown as unknown (artist, album, title...).

What is more strange is embed album art is displayed correctly for ALL six tracks. I am not sure what to make of the tag situation.

Anyone?

[CrowdAds]

[triarii117]

I think the P3 has problems with FLAC tags. Others have mentioned this too.

[mathfeel]

Originally Posted by triarii117

I think the P3 has problems with FLAC tags. Others have mentioned this too.

FLAC doesn't take id3v2 tag, correct?

[Detroit]

All the songs on my P3 are FLAC and they work just fine. Are the titles different for each of your files? Not sure what the problem could be as I use Mp3Tag too.

[triarii117]

Originally Posted by mathfeel

FLAC doesn't take id3v2 tag, correct?

Maybe. I'm not too sure, I do not mess with FLAC very often.

[mathfeel]

Originally Posted by Detroit

All the songs on my P3 are FLAC and they work just fine. Are the titles different for each of your files? Not sure what the problem could be as I use Mp3Tag too.

Yes, each movement is labeled with 1, 2, 3 etc. So are always different.

[mathfeel]

I think I found the bug and my experience of tracking it down might be helpful to others who also use mp3tag (or other tagger) and USB mass storage mode like me.

Actually I accidentally solved the problem without knowing what's wrong at first when I decided to clean up the tags, leaving only those used by the P3. It didn't work at first. Then I decided, perhaps I need to create a new file in the file system. This seemed reasonable to me if P3's algorithm is such that it would not rescan the all files for tags update but only new files. So I copy-delete-rename to replace the file with a new copy.

Not yet unmount the P3, I didn't know if it worked. In the mean time, I also added few new files. Rebooted P3. The problematic old files now works, but three other songs are having similar problems. When I inspected, two of them had a long UNSYNCLYRICS field and the other one's TITLE field was very very long due to a buggy automatic tagging script I wrote. Fixed those, copy-delete-rename. Everything works. The problem files I started this thread with did not have long field, but I suspect P3 did not like the fact that they had two "PERFORMER" fields in them. (They were for the violinist and the pianist).

So to summarize for other user who also uses tagger program + UMS mode:
1. There is some implicit limit to how long a tag field content can be. Even if mp3tag let you have it, P3 does not like it. So remove all long fields.
2. P3 would re-read your changed tag only if it's a new file. So for any change that do not show up: copy-delete-rename.