Music Import Ignores ID3 Tag Info

[frostback13]

I have 3273 songs in 267 albums on my music server. When I point Sage at it to import the music files, it finds all of the songs but doesn't parse the ID3 data correctly. So, I get one song with a correct album name and artist, and 3272 songs with "unknown artist" and "unknown album name".

The one song differs in that it was given to me by someone else. (Yes, legally.) The others are all created by "grip" from my own CDs on a Linux server. They all have valid ID3v1.1 tag information. Every other software tool and player that I tried (both software and hardware) reads the tags and displays the information correctly.

The music files are all accessible and playable through Sage but I have to browse the folder structure to impose any kind of structure on it.

FYI, I'm running Sage 6.2 on a WinXP system with the default STV. Playback is by MVP and sometimes a WinXP SageClient.

Can anyone give me a clue? Has anyone seen this problem before? The obvious thought is that Linux or grip is doing something wrong. But both the one working file and the gazillion non-working files have valid data for TIT2, TPE1, TALB, TYER, TRCK, and TCON.

Any help will be appreciated. I'd love to get this part of Sage working.

-John

[frostback13]

Let me answer my own query.

I have a secondary collection made from the main but transcoded to a lower quality. The process requires copying the id3 tags from the old to the new files. Which means that the tags are written with a different tool than the one that wrote the originals.

The secondary copy works correctly. So, the problem is something to do with how "grip" writes id3 tags when originally creating the file. So, I will run a script to recreate the tags in all of the original files and that should be the end of it.

Thanks for listening...

[pjpjpjpj]

I have a problem with my MP3s as well. Mine are from a million different sources, from free internet downloads (a random bands' website, for example), to rips of my own CDs, to online purchases, to me creating a mix CD and then at some point ripping it back (giving me a bunch of completely-blank IDs). They have been ripped, and/or manually ID'ed, in various different MP3 player programs over the last 10 years or so.

I never cared about having the album art before, but would usually manually type in the ID info if the file did not have it. But since Sage shows album art, I recently started working through the files, using plain old WMP, doing the "find album info" function, which gets me the album art pictures, even if I previously had the info manually typed in.

I have not done (nearly) all of them, but when I go to my MP3 folder in Sage, they are all mixed up. Some that I have updated have correct album cover pictures. Some don't. But the strange part is that all of the files that have not been recently updated by me are showing one particular album cover (one of the newly-loaded ones), but it's wrong, and it seems to be a different one each time I go to the folder. Before I started doing these updates, they all just showed the album name (scrolling text), which I would actually prefer to the incorrect album art which I have now.

On the bright side, everything plays fine... the pictures are just all wrong.

I have not upgraded my software yet (still on 6.3.5, about to move to .10 in the next day or two). Might this solve it?

I am clueless about PC programming - writing scripts and such - so hopefully there is a simple solution.

[brewston]

I tag my MP3s with v2.3 of ID3 tags and Sage finds them fine.. There are Windows utils to convert from 1.x tags to 2.x tags, so I imagine Linux has them too