Radio 10 & ID3 Tag display

[NCC1701]

Originally Posted by brain mass

As you said, the problem with your ID3 tags has nothing to do with sampling rates. The problem is with the ID3 text itself.
<snip>
Another problem seems to be the characters in the text. For example, an MP3 CD with "Help!" as the album name didn't show correctly because of the exclamation point. But when I changed it to "Help" then Radio 10 correctly displayed the ID3 tags.

Interesting feedback, thanks! I'll check it out. Maybe it is these items, plus a few others. Since less than half of the fields are displaying, I'm thinking maybe more. Certainly not that number exceed the character count. I'm wondering if, aside from an exclamation point, what other characters might cause problems ... commas, apostrophes?

I'm gonna have to go back and re-examine my tags with your feedback in mind!

EDIT: Oh, on the fields which did not display properly for you ... wherer there two characters displayed, always the letter T, and something else apparently random?

[eskargo]

i picked up my smart just a couple weeks ago and have been listening to music from my ipod. today i finally got around to trying out the radio 10 playing a disc of mp3 files.

and guess what??? i got the exact 2 chars displayed for the album/artist/song. and i came here looking for a solution but only to find other smart owners with the same problem.

i read the entire thread and it actually gave me some clues as to the problem.

so it seems that there have been various ID3 formats throughout the years. (which kinda explain why older disc created are displaying properly) and the latest includes the addition of an image to the mp3 info. i suspect this is the problem and the radio 10 can only read ID3v1.

i found online a free mp3 tag editor that is perfect for this purpose. this software can be configured (under Tools/Options) to write only ID3v1. it also can lookup song info from different sources to fill in the ID3 tags. it seems to be quite powerful so be sure to give some donation to the software developer.

the name of the program is mp3tag and it can be found @ Mp3tag - Download

what i did was remove all existing tags. next, using the filename, create tag info and write only to ID3v1. that seem to do the trick. the v1 (version 1) for the ID3 text is the bare minimum of information for the mp3 file.

Song Title 30 characters
Artist 30 characters
Album 30 characters
Year 4 characters
Comment 30 characters
Genre 1 byte

that's 30+30+30+4+30+1 equals 125 bytes. having additional information will extend how the Radio 10 picks up this informatoin to display. it's like a positional file and the location of the information is different when other ID3 version are saved. at least that's what i think is happening.

anyway....

this SOCA forum has been so helpful to me and i can very happy to be able to provide some assistance to others.