Getting XLobby to work with ape tags

[Roscoe62]

I briefly brought this up in another thread, but it's better to start a new one I think.

I want to be able to sort songs/albums using genre filters so I am trying to add tags to my ape files. Up til now I've just been correctly naming each file and folder (directory "artist name", sub-directory "album name", then individual track names) and it's been working fine. However when I tried adding an ape tag to a single track, just to try it out, even when it's fully populated with artist, album name, song name, track no. etc, XLobby changes the artist to "Various Artist" and the album to "Various Album" or something similar.

I can go into the music database and change it manually but doing this for my entire collection would be a very tedious task. What am I doing wrong? Where do I have to point XLobby to in order to get it to pick up the correct artist/album name?

Can anyone help?

Cheers
Ross

[stevenhanna6]

can you email me a small ape file that has the tags so I can work from that? I'll also download and rip some of my own ape files to test. I'll post an exe here when its ready to go.

[rhinoman]

My pretagged ape files seem to work ok, haven't tried changing tags though.

Ny folders are artist name/album name/ track number - track title - genre - year

[Roscoe62]

I'm at work right now Steven, but I'll email one through when I get home. Thanks for that!

Having said that I don't think it's a bug in XLobby - I haven't used tags before so it's likely to be user-error

[Tracie]

Roscoe,
Check to see what type of tags you're using. It's been a while since I set mine up so I'm going off of memory, but IIRC Winamp won't identify actual .ape tags. The good news is that with ape files you can use id3 tags (the same ones used for .mp3). I set all of my ripping/encoding up within JRiver's Media Center & it's pretty much automated for me at this point, so like I said I'm going from memory here. But when I was researching all of this prior to setting that up, I seem to recall that being the case.

[Roscoe62]

Tracie,

Thanks for the heads up! I don't use JRiver Media Center, but I do use EAC to do my ripping and, as an option, they can attach an ID3 tag to each of the tracks. However, there seem to be different versions of ID3 tags. The ones offered by EAC are :

ID3 V1
ID3 V1.1
ID3 V2.3
ID3 V2.4

I really don't know much about tags at all, but I guess what I'm looking for is a tag that will allow as much info as possible, but still be compatible with Winamp and XLobby.

Additionally, what format? It looks like I can have:

Track title (mandatory)
CD or track artist
Release year
CD title
Comment
ID3 music type (genre?)
Track number

Which ones do I include and in which order? Too many decisions...aaaarghh!!!!

EDIT: Don't worry, I think I've figured it out. By setting a flag properly in EAC all future rips will have the correct tags attached that both Winamp and XLobby have no problem with. I just have to go back and re-do the albums I've already ripped. To do that I've d-l'ed the latest Tag&Rename so hopefully I'll have finished updating them by the time the 30 day trial period is over.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

Ross

[Tracie]

Roscoe,
Glad that you got it figured out. As far as the differences in the id3 tags go, IIRC it has to do with how many characters you can use in the tag, BUT it seemed like the one that could support more characters had less support within media players. (I really hope that I remembered all of that correctly.)

I got a lot of this off of the forums on Winamp & Monkey's Audio websites (and possibly EAC's), so it might do you some good to do a little searching over there. I'm glad to help, I'm just reaching the limit of what I recall about all of this.

As far as the info that's stored in the tags, I use all of the ones that you listed with the exception of comments & genre. If you want Xlobby to sort/filter according to genre then obviously you'll need that one as well.

Hope that helps.