Metadata for Ogg Vorbis

[FishFace]

Hello everyone. Received my R1 yesterday and it's been a mixed bag so far. I'll state the title problem first, but there are a couple of smaller issues I'd like to know about. Before I start, while testing this I upgraded to 3.00. (And so the current state is 3.00)

For the majority of my Ogg-encoded music, the R1 displays their metadata as "Unknown". However, this is not the case for all Oggs. I realised that one problem was that some of my music used the ".oga" extension and so wasn't being recognised at all - no biggie. However, upon renaming the files, they showed up with full metadata.
Fiddling with some more files, I noticed that in one example of "Unknown" music, the tag names were lower case whereas those of the recognised music were upper case.

I hex-edited the file to upper-case the tags, but I couldn't manually alter the checksum so this rendered the file unplayable. On changing it back, lo and behold the information showed up - even though the file was unchanged from its original state.

Further testing is on-going, but the problem is compounded by other bugs. Often after or during updating the database the player will crash and have to recover firmware. It's impossible to know whether, in this situation, the DB is actually updated. I have just actually crashed the player twice with the manual update, at the same progress. I may format the player and start again.
Anyway, I would like to know whether anyone else has had the same issues, and whether they know any influencing factors. I wonder whether using MTP would mitigate it since whatever put the music on the player should tell it the metadata. I would also like to know why altering the metadata incorrectly then reverting it caused the player to see the correct data.

Finally, a few smaller things. Someone else mentioned cover art - I'd like to have cover art for Oggs. I know there's some draft for embedded album art in Oggs - is this, then, not supported? If not, it's also quite disappointing that there is no support for a .jpg in the folder.

Second, is there any recommendation for dealing with the player crashes? So far they have only occurred while or after updating the database, so I'm not too worried, but of course it'd be preferable to have a fully functional player.

Thanks in advance,
Fish.

EDIT: Performed some more testing. I used the 'mutagen' python package to uppercase all the tags for a few files, and it didn't have any effect - that theory's shot down. Unless you must remove the file then replace it for the DB to fully update. I have not tried that yet.

[Ezekiel000]

I found the same problem of metadata not being read and showing up as unknown for a lot of my music (all my music is ogg) not sure what the cause is though.

[meetooman]

Originally Posted by FishFace

Fiddling with some more files, I noticed that in one example of "Unknown" music, the tag names were lower case whereas those of the recognised music were upper case.

I hex-edited the file to upper-case the tags, but I couldn't manually alter the checksum so this rendered the file unplayable. On changing it back, lo and behold the information showed up - even though the file was unchanged from its original state.

I have an old iriver iFP-500T that also only recognize ogg tag names in upper case: ARTIST and not artist or Artist for example.
You'd better use vorbiscomment[.exe] from the ogg vorbis software tool package to "retag" your files. the "-t" switch enables you to define your own tags. The syntax is like:

vorbiscomment -a "ogg_file" -t "TITLE=song_title" -t "ARTIST=song_artist" -t "ALBUM=song_album" ...

[FishFace]

As I said, changing the tags to upper-case didn't work. I have no tried removing the files from the player and then replacing them with upper-cased versions to no avail. So I still have no idea what the pattern might be.

There is still the possibility that the database is not being updated correctly and has the potential to work with upper-case tags, since during this attempt, the player powered off after getting 2% through updating the database. It later hung entirely while doing a manual update.

I have now formatted the player and am attempting to get it working with MTP, but libmtp does not seem to recognise it. Has anyone succeeded in using this player on Linux in MTP mode? (And if so, does it support Vorbis metadata...)

[Ezekiel000]

I checked one of the files I have that shows as unknown it's the only one that does from that album and the only difference between that and the ones that show up correctly is the tag for the title of the song. So I have no idea why it's not showing up correctly.

[FishFace]

I've just spent a few hours doing some more experiments. With a bit of fiddling, I got libmtp to detect and communicate with the player. Sending files to the player, however, resulted in them arriving without Album or Artist tags intact, only the Title.

I received an email back from Samsung suggesting I ring their support line, so I thought I'd better cover as many bases as possible before paying £10/second to sit on hold for half an hour. Hence I've tried transferring files using WMP 11 and (shudder) installed and tried EmoDio. I tried in both MSC and MTP modes, threw in a few formats, and reinstalled the 3.00 Firmware (this time in MTP mode, just in case) In all cases, the tracks arrived with only the title intact.

Looks like a firmware bug to me - could some other people find/download some OGGs and try transferring them (in MTP mode at least, and MSC mode as well if you have the time ) to see whether all the tags show up? I'd be much obliged if I do ring Samsung up, in case they want me to return it.

[Ezekiel000]

I found out that all of my ogg files whose tags show up correctly were tagged by Sound Juicer (http://burtonini.com/blog/computers/sound-juicer) and all the ones that don't were tagged manually by myself with Audio Tag Tool (http://freshmeat.net/projects/audiotagtool/)
Edit: Never mind.

Maybe it's is a problem with different character encodings? I'm not sure how to check that though.

[FishFace]

it's easy enough to check by poking the tracks themselves in a hex-editor. A lot of my tracks are by foreign artists and so have non-ASCII characters in there, but there's also some pure-english stuff where the encoding shouldn't matter. If it were an encoding issue, I would expect the track titles with accents in to go wrong, but they don't.

I also thought I'd had success with (recent versions of) sound juicer but transferring the same files to device now doesn't seem to produce good results. Bear in mind that by default it names them with the '.oga' extension which libmtp and Samsung don't like.

[FishFace]

Dang nabbit. Officlal response is that it's not supported. Also, the Samsung staff claimed there is no standard way of tagging Vorbis files - tut tut! See my thread on the Samsung forum at CNET. As my reply explains, this is no excuse, but I'm taking it as an admission that the player doesn't support it.

It'd be great if people could publicise this fact. Folks who've got blogs and like Samsung players/Vorbis/Are a consumer watchdog/... - any chance you could make a noise about this?

As a last resort I might try forcibly tagging my music with ID3 tags.

[FishFace]

OK, Scratch all that.

The problem was case sensitivity all along, but the thing which hid it was that the player's database doesn't seem to update correctly. So: tag your vorbis files in upper case!

The way I did it was to modify mutagen (a python library - convenient because I know python) to always save tags in upper case. Then I wrote a python script to retag every one of my OGG files using upper case (this took a while, but the script is quite simple) I also took the opportunity to rename any .oga files to .ogg files, since hardly anyone recognises this extension.

I then formatted the player and did a clean copy, which had the desired effect. There are still a number of problems, namely:

1. Tracks are displayed out of order, and not always alphabetically - it's probably not doing any sorting on them at all.
2. Cover art in the form of cover.jpg coverart.jpg album.jpg and folder.jpg are not supported. If anyone knows any other names to try, go ahead ;-) I've not tried tagging OGGs with embedded art (and don't know how to)
3. There is some bug with refreshing tags. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but if you put your music on there then try to upper-case the tags in place, I don't think it works. More experimentation needed.
4. The player discards tags other than Title, Date and Duration in MTP mode for Vorbis files (really weird...)

I think I can live with these problems, so I'm not going to send the player back, but I think we ought to pressure Samsung to fix these issues (and the case-sensitivity of the tags) in the next release.

[Nikolaus]

Hey Fish Face!
Could you please share your script with us?
I've got a YP-R0 and I have exactly the same issue with my ogg-files. Some are recognized by the player, but without tracknumber. The majority of the files are "Unknown".
I'm using linux, but I'm not that good in coding stuff, so I really would appreciate if you would share your script.
Thanks in advance!

[Nikolaus]

I just tried to retag some of my files with "kid3". I first erased all tags and then grabbed the tags from musicbrainz and now the files are recognized (after a manual update of the library in the sytem-settings-menu).
One interresting thing is, that the player somehow reads the tracknumber-tag but wrong. The only tracknumbers that are not in order seems to be the one greater than ten. A album with 13 tracks is now sorted this way:
11
12
13
10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Maybe with this information, it could be possible to do a workaround.

[FishFace]

It looks like it's ordering them lexicographically. I wonder if tagging them thus would help:

01
02
...
10
11

If so, then the problem is that the track numbers are being sorted as strings rather than as numbers - very easy fix to implement, and hopefully we can work around it.

[setialpha]

It also does matter if running as MTP or MSC mode. In MTP it's normal for OGG/Vorbis tags to be unrecognized. I've tagged all my OGG/Vorbis with EasyTag (in normal case, both files and tags), eg: Technoboy - Next Dimensional World.ogg, Artist: Technoboy, Track: Next Dimensional World, Album: Next Dimensional World), everythings working.

[Nikolaus]

I did some more testin and my last post don't seem to be correct.
The numbers 2-9 are correctly sorted, but the other numbers are just sorted in a odd way (probably in a radom way) so we unfortunally have to wait for a firmware update to fix this...

Originally Posted by setialpha

It also does matter if running as MTP or MSC mode. In MTP it's normal for OGG/Vorbis tags to be unrecognized. I've tagged all my OGG/Vorbis with EasyTag (in normal case, both files and tags), eg: Technoboy - Next Dimensional World.ogg, Artist: Technoboy, Track: Next Dimensional World, Album: Next Dimensional World), everythings working.

Is the tracknumber tag working correctly for you?

[setialpha]

I've zerro'd that tag for almost all of my files, but those how still got it won't show up in the correct order.

1
1
5
3
2

(it's a two cd album, only one track from the second cd)

pretty strange...

[LarsMB]

Ah, so that would explain the problems I have with my ogg/vorbis files on the M1 too - makes sense, the firmware likely has shared back-end code.
I'm still contemplating returning the M1, to be honest. They've updated the firmware several times now and can't get this fixed - that is pretty embarrassing.