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Topic: Comment Tag Field Issue (Read 3350 times) previous topic - next topic
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Comment Tag Field Issue

Hi all.

Apologies in advance if this query has been addressed elsewhere but I have searched here and elsewhere online and haven't found the answer yet. Also apologies as I suspect this isn't specifically a FLAC-related issue, it's just that the vast majority of my files are in FLAC.

So, I like to add album reviews I have found online as text entries in the Comment field of the FLAC tags, because I often listen to music on the headphones early in the morning when my partner is still asleep and I enjoy reading back the reviews while I'm listening. I have the FLAC files on my computer and listen to them via streaming to a Squeezebox Radio and generally use a tablet with Squeeze Commander installed as a remote control and to read the Comments tag. When editing my music file tags I use Tag & Rename, per image #1 below where you can see text has been added to the Comment field for this particular album.

The issue is that when I am attempting to read back the reviews or notes while listening, sometimes the Comment field simply does not show up even though I know there is text added. See image #2 below of the same album (viewed from my computer running Logitech Media Server in this case). I can select 'View Tags' and see that 'Comment' contains 2664 bytes of information (see image #3) so I know the information is there, I just can't access it.

This would all be less confusing if the next random file I listen to had same issue, but for most of the files the Comment tag is visible and the text readable. I can't establish what is different for the files where it doesn't show. Is there a specific limit to the amount of bytes of information that can be added to this tag field?

If anyone has any thoughts or can point me in a particular direction so I can investigate further I'd be grateful. It's an irritation rather than a big problem but I'd like to get it sorted.

Thanks for your patience with this unwieldy and inefficient post!

Nigel.





Comment Tag Field Issue

Reply #1 –
Quote from: wutpa on
Hi all.

Apologies in advance if this query has been addressed elsewhere but I have searched here and elsewhere online and haven't found the answer yet. Also apologies as I suspect this isn't specifically a FLAC-related issue, it's just that the vast majority of my files are in FLAC.

So, I like to add album reviews I have found online as text entries in the Comment field of the FLAC tags, because I often listen to music on the headphones early in the morning when my partner is still asleep and I enjoy reading back the reviews while I'm listening. I have the FLAC files on my computer and listen to them via streaming to a Squeezebox Radio and generally use a tablet with Squeeze Commander installed as a remote control and to read the Comments tag. When editing my music file tags I use Tag & Rename, per image #1 below where you can see text has been added to the Comment field for this particular album.

The issue is that when I am attempting to read back the reviews or notes while listening, sometimes the Comment field simply does not show up even though I know there is text added. See image #2 below of the same album (viewed from my computer running Logitech Media Server in this case). I can select 'View Tags' and see that 'Comment' contains 2664 bytes of information (see image #3) so I know the information is there, I just can't access it.

This would all be less confusing if the next random file I listen to had same issue, but for most of the files the Comment tag is visible and the text readable. I can't establish what is different for the files where it doesn't show. Is there a specific limit to the amount of bytes of information that can be added to this tag field?

If anyone has any thoughts or can point me in a particular direction so I can investigate further I'd be grateful. It's an irritation rather than a big problem but I'd like to get it sorted.

Thanks for your patience with this unwieldy and inefficient post!

Nigel.





The first thing that comes to kind for me is to check which version of FLAC the files are?  Perhaps the ones that don't work are all 1.1 or 1.2 while the ones that work are 1.3 or vise versa.

Another thing.  Ensure the tags are all Vorbis tags.  Some software will write ID3 tags to a FLAC file.

select some of the files and reconvert them to FLAC and retag them.  That may clean up the file without any loss in quality.

That's all I can think up off the top of my head.
 

Comment Tag Field Issue

Reply #2 –
The first thing that comes to kind for me is to check which version of FLAC the files are?  Perhaps the ones that don't work are all 1.1 or 1.2 while the ones that work are 1.3 or vise versa.

Another thing.  Ensure the tags are all Vorbis tags.  Some software will write ID3 tags to a FLAC file.

select some of the files and reconvert them to FLAC and retag them.  That may clean up the file without any loss in quality.

That's all I can think up off the top of my head.


Thank you apastuszak, I appreciate your thoughts on this one. I followed up on the possibilities you posited and there doesn't seem to be a difference in the FLAC version and the tags are Vorbis. However, I think I'm closer to an understanding and it turns out to be in the formatting of the text I'm entering into the Comment field. When I find a review online I copy and paste it into a text file and add another if I can find one. Then I copy and paste the whole text into Tag & Rename. Having just spent a couple of hours meticulously breaking down the pasted text on a word by word basis it appears that some characters such as apostrophes and quote marks on some web sites (but not all unfortunately) aren't recognised by Logitech Media server once I have pasted them into the Comment field. This causes the whole text entry (not just the problem character) to be omitted. If I edit the copied apostrophe and replace it with a typed one for example then all is good again.

I've been adding text to files like this for several years and this seems to be a recent issue as it never happened before. I'm not sure of the way round it since the variations in text characters are too subtle for my eyes to pick out in a paragraph of text and it'll be too time consuming and laborious to manually edit every paragraph of every review in every file, but at least that seems to be the cause.

Thanks again for your input.