Artist visible but not searchable

[lephantome]

Bought my Squezzebox yesterday and have a few problems. I have all my MP3/Apple lossless categorized via Itunes. When I imported the files I have 1000 Albums, 10000 songs but only 5 Artists. However, when I am listening to one song it shows the Artist too. What has happened?

[moley6knipe]

It's yer tags. iTunes and SqueezeCenter do different things with different tags.

The wiki here is a little sketchy on tags. Apple lossless is fairly immune in that it only tags as per the Apple standard.

mp3 can be tagged any old way. Normal probs include having id3v1 tags as well as id3v2 tags, APE tags as well as id3 tags, entries in the Album Artist and/or Band tag fields screwing things up.

Short answer is to look at the files with a good tagging program www.mp3tag.de/en is great - a little work needed to learn it, but once you're in it's great.

This way you can remove all bar id3 v2.3 tags (I've found that makes both SC and Itunes happy) and any other extraneous tags.

[moley6knipe]

One other quick thing to try, actually - find the itunes library.xml file that you're told SqueezeCenter to use, and delete it. Open iTunes and close it again - that'll build a fresh .xml file from scratch. Unlikely to be the problem but I've seen it get corrupted once or twice.

[lephantome]

Thanks. OK, I have downloaded it and made quite a lot of "cleaning up". But I don't know anything about tags. You recommended that I should remove all bar id3 v2.3 tags. Do I have to replace it with something else? And if I have a tag like ID3v2.3(ID3v1 Lyrics3v2 ID3v2.2) is the same?

[Nonreality]

Thanks. OK, I have downloaded it and made quite a lot of "cleaning up". But I don't know anything about tags. You recommended that I should remove all bar id3 v2.3 tags. Do I have to replace it with something else? And if I have a tag like ID3v2.3(ID3v1 Lyrics3v2 ID3v2.2) is the same?

I set mp3tag to read all the choices in the options and in the remove tags I have it set to remove all but ID3v2.3 Then if you have an album that doesn't have any ID3.2 tags you highlight all the tracks and hit save. Then you hit the delete and you end up with just 3.2 tags. If an album already has 3.2 you can just hit remove and it will get rid of the other tags. Depending on your music you will probably want to add an album artist tag but try getting your tags just to 3.2 first and see how that works.

[moley6knipe]

Have a look at this post > http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...214#post306214 < shows you screen-shots of how to set mp3tag to remove all bar id3 v2.3 tags. Set your options exactly like that, and it'll strip everything apart from 2.3 tags when you right-click the files in mp3tag and select "Remove Tags". Also, this way your tags will be 2.3 which gives you the best compatibility with iTunes.

[moley6knipe]

@ lephantome - how'd you get on? Is it working now?