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[dick]

I need some info about how tag information is stored by MC in WMA files. The Help file talks about tag formats for MP3 files, but doesn't say anything about WMA files.

Here's the issue:

I just bought an iRiver iHP-140. Great player, great alternative to the iPod. One of the primary reasons I bought this player is that I have about 5,000 songs (my entire CD collection) ripped in WMA 160 kbps format and didn't want to re-rip them.

My files were previously stored on a removable USB drive, so it was a simple matter to copy them to the iHP-140, which is also a removable USB drive. Then all I had to do was swap the drive letters and MC was able to find all the music files.

By default, the iHP-140 can browse hierarchical folder structures, and I was lucky enough to have already organized my music this way, first by artist and then by album. I previously had set the filename to contain  the artist, album, song name and track number. This made browsing difficult, because the iHP-140 has a limited screen width and has to scroll through all that redundant info to get to the song name. No problem! With MC it was a simple matter to change the filenames to just contain the track number and song name. So far, so good.

The iHP-140 can also contruct a database from ID3 tag info in MP3 files. I initiated this process, but the database only contained info for a couple of MP3 files that happened to be on the drive. The iHP-140 documentation does say that the database is constructed from ID3 tags in MP3 files, but it doesn't say whether it only examines MP3 files or will look for ID3 tags in other files, such as WMA and OGG. I see that the freeware application iRipDB can store ID3 tags in OGG and MP3 files, but it doesn't appear to support WMA. Even if it did, it's not clear to me that the iHP-140 will even look at WMA files.

So... I need to understand what kind of tags are in a WMA file so I can send an intelligent support request to iRiver to find out if there's any way I can get the tag info into the database, or, if not, ask them to support whatever tags are in WMA files.

I'd really appreciate some info from the group on this.

Thanks,
DG

[xen-uno]

Placing ID3 tags in ogg/wma files would likely corrupt them. What tag format do they use?..Vorbis Comments on ogg, ? on wma (certainly not ID3). MC writes to either in their native tag format.  iRipDB does not store ID3's in ogg...it simply inables ogg tag reading for inclusion into DB. Your question should be directed at iRiver...it sounds like the default software is not reading ogg/wma tags. Have you checked for a firmware update?

10^-27

[dick]

Thanks. What I needed to know is that there's a native WMA tag format and that ID3 isn't used in WMA files. Now I can simply ask iRiver to support native WMA tags! (and no, there's no firmware upgrade yet.)

DG