I've been experimenting with Nick's (Nicktf) excellent VB script for
bulk convertion of a directory tree full of FLAC files to a mirrored
tree of MP3 files. Nick posted this script here:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=16240&page=3

After some trivial teething problems I have it working nicely except
for one thing. The tagging doesn't work well for me. The script as
posted by Nick uses TAG.EXE that comes with the FLAC distribution but
it uses this in auto mode where TAG.EXE tries to guess the tags from
the MP3 filename and for my filename conventions this is useless.

I've been reading up on TAG.EXE and did some experiments and for me at
least it seems that it would be far more useful if the script used the
command in the following form:

TAG.EXE --fromfile <original FLAC file> <converted MP3 file>

The fromfile option basically tells it to copy the tags from the FLAC
file to the MP3 file.

I've done some command-line experiments with this and I get 2 errors in
the MP3 tags after executing the above command. These are:

1) I have my Title tags set with the first letter of each word
capitalised. TAG.EXE looses this capitalisation so for instance a track
called "Show Me" is tagged in the MP3 file as "show me". Luckily this
one is easy to fix because I can just run a "TAG.EXE --tcaps Title
<converted MP3 file>" after the first tag command to fix this up.
Interestingly, TAG.EXE does preserve the capitalisation for the Album
tag.

2) This is the one that has me stumped. My FLAC test file is tagged as
Genre = Rock but the TAG.EXE insists of transcribing this to Genre =
New Wave in the MP3 file.

Can anyone help me with (2) above? Is this a tag version thing? If I
look at the files in Windows then for my FLAC test file it shows the
tag types as "Vorbis Comment & ID3v2.3 & ID3v1.0" whereas it shows the
MP3 file as "ID3v1.1". I really don't know anything about the technical
details of how tags are implemented and the different types of tags so
I'm just throwing out wild guesses but could it be that the Genre tag
on the FLAC file is v2.3 and TAG.EXE is writing that value to a v1.1
tag in the MP3 file and getting a different value? There are some
options to TAG.EXE that have to do with "APE v1.0" and "APE v2.0". I
don't understand what these are all about. Can anyone enlighten me?

Once I've got this sorted out then I'll update Nick's script to reflect
my changes and post it here, I'd be most grateful if someone could help
me with this annoying Genre issue though.

- Julian


-- 
JulianL
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