sony walkman nw-za818 not seeing mp3 tags

Support
1

hi

I found my old walkman when unpacking and just thought it would be a "quick 5 minute job" to update the music library and have a listen.

Wrong!

I kept one music folder on the walkman and got rid of the few other folders, and copied over some mp3 folders. After battery recharge, pulled the plug and "music library updated". But no tags for artist, album etc seen except for the original folder. Music plays back ok but all you see is the filename.

Saw Florian's tag on unicode support and tried that but no difference. In mp3tag the tags for the good files (display artist, album etc) and bad files (nothing) look identical.

I looked at other tags I could display but nothing looks different. Can I display other tags or info that might show the differences e.g. unicode version.

Any other clues or info?

Thanks

p.s it's an NWZ-A818 but could not work out how to change the title

2

Perhaps it can ony deal with V1 tags?

3

mp3tag shows the Tag column as ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 ID3v2.3) for "good" and "bad" files... so apart from filename and tags like artist,album, genre, etc all the other tags I can see in the default columns are the same e.g. frequency 44100 hz, mode stereo, etc,

4

Have you tried mp3val and mp3diags to check if they find any differences?

5

found a utility on sourceforge called mp3 diags which does show a difference in the file structure.

The good file has these sections:

ID3V2.3.0
Lame Header
MPEG Audio
ID3V1

and the bad file has the Lame Header section missing.

Not sure if this is relevant or if mp3tag can be used to give the same info...

Cheers

ps. oops our last messages crossed. Will try the other utility now...

6

Could it be that some files are VBR and the others CBR? The lame-header indicates VBR.
MP3diags lets you remove superfluous LAME headers.
There is a utility mp3packer that can fill frames so that they become CBR.

7

mp3val scans show all files OK

both albums play ok with foobar

8

it's the good file that has the LAME header and the bad file doesn't have the LAME header... maybe there'a a way to add a LAME header... although both sets of files play fine in foobar and on my sonos system

mp3tag reports both good and bad files as CBR

9

Can we stop the guessing here?
You can go through all the properties (e.g. cover size may be an issue or that the data has umlauts in it and so on) and see where the important differences are.
But that will go quicker if you check it on your system. I cannot look over your shoulder.

10

Try VBRfix. It works with CBR files too.

11

Thanks for your help

Just tried vbrfix but walkman still says "unknown" for title, artist, album, etc.

Also tried mp3diags with custom transformation list 1 through 4 and result as above.

Ran mp3val also.

Cheers

12

Have you filled the field ALBUMARTIST?
I think my old SONY NX70 was only willing to identify an album if that field was filled.
Also, all files for an album should have just one folder on their own.
The YEAR should be identical.

13

YEAR was already identical - also there is only one album on the device in a folder e.g. artist - album.

Used mp3tag to fill out AlbumArtist, but nwz-a818 still shows unknown...

I'm pretty sure the answer is going to be something like your suggestion.

Thanks