I think it would be great if we could get access to thwe rest of the ID3 tag when we are using the player.
eg. an info screen you can call up for a song which will display some of the other id3 fields ( genre, year, comments) etc.

cheers

eg. an info screen you can call up for a song which will display some of the other id3 fields ( genre, year, comments) etc.

Is genre, year and comments all you want? Because it already does show this. Press and hold the INFO button on the Rio Remote control. Bam, there's your screen.

But that's all it will do. You won't see all of the other V2 fields that way. This screen only shows what's in the database, which is the fields you see on the Emplode screen only. So if you want to have the details about the lead singer, the producer, the composer, etc., those ID3v2 fields are not shown. The only way that information will reach the screen is if you transfer those details to the Comments field (note: Comments field limited to 255 chars to save memory in the database).

This 256byte comment limit is annoying. I think it's really cool to be able to store and view an album review from allmusic.com, but they are invariably longer than 256 bytes.

Forgive my ignorance, but is it possible to view a playlist comment, as opposed to track comment?

I for one don't really care about individual track comments - allmusic.com only has album comments which Tag&Rename can insert into every mp3 in an album and I'm not going to write different track comments for all my mp3s.

This might be a way to get around this issue - allow playlist comments to be 1024 bytes, and show playlist comments instead of track comments (HiJack selectable option to retain backward compatibility?).

Of course, in a heirarchical playlist, it'd need to take the comment from the 'innermost' playlist to be really useful. Being able to instruct Emplode to copy the first track comment to the playlist comment would be useful too, as an automatic feature when new playlists are created and with a single button press for existing playlists.

If I'm missing something, sorry. I'm still a newbie, and learning as fast as possible...

I don't know if you caught it, but the 200-odd-byte limitation of the field is so that the database takes less space in memory.

Part of what makes this player better than other players is its incredibly fast indexing of tracks. There's no waiting between tracks, and very little waiting when you make major changes to the playlist (such as reshuffling, tweaking, or inserting other playlists). The reason it can do all of this is because of its fast database handling. So the comment-field limitation is an absolute necessity and cannot be changed.

For most people (in fact, just about everyone else besides you), the lack of support for long, complex tags isn't a big deal. Also keep in mind that, despite there being fields for all of this stuff in the V2 spec, hardly any piece of software ever populates those fields (in fact, I don't think I've ever seen a ripper which did). The only people with those fields filled out are those who enter the data themselves by hand, and I'm sure those people are very rare. If you're hand-entering customized data that no one else enters, I don't see why the player should have to support it.

And as far as the Allmusic.com reviews in the comment fields, I have this to say:

- Only one piece of software fills out the tags that way, and only in its most recent version.
- Allmusic.com's reviews are bunk anyway and should be avoided.

Aritst Bios... now THAT'D be kinda neat, but not in the empeg. Maybe on a PC based server w. Rio Reciever, but I can't read bios while driving. Reviews are good for when you are prospecting a purchase. But if you already own it, isn't YOUR review what is important (ie, the one in your head)?

On the other hand, the database is there for fast indexing of the tracks and their common metadata. For those (probably fairly rare) instances where you want additional info, it could use the database to find the proper file and use a real ID3 decoder to extract that information for display. That way, you could get all of the data, but not lose the speed of the indexed database.

And the data could only be added before an upload to the empeg.

Actually, an ID3V2-browser sounds like a great candidate for a userland app, interfaced with the Hijack menu. If you enable notify=1, Hijack knows the current FID. The userland app can go a'hunting based on that information.

Someone is, I recall, already trying to get a lyric-scroller working in this vein as I recall, so an addition of a V2-tag browser to that would be cool.

Why anyone would suggest any other way to read comments or anything else track-based is beyond me. I've been wanting to suggest user-land ID3 browsing since the first post in teh thread came up. Just haven't been in the posting mood. Tony, I'm never going to match your average.

As a userland app one would also (depending on the app implementation) be able to tweak the app or its settings to allow it to display the fields of your choice.

I think this is a perfecty suitable way to access information that doesn't need to be indexed and is used only infrequently.

I'll put it up as a "request" in the programming section if you haven't already beat me to it.

Bruno

Ok, I now understand the requirements for a small database

Userland tag browsing sounds like a fine compromise - especially if I can redefine the Knob-press to call it up.

And I know that allmusic.com's reviews are hit and miss - but being able to call up a detailed review adds to the Wow factor for unsuspecting passengers, and I think that the best in-car MP3 player in existence should strive to Wow the masses in as many ways as possible....Next thing I'll be suggesting is coverart, added as a custom ID3 tag that can be viewed with an image-panner app!