2.1.0 Beta 4 Saving Ratings in tags potential issue

[nypd]

I might be having issues regarding song ratings, but I'm not exactly sure what the cause is.

What works for sure:

When I rate a song with 1 / 3 / 5 stars in GMMP, and sync the songs back to my computer, they correctly get updated in my MusicBee desktop player:


(The bottom 3 songs are the ones I used to test this.)

What I'm not sure about:

When I rate a song 2 / 4 stars in GGMP they appear as 1.5 and 4.5 respectively when they get synced back to my Desktop:

(The bottom 2 songs are the ones I used to test this.)

---

One thing that is consistent when the songs get synced back to my desktop is I can't see their rating in windows explorer:



They all appear with no stars, but my MusicBee application is able to read the star rating. So I checked the songs with Mp3Tag and say they were saved with ID3v1 and ID3v2.4 tags:


(You can see there is nothing in the rating column, but that is because I cant get Mp3Tag to show rating properly / Don't know how to yet)



Now, it seems good ol' windows does not know how to read  ID3v2.4 tags because as soon as I remove just the ID3v1 tags and leave the ID3v2.4 tags in place, nothing shows up in windows explorer:


(Everything gets removed besides track name)


However, when I remove all tags versions and save it using ID3v2.3 everything appears normally including the original rating I saved in GMMP!!!:



So my windows explorer findings are:

ID3v1: Windows explorer can not read the rating field properly (It also seems it can't read the genre, album artist and title)
ID3v2.3: Windows explorer reads everything correctly!
ID3v2.4: Windows explorer can not read anything!



Conclusions:


I'm not exactly 100% sure what could be the cause.

It could be an issue with my syncing program "Synthing", but this should be replicating everything back and forth 1:1.
It could be also an issue with my desktop music application "MusicBee", but it does not fully make sense how the 1 / 3 / 5 star rating gets shown as expected.

My best guess is this tag version confusion. I usually save all my music tags using ID3v2.3 because of past issues with Japanese characters using ID3v1. So I'm guessing the different ID3 versions
handle rating diffrently, but once again this does not explain why 1 / 3 / 5 stars are shown normally.

So I'm at a loss. Do you have any ideas or suggestions?

I'm planning to continue more testing after work tomorrow. Let me know if there is anything in particular you want me to test.

[nypd]

Ok something I just tested real quick:

When I change the ID3 versions from the 2 / 4 star rating songs and save the songs using solely ID3v2.3, the 2 / 4 stars songs appear with the correct ratings in windows explorer:





However, they do not appear correct In MusicBee still:


(the bottom 2 songs)

So now i'm not sure its just a ID3 version issue.

[GoneMAD]

windows explorer doesnt really support ratings very well. In mp3tag you have right click the file and go to extended tags. Rating for mp3 is under popularimeter.

I had no issue verifying both in musicbee and mp3tag and the numbers stored in the tag follows the standards according to the internet (and also it reads the values in the same way). I do know that if you just copy and replace a file from the phone to your pc.. musicbee sitll shows the previous version of the files rating for wahtever reason. but copy pasting it to a new file would show the update

My guess is whatever you are using to read the tags does not read id3v2.4 correctly because gmmp writes the value the same regardless of the id3 version (id3v1 doesnt support rating btw)
Here is the code. (GMMP internally uses 0-10 instead of 0-5)

int
RatingTag::RatingToPopm(int Rating)
{
//0 - 255
//trying to represent 0 - 10

/*
0.0 0 _ No POPM
0.5 13 13
1.0 1 1
1.5 54 54
2.0 64 64
2.5 118 118
3.0 128 128
3.5 186 186
4.0 196 196
4.5 242 242
5.0 255 255
224-255 = 5 stars when READ with Windows Explorer, writes 255
160-223 = 4 stars when READ with Windows Explorer, writes 196
096-159 = 3 stars when READ with Windows Explorer, writes 128
032-095 = 2 stars when READ with Windows Explorer, writes 64
001-031 = 1 stars when READ with Windows Explorer, writes 1

*/

if (Rating == 2)
return 1;
else if (Rating == 0)
return 12;
else if (Rating == 1)
return 31;
else if (Rating == 3)
return 54;
else if (Rating == 4)
return 86;
else if (Rating == 5)
return 118;
else if (Rating == 6)
return 159;
else if (Rating == 7)
return 186;
else if (Rating == 8)
return 223;
else if (Rating == 9)
return 242;
else if (Rating == 10)
return 255;
}

[nypd]

Thank you for the reply.

So it seems like my syncing application is syncing the files fine. The 4 star song appear as:


(223 just like how the code dictates)


So I guess that means MusicBee is goofing up for some reason. What version of MusicBee are you using? I moved the latest "3 version" (3.0.6067)
 

I'm gonna play around with other music players like foobar too ses if anything changes.

[nypd]

Update: Star ratings show up as expected in foobar2000 v1.3.12

I'll try re-installing MusicBee and trying out different versions.

[GoneMAD]

im using 2.4.5404. Not sure how up to date that is

[nypd]

I could not find v2.4.5404, but i did get v2.5.5721 from the forums:


But unfortunately as you can see it still has the half rating issue. However, it seems like maybe it's MusicBee who use the 0-255 rating differently?

For example, when rating a song 2 stars using GMMP I get this in Mp3Tag:



Then when I overwrite the same song using MusicBee to 5 stars then back to 2 stars I see this in Mp3Tag:




I'm not exactly sure of v2.4 of MusicBee, but it seems on 2.5+ MusicBee reads a 2 star file as "64" rather than "86".

Is this something I should bring up in MusicBee forums as bug?


Edit: I Found 2.4.5404 in the forums, Ill quickly test what 0-255 number it uses for 2 stars

Edit #2: v2.4.5404 still does the the half stars and still writes 2 stars as "64" and 4 stars as "196". I wonder why even if MusicBee is writing its own rating tags, how GMMP still loads them perfectly fine as 2 stars and 4 stars respectively. 

Edit #2.5: Re-reading your first reply, I just wanted to let you know that In v2.5+, MusicBee will read the new ratings automatically if you refresh. I too noticed in v2.4 the new ratings from GMMP do not appear unless remove from the MusicBee library then force a re-scan. 

[GoneMAD]

"Edit #2: v2.4.5404 still does the the half stars and still writes 2 stars as "64" and 4 stars as "196". I wonder why even if MusicBee is writing its own rating tags, how GMMP still loads them perfectly fine as 2 stars and 4 stars respectively. "

For MP3 you can actually have more than one rating stored to the tag. GMMP specifically looks for the GMAE tag and load that, if it doesnt find it, it will use one of the other ones

[nypd]

Alright I submitted a bug report on the MusicBee forums.

I feel like I'm bothering you a bunch, but there is one other tag issue I'm wondering if it is possible to do in GMMP. Would it be possible to have GMMP "respect" the forward slash in both the track and discnumber fields? At the moment the forward slash and trailing number get erased when GMMP edits the tags in the file: 

Since it seems like GGMP does not take that into account when looking at the Tag Editor in the app:

[GoneMAD]

tags are not stored with slashs, that UI is showing 2 seperate tags together. Track No / Total Tracks and Disc No / Total Discs. GMMP does not support total tracks or total discs

[santoslyfe]

Sept 22, 2016 16:55:25 GMT -5 GoneMAD said:

I have question about this, the code comments has several "xxx when READ with Windows Explorer, writes xxx", however the actual if else block uses different values e.g. for 3 stars the comment is "128", but if statement is rating == 6 return 159. Any reason for the change?

[GoneMAD]

The code block was a copy paste from some documentation i found online

But yeah.. good catch.. i actually just used the numbers in my giant if statement for reading.. which actually was the highest number for each range instead of the numbers the comment says to write to. I'll make the change at least for the whole number ones and try to find the website i grabbed that info from

[nypd]

Oh that's great, I didn't even notice that. I think this will resolve the 2/4 star songs for me!

[GoneMAD]

Sept 27, 2016 18:03:08 GMT -5 nypd said:

Oh that's great, I didn't even notice that. I think this will resolve the 2/4 star songs for me!

yeah i definitely think it will. I went through and rated 0-5 in musicbee and looked at the ratings in mp3tag. I then set gmmp to use the same values

[nypd]

I just tried it and everything works great! This is amazing, thank you so much.

Random question:
From a coding perspective, how time consuming will it be to have a setting where the user chooses which ID3 version tags get written as?