I need your advise.

I've discovered that my Walkman player does not recognize tags in some mp3 files.
What is strange is that those are individual files in some albums (well, a couple of albums is not recognized at all - but that's a different story).

So I wonder what might be so specific about those mp3s making them unrecognizable for Sony player?
I've tried to compare different aspects of them and have found no obvious differences.

I've uploaded several samples here: http://drop.io/zysqjqp
Each archive contains two tracks from the same album. The one with "(notag)" suffix is not recognized. The second one works fine.

If you could have a look and share ideas of what might be "wrong" about those "(notag)" mp3s, how can I detect and fix (!) them - I'd be very thankful!

Hi Sabio,

does this post by Florian help you ?

http://forums.mp3tag.de/index.php?showtopic=3076

Thank you! (sorry for the late reply)

I didn't try to save tags in iso8859-1 to check (half of my tracks have cyrillic characters in tags which cannot be represented with iso8859-1).
But I believe it is not a reason for the problem.
Otherwise all of the tags wouldn't be read by player (UTF-16 is pretty much different from iso8859-1, it's not just like UTF-8).
But in the same album (completely tagged with Mp3tag) I have both ok and problematic tracks.

could you check that the tracks have a correct stream? Use something like (freeware) mp3val to check whether any tracks have been corrupted.
then check if some tracks (the ones that work) have only mp3v1 tags and the others that do not work have mp3v2 tags - some mp3players hickup with mp3v2.

Issue resolved.

Apparently the problem was with ... the files names length.

I normally use the following naming schema:
Artist\Year Album\Nr. Artist - Title.mp3
And when that string was longer than some limit (taking into account utf-8 encoding) the player was not able to read tags (or most likely - store them in its internal database).
While it still plays such tracks fine.

So I had to rename some tracks/albums to make them fit.


P.S. For example this file is "bad"
MUSIC\Jason Mraz\2008 We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things\07. Jason Mraz - Details In Fabric (feat. James Morrison).mp3
But removing just one letter from its full path makes it "good".