I have downloaded the software and tried to input the files (wma) from My Music folder. Winamp finds the files ok and finds all of the tag information but jukebox puts every track either under artist "1" or artist "0" and says it finds no albums. Why is there no help files or contact information for this software

Behold the power of search!



http://www.audiosoft.net/forums/viewthread.php?tid=843

And behold the power of proper format support..

I hate to say this, but the commercial advantages gained from supporting wma seems more and more obvious. Even if the format itself is concidered a bad one. Are there any concrete plans for this audiosoft?

Is it not possible to just read the tag information directly from the WMA input plugin in Winamp somehow?

I'd hate to see ejukebox suffer, just because Microsoft has made a terrible sound format that way too many tend to use..

What's even worse, is that the stock advice for resolving the old versions of files you move is to recreate the database---thus losing all the customizations you make for .WMA , .M4A and .OGG files. It's beyond annoying, as my investment in other file formats grows with time.

Does anyone else find it annoying that all these new music formats elected not to use the perfectly good ID3v2 tag format but to instead invent a new tag format for each file type with some offering the ability to store album cover images and some not. I guess it doesn't really matter to you unless you are a programmer.

Anyways, right now we are trying to add OGG tag Reading support. Hopefully eJukebox will eventually be able to read and write to all the different formats....we are working on it.

.OGG is definitely the forward looking choice, I think, although .M4A may grow.

As for as the ID3v2 format question... I wonder if these various people were under some bizarre impression they could improve it? At least some of them (Microsoft) were deluded enough to think, even briefly, they could outright replace MP3 I suppose, and it wouldn't matter.

Also, I wonder if these different projects--even if open source--feared people would think they were copying each other or not being "forward looking" if they didn't come up with some all new crappy tag format. Either that, or someone wanted to develop a cottage industry for software makers with Tag-control programs.

It's even more of a bear on portable music players, I bet. You not only have to write code for your player to decode the music, you have to write new code to read the tags. Great, when you only have a little bit of memory in those things devoted to the software, as opposed to caching the music...

The mpc format must be one of the few non-mp3 formats that uses id3v2 tags. eJukebox supports reading the tags, even the images from the files. If this is the case, that it is id3v2 compliant, then eJ could save to the tags just as easy as mp3's, yet it doesn't save to them at all. Perhaps this is easy to fix?

RE: then eJ could save to the MPC tags just as easy as mp3's, yet it doesn't save to them at all. Perhaps this is easy to fix

Yes, very easy....we have updated it so eJukebox v3.85 and up will save data to mpc id3 tags.

Hehe, most excellent Thanks for taking action so quickly.

That is really good news! Looking forward to also get my mpc's into the popularity count also after rebuilds

Here is a review of the different codecs and how they compare: http://www.recordstorereview.com/misc/aacmp3.shtml

CONCLUSION

The only standout format appears to be good old MP3, albeit with the most advanced LAME encoding and Variable Bit Rate. It seems to offer a tangible improvement over the other formats if you want to use ~192 kbps encoding.

*Note: If you use eJukebox's CD ripper and turn on Variable Bit Rate and check Studio Quality you can get the above as eJukebox uses LAME. It might not encode as fast as OGG or AAC but should sound better.

As for file size, the same bit rate in different formats yields about the same file size because it's x bits per second. 128 kbps MP3 will be the same size as 128 kbps AAC for example because it has the same number of bits in the same number of seconds.