os121

When playing MP3 files, I would like to be able to have the Shaker 500 display the artist, album and song names in the display. When I press the 'Text' button the unit toggles to try and display this information, but it comes up empty. I think it has something to do with how the files are burned onto the CD (header tags, etc.). I have the player in folder mode, and it does display the file name, which in my case is the same as the song name. I have tried all sorts of stuff, and I am positive that I have this information embedded in the MP3 files -- I can see it when I view the files in my computer media players. Has anyone been able to see artist/album/song information in their displays ? If so, did you do anything special ?

upstate

I would like to know this to. Is this something we have to manually put in, like naming the file or is this encoded in the down load and if so what format must it be in to read?

os121

I looked at some of my MP3 files. The ID Tag Version is: ID3v2.3
Do I need to have them tagged differently ?

Eric B

Mobile mp3 players usually don't display the file name itself but only the ID3 tag in the file. So far I have never seen any car audio mp3 player that displayed ID3 version 2 tags, only version 1.

So you might have to retag your collection and burn them again :S

Easy way to see if there's a v1 or a v2 tag (or both) in an mp3 file is to play it in Winamp and push Alt+F3. Version 1 tag is on the left, version 2 on the right. You can also edit or remove them from there.

There is probably a zillion ripper programs out there that you can do this with too, but I don't use them since I only use LAME for mp3 encoding.

os121

YES ! After weeks I finally figured out what was wrong with my MP3 files, and found out how to display the Song, Artist and Album information in the Shaker 500 display panel. It has to do with the MP3 ID3 tagging, and my guess some limitation of the Shaker 500. In my case, if the MP3 file had picture information embedded in the file, the Shaker would puke and just display the file name .. nothing else. But .. if I cleaned out the file tags, rebuilt them, and removed the picture content it works like a charm.

I originally had ripped my files, and encoded them using iTunes. This may or may not have been part of my problem (iTunes loves to put lots of tagging data in an MP3 file). In search for a solution, I bought MusicMatch Jukebox (MMJ). A buddy at work recommended it. MMJ has all the features to basically rebuild the file tags so that they work in the Shaker 500. Here is what I did:

Using MMJ remove all the file tags by clicking on "Remove Track Tag".
Rebuild the file tags using "Edit Track Info" + "Lookup Tags".
After finding the right artist, album, etc (or typing it in), move over to the right part of the dialog box and click the button to "Remove Art".
Apply the changes
Burn the MP3 files to CD.
Play and Enjoy.

I really tripped across this accidentally because I noticed that one album displayed everything that I wanted when I played it, versus all my others that would only display the file name. Turns out that I had hand-entered all of the song information for that one album. I then snooped a little further, using a hex-editor to look at the differences between the files, and discovered tons of binary data in the bad-file, as compared to the good-file that had basic tag information in the header. Both files had the standard 128 bytes of tag info at the end, however after my testing I don't believe that the Shaker 500 is looking at this for the display.

Hope this helps someone from spending as much time on this as I have.

Good luck ! B)

Kluski

I used media player. I just use the defualt MP3 options. The tag comes up on the Shaker display.

However, I noticed if the name is longer than the display, it shows an arrow pointing left. Can you scroll left to show the rest?

os121

Yep, for each press of the text button, the display will scroll the content over. It works pretty neat. I like this player