This is probably a simple issue... oh, and Merry Christmas!!

I just installed Amarok 2 upgrading from 1.4.9 (medibuntu version). I've tried Amarok 2 previously when it was still developmental and I had a similar issue and it seemed to be related to the AAC encoder I had used previously when creating my collection.

So, on a large amount of my tracks (several thousand) - the Genre comes up as "Unknown". It seems to be a random selection of them - for instance one track in an album of 17 will come up as unknown. The rest are displayed fine. All other parts of the tags are read correctly as well. This is horrible for me, since I organize my music according to Genre... and this collection has become enormous, and editing these tags by hand... well, I'd still be working on it in 2009...

I tried putting the affected tracks through Easytag, to perhaps find some specific difference but nothing obvious. I even tried re-writing the tags in Unicode to see if that helped... but nothing.

So, what method does Amarok 2 use to read tags? What could be so special about this random cross section of tags??? and how do I fix it?

By the by, Amarok 2 is a huge leap forward for this project. I appreciate the work immensely, hopefully you guys can replace iTunes!! 

Might be something to do with different tag versions - Amarok writes v2.4 tags, where easytag does v2.3 (at least last time I checked). You can use a utility like eyed3 to check which versions of the tags are used in the offending files.

Gave eyed3 a try... it doesn't seem to like .m4a (AAC) encoded files... it read it as no tag existing.

So, now the weird thing... Even though I manually edited some of the tags in Amarok's interface - after restarting Amarok and re-scanning the collection they re-appear as unknown tags. I remember having a similar issue with the 2.0 beta version - although it would give me an error and tell me the file is unwritable. This went away when I compiled the beta version and built in support for AAC.

I was hoping they had built that support into Amarok... I understand their are licensing restrictions around AAC - being Mac's proprietary format and all... which is just another reason to really, really, really not like Mac anymore... I may try to compile from source and see if that helps... I wish somebody (Medibuntu maybe?) would build a .deb - it would make my life so much easier... I'm such a lazy ****... I know.

ah, could well be an aac issue then. worth checking bugs.kde.org though - there might be more info.

Yeah, I think that's the ticket... I came across this on the Mandatory Dependencies page:

please note that that binaries built against libmp4v2 can't be distributed due to licensing issues

Which is what I thought, Amarok 2 isnt built with the ability to edit AAC/M4A - at least not the ones that came out iTunes... I really hate Mac sometimes, they always find ways to make my life harder...

thanks for the help though... it's appreciated.