I've just noticed that the Grouping field above does not work either - so need that one too!

www.dropbox.com

All the tags used by Serato DJ. The title by which said tags go by will depend on OS.

Thanks for the response. Sadly, however, I know those are the column headings.

I'm after the field heading in the id3 tag. In the id3 tags each of those headings is represented by a "field" the data show is written to. I'm wondering what those field headings are (as in the bits in CAPS in my original post).

Discoveries since the last post:

- Key is actually written to "INITIAL KEY" with a space.

- There appear to be different fields required dependent on the format of the audio file, some work in mp3's that don't work in m4a's and so on. Hope someone at Serato can help with this.

And having checked my spelling!:

Ahh I got ya. Disregard my entire post then :)

I've always wondered this too. Not so much for MP3/ID3, but for the other supported formats.

Thanks, lads. I'm wondering if I need to put this post in another forum to get a Serato employee to look ...

Create an MP3 or just grab any song to test with.
Use a tag program like Tag-N-Rename and put a different letter in every field. (A,B,C, etc...)
Drag song into a new folder in Serato and enable every column in view.
Should be easy to match them up then.

And then come back and post your findings for the rest of us. :)

For mp3s at least

Remixer = TPE4 frame
Grouping = TIT1 frame

Oh, and

Genere = TCON frame

OK here's where I've got to ...

mp3
(TIT1) TITLE - track
(TPE1) ARTIST - artist
(TBPM) BPM - bpm
(TYER) DATE - year
(COMM) COMMENT - comment
(TALB) ALBUM - album title
(TCON) publisher - label
(TKEY) initial key - key
(TIT1) CONTENT GROUP - group
(TPE4) REMIXED BY - remixer

m4a
(nam) TITLE - track
(art) ARTIST - artist
(tmpo) TEMPO - 000bpm
(day) DATE - year
(cmt) COMMENT - comment
(alb) ALBUM - album
(PUBLISHER) PUBLISHER - label
(intialkey) INITIALKEY - key
(grp) CONTENTGROUP - group
remixer just doesn't save
(gen) ??? - genre

OK - revisisting once more, just in case its helpful to anyone else ...

m4a

ARTIST artist
TITLE song
ALBUM album
DATE year
GENRE genre
COMPOSER composer
COMMENT comment
CONTENTGROUP grouping
INTIALKEY key
TEMPO 000## BPM

mp3
ARTIST artist
TITLE song
ALBUM album
DATE year
GENRE genre
COMPOSER composer
COMMENT comment
CONTENT GROUP grouping
INTIAL KEY key
BPM ###

What I'd like to know, though, is - where is the info for remixer stored in serato dj library then? If you write in it serato it stays there, but doesn't appear in any tag I can find ...

IIRC there is am existing bug where the info is not written back to the files, and is only kept inside the Serato database file. :(

Thanks - it seems to be the same with the "PUBLISHER" (label) too.

Annoyingly even if you populate these fields in the file, Serato doesn't read them either!!

Really? Wow. :(

This 'bug' just bit me in the ass. I've After meticulously organising and tagging my video library, I've extracted the tags into a spreadsheet program only to find the crucial fields I need to work with are empty.

Most notably, I've been using Label to store the original source information. I've since changed that to Composer, which SDJ does seem to be reading and writing properly.

I would like to get to the bottom of how SDJ is writing the tags but I'd also like Serato to resolve the tag writing problem.

Yep, its very annoying. Not quite sure how to get someone from Serato to actually look at this thread.

I've submitted a support request tagging this thread in - hopefully we'll get some answers.

What program are you using to extract the tags into Excel with? Can you edit the tags in Excel, then use the program to import the updated tags back into the files?

That's exactly what I'm doing kbscholar. :) It's very powerful. And fast!

I'm using Tag&Rename to do it which is the only reason I still use a PC at all when it comes to music.

Thanks so much for that tip. I love organizing my tags in Serato, but Excel is way more powerful. I am very happy.

What columns/tags work with Serato and which ones don't?

It's hard to say. I've never had any issues with MP£ ID3 tags but then again Serato only reads/writes less than half of all available ID3 fields which is a bit of a handicap.

It's MP4 files I'm having a bit of an issue with. The Label field doesn't seem to work, in either direction. As for flac/wav, wma etc, I've not tested these either. In fact I haven't done any further testing as I'm waiting for more info from Serato first.

I'm tagging with Jaikoz and there is also data written in the "Unknown Fields" tag.

I'm assuming it's the analysis and cue point data. Very curious to know if these can be edited. I stumbled upon it as I'm trying to copy the Serato data from older files to ones freshly matched with iTunes Match. You can remove this data in Jaikoz but not edit it. Anyone else have any ideas?

I'm still having this issue with ALAC files. The Label, Genre, and some other fields will neither read from the file in Serato on going into the database, or be written to the file and readable elsewhere if tagged in Serato.

Wish Serato would actually put their oar in here and give us some info.

That really sucks!

+1 on this sucks. Badly.

Same with the 'Remixer' field for Flac files... as in, if changed in Serato, and Serato DJ pro even prints 'Writing tags to /bla/bla/file.flac', there is no tag to be found anywhere afterwards. So chances are they store it in one of their Binary GEOB frames...

Also, any permutation of the normal convention I have tried for flac files, I wasn;t even able to read out the remixer value (REMIXER, MIX ARTIST, MIXARTIS and for shits & giggles even TPE4 in a vorbis containter... nada...) ... so a bug ticket it is again.

c.

No, I really don't think so. I can't remember what it was I was doing but the other day something happened that caused me to suspect Serato was adding the data to its own database and not the files themselves. I think I was rebuilding overviews at the time.

I can't be 100% certain right now if it was flac or wav files it was happening to, as I was dealing with both types that day. I know for a fact that this is the way it handles wav files since the metadata options are really limited, but I think it was flac files I saw it happening with that day.

I'll try and run a test when I next get back in the studio.

Chaps, one thing that may help - as far as I've found anyway.

When tagging genre fields in an external program, if you want them to be read by Serato, and are using multiple genres, ensure you tag using a "/" or space. If you use a ";" it won't read the whole field.

mp3 format is fine with everything, of course, but who uses them anymore?

Lossless formats is the problem.

The Remixer field in Serato not being read & written to some obscure place is a new issue for me as I have never tried to use it, but it shows how bad/half-arsed the flac implementation in Serato is...

The genre discussion is yet another one, which is also true for all of the main DJ software manufacturers which are all ignoring the fact that multi-value (as well as custom) metadata is now fully defined & established across all formats, but all are turning a blind eye as it will cost them to implement this properly as they all have taken short cuts at best in the past on this, or in the worst case, their implementation is plain wrong/faulty.

i.e. one of the problematic things, which Pioneer always states as a reason, is that multi-value metadata has not been defined as a standard when the id3 2.3 definition came out originally, which is true for id3 2.3, but id3 2.4 has it defined clearly, and the same applies to 2.3 where this is the de-facto standard used by many programs and institutions (i.e. a null delimiter /0, which many good media programs, such as mp3tag, foobar, musicbee, etc, display as a semicolon ";" between values), and newer/better container formats, such as vorbis on flac files, do allow multiple fields of the same (where Serato & Rekordbox for example ONLY read the first field they encounter... against the file format specification as in so many cases with flac / vorbis containers).

Many threads of the past about this:

Generic
serato.com

Faulty flac metadata handling leading to user data loss:
serato.com

Rekordbox & Pulse's one liner reply
forums.pioneerdj.com

Traktor
www.native-instruments.com


Problem is they get away with it as too few users care and complain on this technical level (what I don't get with this is that users don't see the power of smart-playlists/-crates in combination with multi-value & custom metadata, and how this could easily give them access to all they ever wanted, without workarounds of pushing arbitrary data into comment/grouping field to be able to see it just somewhere, which has become the accepted shitty work around among users.... ), so it's at the bottom of the pile, despite every tech savy person in their support teams and their developers themselves do know how broken this all is... but since it takes a considerable rewrite of the core libraries and the library systems in many cases (which both Traktor & Serato has been promised to do for years.. so SDJ Pro 2 was one big dissapointment for me...), everyone is scared to touch it and fix this self-produced-clusterf* imo.

c.

Hi, I started another thread related to the issues with Flac tags. Please check it out. Any constructive input you can give would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

(hopefully someday serato Flac will work properly, but until then maybe we can combine our knowledge to best work around these issues)

Link to thread - serato.com

+1

And the software crashes quite often for me, even though they boast and brag about it's stability! Maybe if they fixed the core libraries it would be actually as stable as they lead you to believe!

I've been using Serato DJ for years and till date not a single crash playing live.

The only time I've had anything close to a crash was with the Denon MCX8000 freezing up and becoming unresponsive but the software was still working.

Just saying, it's been pretty stable for me.

It's mostly to do with library management tasks I think (and of course my Numark NS7ii which is pretty much made out of poop). It always makes me wonder how they think they substantiate that claim as it seems completely made up to me is all.

I surprised that this thread is 4 years old, yet a moderator has never once interjected any useful information.

To the best of my knowledge the "remixer" field is a proprietary field from Serato. his information is not embedded within any individual file, rather it is stored within the file structure of the "_serato_" directory.

I presently have my own issue. I own several 4TB hard drives, each mirrored copies of each other that I back up from my prime playing drive once a week. Before I do I always take the time to check the "remixer" field. Recently I peaked on drive space and had to clean out numerous files off of my primary gigging drive to fit a music update on it. Once finished it left virtually no room on the drive. I thought nothing of this at the time, but when I got to the gig I found every meta tag empty & needed to be reloaded.

This took about 30 minutes. I have Thunderbolt drives, so reading information is rather quick. Thankfully I was there hours early, so this wasn't much of an issue.

Following the gig I put my thinking cap on and realized the issue had been that Serato was unable to save itself properly upon closing as there was no drive space available.

I moved some unneeded client folders to my desktop, following which I closed Serato & had no further issues...until....

I went to back up my drive & immediately noticed all my Canadian Chart data from 1962-present stored in the "remixer" field was gone, about 2 years of work. I spent 40 hours a week embedding meta data and ALL this was gone. All other fields were fine, it was only the remixer field that had an issue.

Looking at a back up drive, all this information is still stored properly, so I am currently waiting for Serato staff to address exactly where within the "_serato_" directory this is stored. I kinda know where already, but in the past I've attempted manipulating it and have noticed log files also play a role in archiving and reading this information.

I'm at a standstill at the moment waiting for them to respond. It's been 4 days thus far. I get into this in more detail here.

serato.com

PS Glad to see there are a number of others that care about this issue.

Serato is really dropping the ball on this one. Having the program read & write ID3 tags should be a simple enough task for their design team to address.

With that said, I do know that Alcatech's BPM Studio worked flawlessly reading & writing ID3 tags until one day an update truncated any tags longer than 25 characters. Not only did it read this information incorrectly, but when closing the program it saved the meta-data in a truncated form. WE WERE FURIOUS, particularly since the studio computer was hooked directly into our master server and literally 10 years of work was affected. With 100 DJ systems & another 750 clients that we supplied background music to, it was rather easy to get this data back, grabbing the most recent computer not updated from our client base.

This occurred very near the end Alcatech's run. The company I worked for had actually been their original & sole North American distributer for BPM Studio's first 5 years of existence. They never were able to fix this tagging issue, so the workaround became using the last version of BPM Studio that worked.

I mention this because if it was an ultra simple fix, they likely would have been on this immediately. Instead 3 years passed and eventually we retired all these system and replaced them with Serato.

I gave up totally out of frustration (and the instability of Serato). I switched to Rekordbox, and even though it's tag writing isn't perfect, it is much better than Serato's. I am retagging my library with the "my tags" feature which is light-years ahead of serato's prehistoric non-functioning windows95 capabilities. I am more than happy with the switch and will never look back. I got tired of speaking to deaf ears on this forum and have voiced my opinion with my wallet (as well as telling everyone what I think about Serato and there business practices). Does anybody want to buy a Serato Pro liscense?

It has video and all the effects packs plus the other one with slip mode or whatever. I will sell for 50% of the full price to purchase new.

So I opened up a ticket with Serato, but It’s been 5 days without a reply to my support question.

If the forums are to be believed, many have opened up tickets on this issue in the past with no help or response from Serato.

Anyways I have an update on my situation.

As initially noted, Serato is not storing particular meta tag fields properly, rather it is doing so with the root directory of “_serato_”…my question had simply been “where?” and I’ve yet to hear back.

I spent the last two days running my own tests on the matter. I also had to purchase a tag editor so I could confirm my suspicions.

It appears both the “label” & “remixer” field are definitely NOT stored within a files meta data, rather they are stored to the following sub directory:

_serato_ / database V2

I purchased a new drive, place the contents of my prime drive onto it & then one by one replaced:

1) _serato_ / subcrates
2) _serato_ / neworder.pref
3) _serato_ / collapsed.pref
4) _serato_ / database V2

Until I found which of the above was acting as a storage container for this information.

Once identified I replaced the last working copy of "_serato_ / database V2” from a secondary drive onto my primary drive. All the contents of “remixer” repopulated itself.

Following this I used Serato to rescan all the ID3 tags of the entire drives contents. Changes made to my primary drive read and rewrote over any old information in any of the working ID3 tags. Since I haven’t recently made changes to the work in either “remixer” or “label”, none of this was affected.

So the good news is I am back to where I was before the hiccup of last week, the downside is I’ve lost faith in the support team.

I am the furthest thing from a “computer expert”, yet somehow I was able to solve my issue with no help from either the forums or from Serato staff. How an absolute rookie with regards to computers was able to identify, troubleshoot and solve a problem within 4 hours when it has been a known issue since 2015 on the forums is most worrisome.

I begun testing a single file with a tag editor between 3pm-5pm yesterday then today after I mirrored my primary drive overnight, took it upon myself to identify where within the Serato file structure this information was stored. This was done in a hour between 1pm-2pm. Testing to 30 minutes & then running an ID3 scan another 30 minutes.

I have literally spent half my lifetime organizing meta data. To have a field almost lost was bad enough, to have no response from Serato was disturbing and be left to troubleshoot & solve the issue myself infuriating.

I started a post with the results I found from my own testing here;

serato.com

I was hoping that there would be positive discussion, and there eventually was a little bit, but mostly lots of trolling in the ultra super toxic serato forum environment, and of course no help from serato (as always). I tried, then realized it was far worth my effort to even try.... I do like rekordbox much better now that I have switched. Anyway I figure Serato is too busy making half-ass production software as well as making sure that integration with the new Herclules IPOD Jr. 3 controller (in collaboration with Fisher Price) is spot on for its release tomorrow to help anybody with silly "basic functionality issues" , I mean come on now = you already bought the software, so where is the money in that?

I have lost fields permanently and it sucks, some are stored in the files, and some in the database. Check out my aforementioned post to see what I figured out. Though that was Flac. I do think I tested MP3 but didn't post results due to negative feedback. I should have that info somewhere if anybody needs.