Serato DJ Pro General Discussion

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 Serato DJ Pro General Discussion
Playcount gone after saving/altering outside Serato
Talk about Serato DJ Pro, expansion packs and supported hardware

Playcount gone after saving/altering outside Serato

bascurtiz 12:30 PM - 30 June, 2022
After I make changes to MP3s with, for example Mp3tag - the playcount is gone in Serato.
The weird thing is, I don't need to alter anything, a simple Save in Mp3tag causes this.
I've enabled 'Preserve modification date' in Mp3tag, but that doesn't seem to fix it.

I've tried other Mp3 editors too, like One Tagger, but same issue.
When I look into the metadata, SERATO_PLAYCOUNT remained however, incl. the proper value.

How do I make Serato read this value again?
I've tried 'Analyze files' and 'Rescan ID3 Tags' in Serato, but that doesn't fix it.
I've tried Ctrl-Deleting them and re-importing them, but nope.

Serato DJ Pro 2.5.9 / Windows 10 / MP3 ID3v2.3 & ID3v2.4 / Mp3tag 3.14
bascurtiz 9:28 PM - 1 July, 2022
Just tested it on macOS too; same outcome.
See: youtu.be
bascurtiz 12:53 PM - 6 July, 2022
I found the culprit.

When I save a MP3-file with ID3v2.4 UTF-8 in Mp3tag, playcount shows in Serato.
When I save a MP3-file with ID3v2.3 UTF-16 in Mp3tag, playcount is gone in Serato (though SERATO_PLAYCOUNT is present as metadata tag incl. the value)
When I save a MP3-file with IID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1, playcount shows in Serato.

Conclusion so far:
When writing ID3v2.4 use UTF-8.
When writing ID3v2.3 use ISO-8859-1
...to have full compatibility with Serato.

Since One Tagger uses UTF-8 for both ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 the issue popped up with this app as well.
We've pushed a fix to the rust ID3 library we're using for One Tagger.

Zip with audio files that use the ID3 scheme, saved in the different char-encoding:
download.multimedia.workers.dev

Updated Mp3tag to the latest as of now, v3.16.

Suggestion for Serato:
Support both UTF-8 and UTF-16 next to ISO-8859-1, no matter if audio file's metadata is ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4.
bascurtiz 1:06 PM - 6 July, 2022
See screenshot as evidence: i.imgur.com