So after downloading this and firing it up I ran into this bug almost immediately which sadly makes the app near unusable for me.
You see I listen to a lot of music which does not have one universal album artist. Instead thee are multiple artists per album (basically a compilation album)
The problem arises when I want to open an album. Instead of getting all the tracks in an album and having the artist name underneath each track only 1 song gets displayed for each album which is usually either the first or last track.
It isn't like the songs are split into different albums either (although that would be probably worse so please don't so that if you work on fixing this). They are just completely absent from the album section.
It seems the grouping criteria involves the folder and ARTIST to be the same in order for something to get grouped as an album which isn't ideal for someone like me who listens to mostly compilation albums.
What might be a good solution is implementing a feature I have seen in another music player called rocket player. With rocket player you can actually select how you want albums grouped. For example I have it set so that songs which are in the same folder and are listed as being from the same album are grouped under one album. The artist tag doesn't actually come into play in this way which stops this issue with the sorting from actually happening.
I really do hope this gets fixed soon as for me it is a major drawback which makes the app almost unusable. At the very least implementing an option so the user can set how albums are grouped would be ideal.
I have attached some screenshots showing this issue below. (I have also attached a screenshot of what the album should look like when seen from another music player as well as a screenshot of that album grouping feature I talked about with rocket player)
Attachment Key:
First Image is what I see in Encore
Second and third image is what I was supposed to see (I.E those are all the songs that should be displaying)
Fourth image shows the Album grouping feature from rocket player
Related
I've removed the supplied music and added my own selection to my memory card. The touch flo music app see's this in its library and, if I go through the pages to select and album and song, will show the album art etc. in the touch flo music player but it only shows that one artist at a time, not the stacked albums as with the original, supplied music.
How do I get the touch flo music player to build the stacked view of my artists?
Thanks...
Isn't touchflo3D linked to windows media player? If so, try going to start>programs>wmp right click>Update library. I haven't had this problem so don't know much.
I don't use WMP as such though and only want to synch some files from another location, not those my laptop has access to...
2nd poster is right, you have to find a link to windows media player then go into the options and update your library. It finds all music files and adds them, and they can then be accessed by going into the music tab and hitting Library in the bottom left.
Okay, cheers. Will give it a go and sort it out.
Thanks both.
That's weird. All I did was dump a load of tracks onto my SD card in a folder and they all appeared. I didnt have to do anything in WMP etc. TF3D picked them up pretty much straight away.
EDIT: Having read your OP again, I see what you are getting at. The view of "stacked albums" you are talking about is the "Now Playing" list. You have to add items into Now Playing before they will appear there. You will not see your entire music collection in that view unless you put them all into the playist that is currently playing.
Syphon Filter said:
That's weird. All I did was dump a load of tracks onto my SD card in a folder and they all appeared. I didnt have to do anything in WMP etc. TF3D picked them up pretty much straight away.
EDIT: Having read your OP again, I see what you are getting at. The view of "stacked albums" you are talking about is the "Now Playing" list. You have to add items into Now Playing before they will appear there. You will not see your entire music collection in that view unless you put them all into the playist that is currently playing.
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AH, I didn't even realize that lol... I thought he meant getting them into the library, and unlike yours mine didn't pick them up automatically. I had a folder full of files with "No program assigned" so I couldn't even open them until I updated my library.
i think that the original tracks gave you the wrong ideia. I used a diamond and i could only ear one artist at the time! the up and down only changes track.
But since you mention it, try messing with the settings and choose all albums. This should do the trick because with the original track they were like albums but with only one sample track each??
Should be getting mine soon to try it out
Yep, think I'm getting the hang of it.
Some confusion too. When I was referring to WMP I meant on my laptop rather than WMP on the Touch Pro.
WMP on my laptop wanted to synch a few hundred pictures as well... Stopped that and removed what I don't want leaving only the music I do want on the Touch Pro storage card.
Have now updated the library from within WMP on the Touch Pro (you have to first change it to look in the storage card) and now things are looking better.
Yep, agree that the supplied sample tracks give the impression that the Touch Flo music app can navigate between albums a flick at a time whereas this was because there was only a single track per each of these albums...
Have also seen that I need to get a selection made in order for the stacked album covers to appear...
Getting there slowly...
Further. Have added all my music to a playlist now and that makes all the albums come up in the stacked album view within the touch flo music app.
Not quite like what I thought it would be like though, i.e. you are limited to scrolling through your music one track at a time, the album flips to the next when you reach beyond the first or last track - you can't flip through albums at a time using the interface (unless the album has only one track) to select.
Can the Touchflow built in player read flac files? I have a feeling WMP doesnt...
NutsyUK said:
Can the Touchflow built in player read flac files? I have a feeling WMP doesnt...
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I think it's just a re-skinned WMP, built around it. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that why you update WMP's library and it shows up in touch-flo's library?
It is a crock, I am going to switch it off, all I want to do is browse the folders to add songs to the play list but all I get is a big long list of all the songs on there, I have multiple versions of some but I can't see which are which.......
kempas said:
Further. Have added all my music to a playlist now and that makes all the albums come up in the stacked album view within the touch flo music app.
Not quite like what I thought it would be like though, i.e. you are limited to scrolling through your music one track at a time, the album flips to the next when you reach beyond the first or last track - you can't flip through albums at a time using the interface (unless the album has only one track) to select.
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yes, if you have 10 songs from the same album, each gesture flick will flip to the next track but the album art doesn't flip since it's the same album.
I "workaround" by creating a playlist containing multiple albums, and then I sort them in such a manner that the album tracks are arranged randomly, or at least no two track from the same album are together side by side.
Regarding album art.
I have added pics to albums that I have in WMP on PC. Synced those albums with TP. Some of the album arts does not show in TF3Ds music player, other does. However, album art shows nice when playing the same file in WPM on TP. Any clues???
Regarding album art, one foolproof way I've discovered of ensuring it appears is to make sure each album folder contains a file called Folder.jpg, then TF3D's music app will convert that JPG into it's own album art file when it next updates its library, which it tends to do either after a soft reset or after a memory card is inserted.
You may then delete all the Folder.jpg files if you want, to save space - they won't be needed any more.
OK, it's probably just me, but I cannot figure out the TouchFlo music player at all.
I synced 7 or 8 albums from various artists onto the storage card using Windows Media Player on my desktop. All of the albums have appropriate album art visible within Media Player.
After a bit of hit and miss, TF Music Player found the albums. But only some of the have album art. Those that do have a ~hTC_<album name>.jpg file, others have a AlbumArt_{long guid}_Large.jpg file. Any way to automatically fix this?
OK, now on to the bigger problem. I just can't figure out how to get the player to play what I want. I press Library, go to Artists, Select an artist, then an Album. Click on a track, and it starts playing that album. Do the same again, except select a different album and selecy Add to play list, and .... nothing happens.
I've messed around for quite a while. About 1 in 4 times I can get it to play what I want, but it's seems far from intuitive. I'd just like a 'Play' button on the screen that lists the albums for instance.
The only thing I seem to be able to do reliably is queue up everything, so I guess that'll have to do.
Sorry for the long winded rant, but I've been fighting with this for a while, it's nearly 1am and I'm tired.
If the album art picture is called folder.jpg the TouchFlo player will pick it up and assign it as the album cover , it creates the ~hTC_<album name>.jpg file file when it does so.
When I click on a track from within an album it plays the track and cues the rest of the album to play, but it does play the track I select. I'm not 100% sure, but from your description it sounds like yours doesn't?
But in general to answer your question: no, its not a particularly useful UI for song selection (especially compared to what I'm used to coming from the S60 music player). Really wish in particular that you could do as you say and select an artist/genre and just hit play - instead you have to select the artist, then click on the music note to bring up all the songs, click on any one and then it cues them all (same goes for playing by genre etc). Also wish you could narrow down selection with the keyboard (or virtual keypad), like in contacts, or at least have the alphabet sidebar for selection. Only thing I really like about it, other than looking quite pretty, is that its fairly finger friendly.
Thanks, the folder.jpg bit seems to have worked mostly. It's not picked a couple of them up yet, but I guess it will eventually.
As for queueing up tracks, I'm not sure what happens and when. It just seems that sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn't. Mostly I can queue up a single album just fine, but if I want to add a second album to the queue it seems hit and miss.
Best way is to create a playlist and add them to that, but its hardly intuitive or user friendly, worst of all the playlist editor is not that finger-friendly either. Its adequate for me, but only just.
So I'm kind of an exception case for music, where I hunt for all my music via music blogs. The problem with this is that most of the songs I download aren't part of an album, and most of the time are pre releases, or bootlegs.
In these situations how do I organize my music through zune?!
Editing tag information in Zune REQUIRES an album name. Adding albums that don't have an album name are tagged "Unknown Album {Date Added}".
Is there any way to just have the songs without album names hidden? I've even tried using a space, but then it started grouping all of those together as an unknown album .
Other than that do you guys have a particular way in how you organize music?
mesofly said:
So I'm kind of an exception case for music, where I hunt for all my music via music blogs. The problem with this is that most of the songs I download aren't part of an album, and most of the time are pre releases, or bootlegs.
In these situations how do I organize my music through zune?!
Editing tag information in Zune REQUIRES an album name. Adding albums that don't have an album name are tagged "Unknown Album {Date Added}".
Is there any way to just have the songs without album names hidden? I've even tried using a space, but then it started grouping all of those together as an unknown album .
Other than that do you guys have a particular way in how you organize music?
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Uhm. I would just make a bogus album name (aka song name). There's no way to just have album so just do it that way. You can always just look at different ways to look at ur music, by artist, song, etc...
Zedox said:
Uhm. I would just make a bogus album name (aka song name). There's no way to just have album so just do it that way. You can always just look at different ways to look at ur music, by artist, song, etc...
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That's what I do for any artist where I have b-sides or demos in addition to the regular albums. I create an album called 'singles' and group all the non-album tracks under those. You could create different albums like this; demos, singles, bootlegs, etc.
I am looking for some clarification on how Android generates the Music DB and in particular how it displays track and album info and artwork. Right now I have some music in a "Music" folder on the root of my sdcard. There are several tracks directly in that folder, and some others organized into subfolders by artist or album. I'm having several problems getting the info to display properly.
My first issue is album artwork. Does Android display artwork that is embedded in the file? Some of them are showing up correctly and some are showing album covers from other tracks. Some of the things I've read suggested that everything be organized in folders by Album and to have an AlbumArt.jpg in each folder. While this is doable, I haven't gotten around to reorganizing my library and would rather the phone just read artwork from the file. I have checked the id3 tags of some of the problem tracks, both with an app on the phone, and from my pc, and everything (including artwork) looks fine. Both the stock music player and several 3rd party players are displaying the information incorrectly and identical so it seems to me like Android is caching the data incorrectly. I've tried to delete the albumthumbs folder on the sdcard as well as Settings->Manage Applications->Media Storage->Clear Data. It just gets regenerated incorrectly.
I think this is related to my next problem. It seems like the tracks that do not reside in their own album folders and sit directly in the Music folder are having the most problems. In particular the songs where there is no Album field in the id3 tags. The phone seems to think these all belong to the album "Music" - must be resorting to looking at the containing directory if no album is found in the tags. What's odd is that even though it thinks several tracks belong to this Music album, its now showing the same artwork for each of them.
What is the ideal way to organize music for playback on Android? Would sorting everything info folders by Album solve my problems? Do I need to make sure I don't have any blank Album tags?
On a side note, is anyone familiar with how iTunes stores its Album art? I'm looking for an easy way to maintain consistency between my iTunes library and what is on my phone. I'm thinking of developing a small application that can scan both libraries and detect differences to keep them synchronized. All of my music is on my old Macbook which I hardly use, but I listen to it pretty much exclusively on my Android phone. The problem is we also have an iPad that I'd like to keep the music on so I can't ditch iTunes entirely.
Thanks for any advice.
Hello,
about a week ago I updated most of my media on my phone with zune social tagger so that most songs had artist backgrounds. These backgrounds showed up on the phone during playback (back then on 7392) and when I played the song in Zune on the PC.
Sometimes I only have single song from an album. If I then searched for the album on the marketplace and found it, it would offer me 30 second snippets of all the songs but the one I have on my phone. Instead, this song would be played from my library without problems and with artist background.
However, since Mango these backgrounds are missing on some songs.
One example is the song "Renegade" from the Jay-Z album "The Blueprint".
I have only this song from the album.
The weird thing is that when I search for album in the marketplace, find it and start to play the tracks, it shows me the artist background.
However, when the track I have on my phone (Renegade) comes up, the artist background disappears.
On the PC the background is still there.
Any ideas?
OK I got a little further.
Apparently with Mango the way the artist backgrounds work has been changed at least a little bit.
The thing that was wrong in the song mentioned above (Renegade) was this:
The song is from a Jay-Z album and is by Jay-Z and Eminem. I had set the artist to this:
Jay-Z; Eminem
However, it was recognized as one artist by Zune and as such the artist of the song would show up as "Jay-Z; Eminem" which is not what I intended.
So I changed the artist tag using Windows Explorer. I first removed all the artist, then wrote in "Jay-Z" and saved, and then wrote in "Eminem" (after the auto generated semicolon) and saved again. I don't really know what's different in the artist tag now but somehow Zune seems to regocnize that there are two artist and only displays the first artist (as it should).
This fixed the missing background for this song.
Additonally, I noticed that songs which are not linked to Zune Marketplace songs now also have artist backgrounds as long as the artist tag is correct and I have an album by that artist on my phone.
For example the album "The Marshall Mathers LP" by Eminem is not in the German Zune Marketplace but I have it on my phone (not linked using zune social tagger).
When I play a song from that album I do have an artist background as long as the artist mp3 tag is set to Eminem (or set to "Eminem; xxx", as long as it is done using Windows Explorer (or probably also WMP etc.)).
However there are still artist backgrounds missing for some music from the device while they show up in the Zune software on the pc and the artist tag is correct.
For these artists I also don't have any backgrounds in when I tap on their names.
Another thing that doesn't work (probably a missing feature) is that when I play all songs by Eminem, Zune does not add songs to the list where Eminem is only the secondary artist (such as Renegade as noted above).