Database Info

Media Player and MP3s

Hey all, new to the forum (a fantastic resource, and I'm learning tons about my magnificent HTC Wizard), so hopefully this is in the right place.
I'm running WM5 and the default version of WMP on my Wizard, and I'm having some trouble with WMP recognizing the artist and album information encoded in the ID3 tags in my MP3s.
The ID3 tags are done using iTunes 7-ish on my PC running XP Pro, and thus, they are filed on the storage card as follows: \Storage Card\iTunes Music\Artist\Album\Track# SongName.mp3 - an example being \Storage Card\iTunes Music\Primus\Tales From The Punchbowl\01 Professor Nutbutter's House of Treats.mp3 . This is the default way in which iTunes stores music on my PC's HD, and I'm simply copying over the folders that I wish to have on my PDA.
What's happening, however, is that when I import the music into the WMP library, it doesn't seem to find any artist or album information, which, of course, makes it exceptionally difficult to organize my music collection on there.
I appeal to you, XDA geniuses, to help me solve my problem. Thanks!
P.S. - It now occurs to me that iTunes may not be encoding the artist and album information in the ID3 tags, and, rather, relying on the directory tree to contain that information. Does anyone know if this is the case? If so, how can it be solved?

Incorrectly Tagged Music

I have a huge library of music that is all perfectly tagged in iTunes. Yet when I move to my Nexus One, a lot of it doesn't appear correctly. lots of "unknown artists" or songs in the incorrect track order.
is there something I need to know about doing this correctly? again, all of the music has been meticulously tagged in iTunes.
thanks

I'm no expert on iTunes, but I did used my iPhone 2G for the past two years. All I can tell you is that I believe iTunes keeps tags and all your music info under it's own database (might be wrong ). I don't believe it actually "tags" your mp3 files. That's why I stopped using it to tag my collection.
I use mp3Tag to tag my files, and it even does mp4 movie files.

SuxenNeo said:
I'm no expert on iTunes, but I did used my iPhone 2G for the past two years. All I can tell you is that I believe iTunes keeps tags and all your music info under it's own database (might be wrong ). I don't believe it actually "tags" your mp3 files. That's why I stopped using it to tag my collection.
I use mp3Tag to tag my files, and it even does mp4 movie files.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just tied mp3tag and its showing my tags all right but on my N1 its giving loads of incorrect tags...
Weird I'm having the same problem when exporting from my iTunes library...

stewart1988 said:
I just tied mp3tag and its showing my tags all right but on my N1 its giving loads of incorrect tags...
Weird I'm having the same problem when exporting from my iTunes library...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That is very weird. I have only encounter one of my albums not showing the "cover art" on the Nexus. But all tags are correct and show properly. Maybe rescanning the SD card might help?

iTunes does indeed keep it's own database.
Therefore it doesn't actually embed the info into each track.
Remember to label the file in wondows explorer as well as I think the N1 might use this.
You can enbed all of the info using iTunes so that your music is perfect on all devices but it is tedious, on another post I've commented that I've done 120Gb (21000 songs) of my 300Gb so far.......

Use doubleTwist. Syncs iTunes to pretty much any MP3 device these days. They recently added N1 support. It's free too.
Works perfectly too- all my tags and album artwork are showing up under the standard music app and nemoPlayer from the Liquid.

I stopped using itunes a long time ago and switched to mediamonkey. Each time I put an album in the library I update the tag from the web, this includes the album covers in the mp3 tags. everything copies just fine to the N1.

zjchaser said:
I stopped using itunes a long time ago and switched to mediamonkey. Each time I put an album in the library I update the tag from the web, this includes the album covers in the mp3 tags. everything copies just fine to the N1.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I love MediaMonkey. I even bought the Pro version .
doubleTwist is nice but what killed it for me is the fact that it doesn't support networked drives Not sure if they fixed this yet.
I have all my content on a NAS.

Amdathlonuk said:
iTunes does indeed keep it's own database.
Therefore it doesn't actually embed the info into each track.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you all sure about this. I've moved my "tagged" items from iTunes many times into different client apps and always had it stay tagged the same way. this is not a challenge to your knowledge simply a "really?"
if indeed true, then to clarify what is the best app to use to tag all my music again so it shows correctly in any other client music app i use it in?

DaveKid said:
you all sure about this. I've moved my "tagged" items from iTunes many times into different client apps and always had it stay tagged the same way. this is not a challenge to your knowledge simply a "really?"
if indeed true, then to clarify what is the best app to use to tag all my music again so it shows correctly in any other client music app i use it in?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I use TagRunner and Tag&Rename.

i'm trying out doubleTwist. LifeHacker swoons about it.

You also have to give the media player a chance to update it's display.
I noticed this when I dumped a bunch of music on it, went immediately to the player and saw a bunch of stuff tagged wrong and then I watched it correct itself after a few seconds and combine some artists that it was seeing wrong.

muncheese said:
You also have to give the media player a chance to update it's display.
I noticed this when I dumped a bunch of music on it, went immediately to the player and saw a bunch of stuff tagged wrong and then I watched it correct itself after a few seconds and combine some artists that it was seeing wrong.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yea...it's been days though.

Android uses idv2 for identifying tags and it ignores idv1 but there are tagger apps on the market that work well like mp3tagger or tag but if you perfer a PC then go for it.

i've got the problem, that albums are not grouped right. If i got a album from one artist, everything ist ok, but if i've got a album with diferent artists, it is sorted by the artist name an i've got 20 albums (with the same name) and only one track in it, this is very ugly...
like showen in this screenshot. Here you see the album from Rammstein - Liebe ist für alle da (it is only showen one time) but demovibes 9 is showen multiple

AC!D said:
i've got the problem, that albums are not grouped right. If i got a album from one artist, everything ist ok, but if i've got a album with diferent artists, it is sorted by the artist name an i've got 20 albums (with the same name) and only one track in it, this is very ugly...
like showen in this screenshot. Here you see the album from Rammstein - Liebe ist für alle da (it is only showen one time) but demovibes 9 is showen multiple
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Artist needs to be tagged as various, and each artist needs to be tagged in "track artist"

omg, then i need to retag my whole collection...
on every app and device it is working correctly, only on my android phones not, this is evil

co-sign on mediamonkey.
it'll make your changing album artist to "various" really easy.

changed everything in media monkey. was pretty easy as those have said. then deleted entire library in iTunes and added again. I couldn't believe it when they all went back to how they were originally tagged in iTunes. what the heck gives?
Not only that but a bunch of them are tagged one way in Media Monkey and a different way in iTunes.
this is so frustrating....

Why is it so hard to find a decent music player?

It's things like this that makes me frustrated about Android. There is so much noise about hotspot, or tethering, or other geeky stuff that are pretty useless for regular users. But the music player, a standard feature for every phone nowadays, is really bad.
All I want is to transfer the damn songs with playlist and play on my phone!
Well, the stock player doesn't recognize playlist.
So I have to use other music apps.
I have tried doubleTwist. It doesn't recognize playlist created by its own desktop app. And also, you have to use its desktop app to sync music. And the syncing is not so good, lots of Artwork is missing.
I then turn to Cubed (superscript 3). It's cool. It reads my playlist. But it creates duplicated ones. In other words, every time you sync your music, it creates new playlist. I did a little research, it turns out it's the problem of the OS. If you copy your songs to external SD, the OS will scan them and then create duplicated list. Music players just read the list from the OS.
Another problem of Cubed is, if I manually copy music to SD card, all my artworks are gone.
I have tried other *free* music players on the market. None of them works perfectly. And I am so cheap that I don't want to pay for a feature that a smartphone should easily have.

mwxiao said:
It's things like this that makes me frustrated about Android. There is so much noise about hotspot, or tethering, or other geeky stuff that are pretty useless for regular users. But the music player, a standard feature for every phone nowadays, is really bad.
All I want is to transfer the damn songs with playlist and play on my phone!
Well, the stock player doesn't recognize playlist.
So I have to use other music apps.
I have tried doubleTwist. It doesn't recognize playlist created by its own desktop app. And also, you have to use its desktop app to sync music. And the syncing is not so good, lots of Artwork is missing.
I then turn to Cubed (superscript 3). It's cool. It reads my playlist. But it creates duplicated ones. In other words, every time you sync your music, it creates new playlist. I did a little research, it turns out it's the problem of the OS. If you copy your songs to external SD, the OS will scan them and then create duplicated list. Music players just read the list from the OS.
Another problem of Cubed is, if I manually copy music to SD card, all my artworks are gone.
I have tried other *free* music players on the market. None of them works perfectly. And I am so cheap that I don't want to pay for a feature that a smartphone should easily have.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Are you coming from an iTunes? Many of the problems with artwork deal with the way the artwork is embedded. AAC files do tags poorly and I had to rerip all my files to MP3 and make sure that the artwork was embedded in the tags and not in a folder. I used MediaMonkey to sync my music to my phone. I don't use playlists - I just put about 2GB of music on and pick what i want. The stock music player works great for me in this regard.
The stock music player allows local playlists, but so far doesn't import them. I think it is a matter of discovering name and format.

alphadog00 said:
Are you coming from an iTunes? Many of the problems with artwork deal with the way the artwork is embedded. AAC files do tags poorly and I had to rerip all my files to MP3 and make sure that the artwork was embedded in the tags and not in a folder. I used MediaMonkey to sync my music to my phone. I don't use playlists - I just put about 2GB of music on and pick what i want. The stock music player works great for me in this regard.
The stock music player allows local playlists, but so far doesn't import them. I think it is a matter of discovering name and format.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for your reply. I have a relatively big library in iTunes so playlist is kinda of necessary for me. It really sucks that the stock music player can't do it.
I didn't know about the iTunes artworks problem. All my song files are .mp3. I thought artwork was embedded in the file.

I've had pretty good success using an app called "isynchr" available in the market. It's not free, though! But it allows you to take your playlists from iTunes, copy them (and the songs) over to your phone and play everything using the music player that came on the phone.

Try this:
hxxp://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=751429
It works great for me and along with the mp3tagger pro app that lets you edit the ID3 tags and download artwork, its been a huge timesaver for me.

I feel your pain; I've had trouble finding a music player I really liked too. As of now, I'm just using the stock Samsung Music Player.
...which actually isn't that bad. It works well enough and the 5.1 feature is awesome.

check doubletwist. very good GUI and has itunes compatibility but I have not used that personally

DoubleTwist is a good music player and can export your playlists from itunes. They syncing is a bit slow tho.

I really had a hard time with doubletwist, and it took forever to start up on the pc.
I would recommend 'Songbird' on the desktop. It's built on top of a Mozilla Firefox framework, has great plug-ins and extensions, and via MTP can sync playlists with M3Us to the captivate, and then mixzing as the player on the captivate.

noidd said:
Try this:
hxxp://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=751429
It works great for me and along with the mp3tagger pro app that lets you edit the ID3 tags and download artwork, its been a huge timesaver for me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks a lot. The Android music player is much better than the Samsung one. Though I have a few bugs for just 10 min of try. Well, it's actually not a big of a deal. Playlist works fine, album art works fine. And that's all I am asking for.

closeshave2 said:
I've had pretty good success using an app called "isynchr" available in the market. It's not free, though! But it allows you to take your playlists from iTunes, copy them (and the songs) over to your phone and play everything using the music player that came on the phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1 on this app, you can use the stock samsung player, and double twist recongizes the playlists as well. it was much easier and faster on my computer as well. syching around 6 gigs of music only took around 15 mintues as opposed to over 2 hours with double twist.

ANOTHER good and easy to use apps is called "itunes agent". All you have to do is plug in the phone as USB drive and use it to sync you songs. Check it out. I use it for my WinMo phone and it is probably one of the best tool for sync songs to my phne.

mwxiao said:
Thanks for your reply. I have a relatively big library in iTunes so playlist is kinda of necessary for me. It really sucks that the stock music player can't do it.
I didn't know about the iTunes artworks problem. All my song files are .mp3. I thought artwork was embedded in the file.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had all my music in iTunes (many files were AAC - ripped that way before i knew better) and I learned the hardway that iTunes some funky things. I actually used MP3tag to fix the tags - lots of Android phones don't like the tags if some fields are empty - this has the effect of showing uknown artist and maybe empty album art. iTunes added some funky stuff to some of the tags, so once i got it all cleaned up and made sure the album artwork was embedded in the tags all was good.
As for playlists - you could try Samsung Kies - it does sync with the phone and allows you to make playlists. I have not tried it for syncing yet.

[Q] Android Music Database

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.

[Q] How do I embed the metadata that shows up in iTunes 11 on my Android 2.3 phone?

So I have around 1000 songs on iTunes that I want to transfer over to my phone since I just got a new SD card for it. The problem is, the ID3 tags that display correctly in iTunes show up as a bunch of jumbled characters on Android 2.3's default, as well as other music players including doubleTwist, Poweramp and so on. What's weird is that the phone only does this for certain songs. However, other songs using the same set of characters will display properly.
I've tried to sync my iTunes library with my phone using programs like doubleTwist and SnapPea already. Both produce the exact same result as dragging and dropping the files into my SD card's 'media' folder would--all they do is take the files from 'My Music' (the ones with the messed up ID3 tags) so the file titles are all messed up in the phone's music player.
For example, I have a song starting with the symbol 'θ' that will display properly on my phone but 'β' doesn't display... it turns it a Chinese character for some reason. I've used apps like ID3Fixer to no avail. Besides, it'd take too long for me to go through the metadata of 1000 songs... surely there's a way to fix this if iTunes can display them correctly? I've been looking for ways to forcibly embed the iTunes metadata onto the standalone files themselves (in 'My Music') but I still haven't found anything. In fact, the ID3 tags for these songs are messed up outside iTunes because I only edited their metadata in iTunes in the first place.
Any help at all is appreciated. Thanks.