Help Music genre problem - anyone else?

[kimf]

All music players on my Incredible (default, btunes, and 3/cubed) are showing some odd genres, even after I repeatedly try to correct tags on the SD card music files.

I have a genres showing up called "255" and "Folk". I have no idea what 255 is and I have no folk music. The songs showing up under these genres also show up under the correct genre as well.

Also, the player is trying to change the genre for some files, I don't know if this is some kind of auto-fill, it doesn't like the genre I am using and is replacing it with something else?

Anyone else seeing anything like this? It's very annoying and frustrating. By the way, all these files show up correctly in iTunes and on my iPod so I don't think there is a problem with the files themselves.

 

[osin83]

I have the same problem... no 255 but folk music genre. I'm not sure how you have your itunes library setup. But i use itunes helper to sync my "hero" playlist in itunes to my phone. I saved all my 1 hit wonder 80s music songs under 1 album named (80s hits) and itunes lumped them all in one folder on my PC. Only the songs that are in that folder get renamed as folk. No solution yet unless i resave them under their proper albums.

 

[Excedio]

Sounds like the meta tags are not correct. Try using this: MusicBrainz Picard - MusicBrainz

 

[kimf]

Wow, what a surprise to see my post come back up.

Excedio you are correct, some of my tags were messed up and I was able to correct them using MP3Tag, which is a great program. It had to do with different versions of tags on the songs, I deleted the old versions and that fixed some of the incorrect genres.

I still have the "folk" and "255" genres which bug the crap out of me, but I'm trying to ignore them. I did come to the conclusion that my self-made "80s" genre is not readable because it is not an official genre tag, so that is part of the problem. I think I will create an album called 80s and leave the genre blank, like you suggested osin83. Thanks!

 

[heindlik]

hey guys, having similar problem with genres...

I've got about 900 songs all properly tagged (album art, genre,...) and after importing them into Windows Media Player on PC everything works fine. But when I put my songs on my HTC Hero (android 2.1), there are some basic genres, not these mine I created, such as DnB (missing completely). And even playing in mixzing, btunes, meridian etc. didnt help...
Any advice? Thanks

 

[ariscotle]

I have the same issue. And I am meticulous about the way I tag my media.
There could be an issue of which tag version the software will read. I tagged all mine in iTunes using 4. I use the Samsung Galaxy S (Capitvate on AT&T) and it always lumps my music into Alternative/Indie - Rock - Metal and a few others. My "Psychedelic" and a few others that I use simply never show up.
Any idea why all my music gets lumped into whatever genre the phone decides?
It does the same in "Music Player" "Double Twist" "MixZing" and "Astro Player" can't these things just read the tags?

HELP!

 

[SquareBare]

I too have had this problem it is extremely annoying and nobody seems to have an answer.

 

[eyallvy]

Hi,

A clever person who calls himself runamonk posted the solution to the problem on the Google Mobile Help Forum, using MediaMonkey software. I'm passing it on here...

Music Players running under Android v2.1 all seem not to understand Genres set in ID3v2 tags in mp3 files. The Genres are not understood even when ID3v1 tags are present alongside ID3v2 tags. The only way to get Genres to appear correctly under Android v2.1 is to set all tracks to have ID3v1 tags only.

A good way to do it is using MediaMonkey. The free version works fine.
After all mp3s are properly tagged using your favorite tagger, with cover art included if required, do the following in MediaMonkey:

Open Tools > Options.
In the Treeview on the left click on Library > Tags & Playlists.
Change the option for "Store MP3 file properties using:" to "ID3v1 tags".
This ensures that only ID3v1 tags are stored in the files.

Select the required mp3 files (perhaps try it on some test files first), and...

Tools > Advanced Tag Management | Synchronize Tags.
Tools > Advanced Tag Management | Clean ID3v2 tags.

Synchronize tags makes sure that ID3v1 and ID3v2 tag contents are identical.
Clean ID3v2 tags leaves only the ID3v1 tags in the files.

Copy the files to phone. The best way to do this is by simply hooking it up with USB as a disk drive. I use MicroSoft SyncToy to maintain an identical tree on the phone and PC.

When you use media management to do your sync for you, one never knows if the software does something "clever" in the transfer process, reversing the tag cleaning process just completed.

Just to check, you can use Mp3tag to see if a given file on the phone (hooked up as a USB disk) really does contain just ID3v1 tags.

For the record, it is not for nothing that ID3v2 superseded ID3v1 tags. ID3v2 is much more flexible in the type and amount of data it caters to.
Going to ID3v1 is actually a sizeable downgrade, done as a cludge to circumvent a bug.

And then... Some Genres may still appear weird and inapplicable, since ID3v2 allows the use of free format text to call your Genre whatever you wish,
while ID3v1 uses a fixed list of numbered Genres. If there is a correlation in the main Genres (like Rock, etc), all will be OK. "Smooth Jazz" may not. You may then have to re-tag the problematic files with ID3v1 supported Genre names.

Good luck.

 

[eyallvy]

Further to the info I posted yesterday, if you remove all ID3v2 tags, you will remove embedded album art from the mp3 files.

No solution yet.

 

[kaye]

yeah I experienced probs like that and I dont have any idea why on earth it happened.

 

[Ronman71]

Tried this tip and works great, but still had a lot of mixed/strange genres. What finally fixed the problem for me was converting all files to mp3 format. I chose the option in media monkey to create copies and keep originals (I have a 1.5tb ext hd so space was not an issue). For some reason, other types of music files don't display genres correctly in Android devices. Still limited to basic genres, but it's better than the nonsense that was showing up under the genre category before.