Help MP3 files farked?

[turbohobbit]

Guys, I'm having a bit of an issue with the MP3 files on my SD card. Around the same time as my non-Bootup issues, I noticed that some of the albums on my SD card had devided themselves in half, or occasionally having all except 1 or 2 tracks on one album, and a duplicate album holding the remaining songs. I though this was just PowerAmp playing up, so I checked my library on the "house" music player and Winamp, but the same problem existed. I'd expect this if it only affected complilation albums (i.e. the phone recognising separate artists within an album and making separate entries for them), but this also includes albums by single artists.

I completely reformatted my SD card and last night copied my music files over from my PC again, and the problem has replicated itself again.

Does anyone have any bright ideas how I may solve this one, short of me going through each file making sure the artist and track names / formats are all the same for each album?

Cheers!

 

[SiHa]

I think this might be an Android thing, ie the way it categorizes music by their ID3 tags.

I downloaded a compilation album (with 99 tracks) using the AmazonMP3 app. I ended up with 99 folders, one for each artist, each with a single subfolder containing one track.

I contacted Amazon to moan and was informed that it was to do with the way that Android handles things, and was advised to download via PC instead for this album only. Now I took this advice with a large pinch of salt, as I would think that the app would have control over where it puts the files, but the PC option definitely worked, and the files had different tags (I think), they were at least in a single folder.

I suspect that your problem might be occurring with tracks that not only have the 'Album Artist' field filled, but also the 'Contributing Artist'. I have seen this with (eg) some Queen albums where the Artist is listed as Queen, but the Contibuting Artist would have Brian May, John Deacon, etc.

The only way I have managed to resolve issues like this is spend an evening with something like Mp3tag to go through and check all the tags. Thereafter, any new album I download or rip, I do the same. It's really not that time consuming with good software.

I have seen this with (eg) some Queen albums

Yes, I'm an old git

 

[turbohobbit]

Hmmm... I know what you mean as I've had the exact problem with both compilation albums and albums as you say there there are contributing artists (Queen's Greatest Hits III, for example ). However, this has also happened to albums where a) there is only the main artist (no contributing artists) and these albums have in the past been on my SD card without any problems. It's not even like I deleted the albums then reinstalled them; they just, well, fractured one day. Weird.

Think I may end up having to use MP3tag to see if that sorts the problem, but I was hoping for a quick fix. Ah well!

 

[SiHa]

I'd be interested to know what it was if you ever do get to the bottom of it.

 

[turbohobbit]

Well, I installed Mp3tag - what a neat piece of kit! - and scanned through all the music files on my SD card. It looks like all the problem albums are those where some of the tracks have an "album artist" tag as well as an "artist" tag. Those albums where either all the tracks have an "album artist" tag or none of them do are fine, so it looks like there is a confusion being caused by a partial tagging.

I have therefore set about ensuring that all tracks for all albums has an "album artist" tag (and that tag is the same for all tracks, obviously). I guess I could ignore all the albums without any tags, but I want to make sure I irradicate any problems first time around. It's laborious work and will probably take a few nights to sort, but hopefully this will crack the problem.

Thanks for the help SiHa!

 

[SiHa]

Well, I installed Mp3tag - what a neat piece of kit!

Yes, it's very useful, I use it regularly now.

Glad you got it sorted. It seems different systems interpret tags differently, I guess however the programmer thought would be 'best'.

 

[turbohobbit]

Yup, although I have still to finish the project so I won't know that everything's straight for sure until the end of the week.

Incidentally, two questions about Mp3tag:

1) Is there any way I can Highlight a whole list of tracks (for a whole album, say) and change the Album Artist tag on all of them at once? At the moment I'm having to click on each track individually and paste the name in, and it's starting to do my head in!

2) Is there any way I can permanently delete album art en masse? I delete a piece of album art on a track, but then have to same that track before moving on to the next track. This also is baking my noodle!

 

[SiHa]

Yup, although I have still to finish the project so I won't know that everything's straight for sure until the end of the week.

Incidentally, two questions about Mp3tag:

1) Is there any way I can Highlight a whole list of tracks (for a whole album, say) and change the Album Artist tag on all of them at once? At the moment I'm having to click on each track individually and paste the name in, and it's starting to do my head in!

2) Is there any way I can permanently delete album art en masse? I delete a piece of album art on a track, but then have to same that track before moving on to the next track. This also is baking my noodle!

1) I *think* you can change the field for all selected tracks in the left-hand pane. IIRC, it has all the fields in there, and they default to <keep>, ie not change anything, but you can change it, and it should change that field for all selected tracks.

2) Not sure, will have a play.

Incidentally, you can also get it to generate a .M3U playlist automatically when you save a group of tracks, which is useful for media syncing with XP, as it only seems to sync playlists as far as I cxould make out. I'm on Win7 now though, and M$ have changed it to folders, bless'em.