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Help Music Player

JaneN

Newbie
I have just taken my first steps to use my Desire as my mp3 player. I copied a few albums from my laptop into a folder called Music.

They will play, but in the music player they all show under a Unknown Artist group, and the tracks are all in alphabetical order. All of the info from WMP has been lost.

Is there something I have to do to 'initialise' the music files?
 
You probably need to "tag" the music in windows :) go to winamp or media player and edit the track title and artist etc... youl probably find theres not enough info
 
You probably need to "tag" the music in windows :) go to winamp or media player and edit the track title and artist etc... youl probably find theres not enough info

Thanks for the response, in media player all the fields are completed correctly, artist and composer. :confused:
 
Thanks for the response, in media player all the fields are completed correctly, artist and composer. :confused:

I am pretty sure that WMP tags are held in a local database on the computer and doesn't actually update the ID3 tags for the files.

I normally use MP3Tag to do it myself...not sure if there is a way to automatically do it from WMP though or not...but I would start there.
 
Jane, not sure if this is much use, but have a look at these two threads to see if you can find anything helpful...

http://androidforums.com/desire-support-troubleshooting/311388-playing-wma-files.html
http://androidforums.com/desire-support-troubleshooting/307795-mp3-files-farked.html

How did you rip the CD onto your PC originally? Did you use something like iTunes and if so were the tracks correctly tagged (I'm presuming so...). I also suggest using Mp3Tag as it's a very easy programme to use. Just remember to save your work before closing the programme and unmounting the SD card!
 
I am very new to digital music lol, I usually only listen to CD's in my car, so I did the auto rip from Windows Media Player. It created entries in my Music library, and apart from a couple of compilation disk sets the information was all automatically created. The one's that were not, I used find data and created one manually, matched one from the microsoft library.

When I copied these to my phone, it puts them all under a tag 'unknown artist', then a separate tag for each album, and every track is in alphabetical order, with unknown artist attributed.
 
Aaaaaaaaaaaaah. Ok.

I may be shot down in flames here, but try ripping your CDs using something like iTunes or a dedicated ripping programme downloaded from the internet. I tend to favour iTunes. It'll automatically find and tag your tunes and also add album artwork (although there is an excellent app you can download to get artwork / correct incorrectly downloaded artwork). The files will be ripped to an album-specific subfolder in the iTunes folder which is normally found in the My Music section of your files.

Plug your phone into your computer using the USB cable, mount it as a USB drive, then copy the album folders from the PC onto your phone (I've created a music folder within the Media folder on my phone and copy the individual album folders to there, but I guess you can dump it anywhere you like). Once you've copied over all the album folders you want, stop the USB drive (right click on the USB / drive icon in the tray at the bottom right of your PC display, select the correct drive - it should be called something like [F]:\Android or [F]:\Desire, where [F] is the unique drive letter - right click on the drive and select "stop"), then hit "dismount" (I think!) on the phone screen to dismount the SD card from the PC and restart the phone as a phone. Let the SD card restart itself and after a minute or two you can unlock the phone screen and go and have a look at your tunes in your chosen music app.

If the tags are all as they should be, then YAY!

If they're not, download Mp3Tag from the internet onto your PC and install, plug your phone back into the PC (mounting the phone as a USB drive, etc), and then open Mp3Tag. Choose "select drive" in the programme (there's an icon in the top left hand corner, a picture of a file and a '+' I think...) and select the drive that represents your phone and keep drilling down the file structure until you find the folder that contains all your music files (like I said, with mine that would be F:\media\audio\music). The programme will then scan the drive for all your music files and eventually show you all the files in list format with all the tags. Change the taga as you see fit, but remember to save all the changes you make (I tend to highlight all the files I've changed at the end of the session, and then click on the save icon to do everything at once). Dismount the phone as described above, let the SD card sort itself out, and have another look at your music files via your audia player app of choice on your phone. Keep making the changes until you have reached the desired result!

If you are using PowerAmp as your player - and I (along with many others here) recommend that you do - you can go into the settings and tell the phone where to look for your files (menu button - settings - music folders). This is especially important if you start buying and downloading albums from Amazon via the Amazon MP3 app (which is rather good for the impulse music buy!). Also, if you use PowerAmp, be a bit careful because once you've changed tags to existing track files or shifted new album folders to your selected main folder(s) it will take a few moments to rescan the folders to check for changes / additions. What this means in real terms is that any additions or changes made will take a couple of moments to filter through to your album library - don't panic if you can't see a newly added album or if your track names still don't appear as soon as you interrogate your library, the system just need to take a moment to update itself!
 
Thank you so much for your comprehensive post :)

All the tags and album art show up fine on the PC and the files are all in album specific folders on the SD card. I will download the mp3tag and try to use it on the data on the card before I rip the CD's again using something else.

Thanks again, have a great day.

Jane
 
No worries. I know how frustrating it is when something doesn't work how you'd like it to / how it should. Hope this sorts everything out for you.
 
Well everything is there in mp3tag, Album Artist, Contributing Artist, Composer, track number. The tag column shows WMA for them all? I will download the PowerAmp player that you suggested and see if that will find the data that the standard player seems to be ignoring.
 
OK PowerAmp picks up all the data perfectly, so it seems that the standard music player has an issue with music ripped through WMP

Thanks for your input :)
 
Just to add to Bilbo's excellent advice, Windows Media Player is fine for ripping, but you can change the default format to MP3 rather than WMA, and also change the bitrate. I've used Audiograbber since you had to pay for it, but it was a bit outdated and didn't get album art - WMP does it all.
It does occasionally get it wrong, and is a bit of a pin in the arse to correct before ripping, but you can always change things with MP3TAG
 
Wot ee said. I've had a weston with WMA files recently (specifically players on my phone not recognising them within libraries) so I strongly advise you to change the preferences in your ripping tool of choice (be it Windows Media, iTunes, whatever) to set the default format to either MP3 or MP4.

If you have issues with album art, I can recommend "Cover Art Downloader" from the Market. It's excellent and very easy to use.
 
Thanks guys, as I said this is my first step into digital music, so I didn't even know you could set preferences on type. I will do that for the future.
 
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