[fiish]

Hi all,

I am posting this in search of support for problems I am having with my music collection, my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and the Nokia Music 1.2 program. The problems are centred around MP3 ID3 tag recognition, album art, and in the case of Nokia Music, the inability to play certain files.

Firstly, I shall clearly describe my music collection, as searches for similar problems to mine usually blame poor MP3 tagging. My music collection is virtually all MP3, with a variety of bitrates. I tend to buy CDs and rip, encode and tag the songs myself using LAME and a VBR scheme to encode and MediaMonkey or Mp3tag to write the tags. Album art is always embedded. On my computer I play the MP3s using MediaMonkey or iTunes (I used to own an iPhone), and both these programs have no problems recognising the tags and loading the album art.

1. The problem on the 5800 is the well known one where embedded album art fails to appear when playing a song. And also after a library refresh some of the MP3 tags are not recognised and the songs are categorised into Unknown Artist/Unknown Album/file name for title. I have had some success against this problem by deleting, refreshing, recopying the files and refreshing again, sometimes needing to clear the embedded album art and re-embed a new JPEG (yes, putting the same JPEG in fails), and this is just getting ridiculously tedious.

2. I use a non-official method of loading songs on my 5800, so having read about better results obtained by using Nokia's software, I decided to try Nokia Music Manager today. I was prompted to update to the new Nokia Music program, which I did. Nokia Music had me import my music collection before it could do its work; fair enough.

While the import was taking place, I spotted files being added to an 'Unknown Artist' category. Once the import process was completed I looked in that category, and some of the MP3s corresponding to my albums were there (2 Coldplay albums and 1 Dream Theater). Thinking it was just a random error with the metadata read I removed and reimported them into Nokia Music. The program still refused to read the tags, and even better, when I tried to play them Nokia Music indicated that something was wrong with the files and would not play them (! appeared next to the files in the play queue).

Those songs play fine in WMP, iTunes and MediaMonkey, and also show the album art properly. However, something seems to be broken in Nokia Music in the way it opens MP3 files, not only getting the tags wrong but not playing the songs at all in some cases.

I have a theory that the way Nokia's software reads MP3s differs from the approach taken by most PC programs and dedicated MP3 players, in a way that irregularities in the tagging break compatibility more easily, i.e. doing the right thing in following the MP3 standard but applying the rules too strictly. I think this because I believe Nokia has good software engineers....

Sometimes I wonder why I switched to the 5800XM from the iPhone (2G).... I am trying to make things work with the 5800, however it disappoints me that a company which has been in this business for so long has got so much wrong with its software.

[j_i_m_s_t_e_r]

I've noticed exactly the same thing - and worse, it seeing some of my video clips as music.  If you delete them as music files, yes, you guessed it, it deletes the video too.

I'm currently experimenting with MediaMonkey on the PC how to get just one file over and retain the album and artist tags when the file is on the phone.  Rest assured, I too am meticulous about tags being complete and having embedded artwork, but the file will just not retain these fields after transfer.  The artwork is fine though!

If I were to transfer a random set of 20 albums over, about half seem to go across with intact tags, the others end up as unknown artist, unknown album.  There doesn't seem to be any consistency to it.

Let me know if you made any progress with this.I am on the latest firmware at the time of writing.

[nolan316]

Okely Dokely,

I don't usually reply on these things i usually just skulk in the background and watch from afar!!!

Anywho to your problem, after two years of research into the issues i can offer this advice, if it works great (cause it does for me) if it doesn't,at least i have put it forward for you:

Tip 1 - Avoid Nokia Music Manager until they make it more stable as this always will crash and leave you extremley frustrated, if you want proof ask er'indoors the countless times i have slammed my laptop lid down in anger!!!

Tip 2 - The only possible reason to use Nokia Music Manager is to transfer playlists, if you follow the following tips then the issue you have experienced shouldn't arise in the tagging, simply build your playlists in Media Monkey and import them as you would in Nokia Music Manager and then transfer.

Tip 3 - All album art, tagging etc can be done all in one program (tah dah) Media Monkey, i have tested countless software and this is by far the best for tagging any part of the file as i used ITunes but found all of my phones (Samsung Omnia, Nokia 5800, Nokia E51 & an N78) still had issues with the Itunes way of tagging and this was resolved by using Media Monkey.

Tip 4 - Album art transfer to your device is as i have found is a simple thing to fix but if you don't get told exactly what the problem is (Like had to be explained to me) you'll never know how to fix it. All's you have to do is open up (in Media Monkey) the properties or track info and go to the album art section, if you can see the album art then all's you have to do is use the drop down box and select the "Front Cover" option and then simply save the changed info. This should now when you wipe off the old track on your device and replace with the newly updated track display your nice album cover. NB: Sometimes you will have three of the same artwork in the album artwork section and they will be different sizes, make sure that you move the largest artwork to the top of the list and select the "Front Cover" from the drop down box or else you will find it still comes up blank on your device.

 This issue bugged me for ages and found that this is really the only way to fix the issue, i had to modify 80GB's worth of music so beleive me it definetly worked for me as my device now shows all the album artwork.

Tip 5 - The album names and artist names, you will have to make sure that you have no unusal characters in the text or the comments section (very important that this is blank if you want it to display correctly) of the track as i have literally not 5 mins before posting had the same issues with my Motley Crue tracks i had to change the format of the characters from - Mötley to Motley

Make sure to chcek the album names and the artist names, for some reason the same issue doesn't happen with the track names but if it ain't broke don't fix it eh.

I then put my memory card back into my device refreshed the library and hey presto it all worked and all the track names were read as they should be.

I really hope this works for you like it did for me but you will find that this may be very time consuming if you are to do a large library like i had to, but i swear from my own experience that using Media Monkey (even the free version) is the best for this problem.

If you simply want to just sync to your device without playlists then stick the phone into "Mass Storage" mode and it will go extremley quick whilst using Media Monkey, but if you want to transfer music and playlists you will have to use Nokia Media Transfer software which is sticky and can crash on you.

Hope this helps.

[fiish]

nolan316,

Thank you for your tips.

I used MediaMonkey and had issues, before I decided to give Nokia Music a try, however I wasn't doing some of the things you suggested. I shall try those and maybe the problems will be resolved now. I'll need to keep a closer eye out for unusual characters in the tags and comments, like you said these seem to break the phone's tag reading I am guessing the Nokia phone music player doesn't like Unicode tags (which are in 90% of my library).

[j_i_m_s_t_e_r]

Some progress - after reading the above, I concur that the Comments tag may be throwing the mp3 properties.  I conncted the phone via Mass Storage, went into Media Monkey, and wiped the Contents tag on each track (stored on the phone) manually (I can't think of a quicker way to do this, unless you know how).  Of course, this doesn't affect the original tracks stored elsewhere.

All artists and albums are now recognised on the phone.  Bit of a chore though.  As a test, I also noticed that on a podcast (a 1hr mix, categorised on the phone because the Genre tag is Podcast), the comments (Options, Episode Details) are truncated on the phone (~ first 100 chars only are kept.)

Pfffft.

[kindrudekid]

okay

here is the thing i'm a bit of a keen observer...

my tags wouldnt show up when i use to open music n directly visit all songs or artist or albums

...

once i added songs 

but after opening music i first refreshed my library... viola tags were read .. but my old tags were still not updated... but tried it again and it works....

so in short

attach in mc mode ... cut paste songs to hdd

deattach... 

refresh ..

attach again add back all songs ..

then open music n then referesh..

works for me!!!

[MrsBunnsy]

This fixed the problem for me:

If you are using mediamonkey,

1. First of all make sure all the track/artist/album names in the library are correct, edit if necessary.

2. Then make note of the tracks/albums with the faulty tags (the ones that show up as "unknown" on the phone) and delete this music from your phone.

1. Select these tracks in the mediamonkey library, Go to Tools > Advanced Tag Management > Clean ID3 v1 and v2 tags. Click yes.

2. With the songs still selected, hit CTRL +s OR go to Tools > Advanced Tag Management > Synchronize Tags, click yes.

3. Plug in the phone and transfer the songs across using mass storage mode.

The tag problem should be fixed, but you will have to do this for all the tracks that show up as unknown in the future.

Also, if you are using mass storage mode you should do it while the media player app is running on the phone because it will automatically prompt you to refresh the library.

[lonevolf]

I got  the same poblem bugging me! My music player just doesn't read th artist info. I tagged my songs with this Musicbrainz Picard software and my PC media player does sow the metadata but my phone doesn't. So are you suggesting this could be happening because of the version of tagging we are using??

And oh, Musicbrainz Picard does solve the album art problem easily, that too AUTOMATICALLY!!