Puzzling problem with mp3s on my phone

[Johnny Robbo]

I'm having a problem with music on my phone. My old mp3 player recently died and now I just use my phone, with an SD card inserted, as a music player - the sound quality is great, either through headphones or plugged into the speaker system in the living room. Generally, I'm quite happy with the performance, but there is one niggling issue...

I'm a bit of an anorak when it comes to organising my music collection. Everything is tagged meticulously - artist, album, genre, track number etc etc... When I read these tags on the PC, they're all fine, but when I go to my phone & try and browse by artist (for example) I'll get "Aerosmith" followed by "Aerosmith*" followed by "Aerosmith*%" followed by "Aerosmith000" and so on & so on - random characters in a string after the actual artist name. When I check these tags on the PC they all simply show up as "Aerosmith". ACDC shows up as "ACDC" for some tracks and "ACDC/ACDC/ACDC" for others, when I look at the music on the phone's media player. But they're all just "ACDC" when I check the tags on the PC by browsing the phone's storage in Windows Explorer.

It's making it impossible to play all the music from a single artist as (according to the phone) there are several different artists with slightly different names like "The Beatles" and "The Beatles!£$" and "The Beatles////" & the phone will only play one of these "different" artists catalogue at a time.

This happens across the entire 3000 or so songs on the SD card and is a problem for the artist and genre tags. Thankfully, the album tags are exactly as I set them, so I can at least browse by album.

I've tried re-tagging the entire music collection in both Media Monkey and MP3Tag software on the PC, as well as just using the old, track by track method (right-clicking on the files in Windows explorer and editing the properties of each track). I KNOW that the tags are correct, I'm 100% certain of that, but still the phone refuses to play ball. I've even formatted the SD card and re-transferred the files from the PC where I know they are correct. I don't think they're getting corrupted as they transfer to the phone down the USB cable, as when I view the files on the phone in Windows Explorer, Media Monkey and MP3Tag by looking at them as it's connected to the PC, they all read fine. Disconnect the phone from the PC, though, and try to browse them in the phone's media player, and they all appear corrupted.

I'm not using a smart phone, as I still use my old Nokia 301 - it does all I need from a phone... OK camera, plays music, makes phone calls & does texts & that's pretty much it. I don't need a phone with email/social media and I prefer having a battery life measured in days, not hours. Generally I'm happy with the phone's performance, and if this mp3 tagging thing is something I'll just have to live with then, so be it... it's just niggling me that I know my music is organised correctly but the phone is telling me it isn't.

Any suggestions from the tech-minded out there?

Cheers,

John.

[Flash Harry]

John, your phone could be reading some of the metadata - the information about the MP3 contained in the MP3 file rather than the filename. You may need to edit the MP3 tags. Can you put the card into a machine and look at the information?

[Johnny Robbo]

John, your phone could be reading some of the metadata - the information about the MP3 contained in the MP3 file rather than the filename. You may need to edit the MP3 tags. Can you put the card into a machine and look at the information?

Yes mate... that's kind of my point: I've made sure all the tags ARE correct. I've checked them, track by track, using the right-click/properties/advanced method you can do in Windows Explorer, I've also checked them in a piece of software called Media Monkey (which is what I normally use for tagging mp3s) and just to be sure I've downloaded another mp3 tagging programme called mp3Tag & checked the tags with that as well, so I know the tags are 100% correct. It's not the file names that are giving me this headache... the tags are correct, but the phone is telling me they're not.

It's not a huge inconvenience... it's just p*ssing me off that it's not doing what it's supposed to    


UPDATE...

Just finished doing a factory reset on the phone & all is now well. Now I can listen to the whole catalogue of a single artist without having to make a playlist consisting of all the different variations of that artist's name that the phone used to think it could see on the SD card.

Just goes to show... when in doubt, flatten it and reboot 

[Oldrottenhead]

I was gonna suggest you delete aerosmith  

[Johnny Robbo]

I was gonna suggest you delete aerosmith