Xbox music messing with mp3 tags?

holzlondon

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Has anyone else imported music manually, switched on the xbox live service, and had a handful of mp3 tags completely screwed up?

It's a minor issue, but a little annoying. I ended up re-importing everything, leaving the xbox service off, and it leaves them in peace, but i kind of liked the artist profiles and imagery.

BTW, using WP8 on a Lumia 920
 

AngryNil

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Happened with the Zune software too. Just turn off automatic retrieval of metadata if possible, if not you might have to disable any sync to Xbox Music.
 

thirdsun

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Same problem here. It seems as if the service has different versions of the same album and splits your albums even if the tags have been fine before. I also noticed that this happens a lot with lower-/upper-case letters in albums which turn into 2 albums only distinguishable by a "the" or "The" in the title.
This behavior can be avoided by turning off the option of "completing" meta data, but then you won't receive artist info and pictures.

Also my library which is Apple lossless encoded (Mac user) gets transcoded during syncing without any option to avoid this.

These two issues make me think about returning the Lumia and staying with the iPhone as I'm serious about music.
 

paulm187

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Same problem here. It seems as if the service has different versions of the same album and splits your albums even if the tags have been fine before. I also noticed that this happens a lot with lower-/upper-case letters in albums which turn into 2 albums only distinguishable by a "the" or "The" in the title.
This behavior can be avoided by turning off the option of "completing" meta data, but then you won't receive artist info and pictures.

Also my library which is Apple lossless encoded (Mac user) gets transcoded during syncing without any option to avoid this.

These two issues make me think about returning the Lumia and staying with the iPhone as I'm serious about music.

I havn't got my new phone yet but according to this post http://forums.windowscentral.com/windows-phone-8-os-discussion/201922.htm WP8 can play WMA lossless. So you could convert your music to this format to play as lossless audio on your Windows Phone. Unfortunately ALAC is Apple's proprietary lossless format and WMA Lossless is Microsoft's so they are not going to work in each others devices without transcoding.
 

igoramadas

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Has anyone else imported music manually, switched on the xbox live service, and had a handful of mp3 tags completely screwed up?

It's a minor issue, but a little annoying. I ended up re-importing everything, leaving the xbox service off, and it leaves them in peace, but i kind of liked the artist profiles and imagery.

BTW, using WP8 on a Lumia 920

Not sure about Xbox Music but the Zune client has its own database and won't update existing ID3 tags. I know this because my old Zune library was organised with updated album/track/cover art details, but if I open the same files on VLC or foobar2000 it will show different and outdated information.

Will confirm if Xbox music has the same behaviour when I go back home tonight.
 

thirdsun

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I havn't got my new phone yet but according to this post http://forums.windowscentral.com/windows-phone-8-os-discussion/201922.htm WP8 can play WMA lossless. So you could convert your music to this format to play as lossless audio on your Windows Phone. Unfortunately ALAC is Apple's proprietary lossless format and WMA Lossless is Microsoft's so they are not going to work in each others devices without transcoding.

Tell me about it, Apple Lossless certainly isn't the holy grail when it comes to support on other players and devices, but WMA lossless is even worse. I'm still a mac user and I don't see that changing anytime soon, so WMA would drive me even further away from any common standard. Of course, the answer to those issues would be FLAC and while I understand that lossless audio is a niche interest to the general public, I have a hard time accepting that Android seems to be the only platform supporting it. I mean, it's not like supporting a codec, that is the de facto standard in lossless audio, is difficult to implement or requires a lot of ressources - this is just a case of not caring and applies to Microsoft and Apple alike.

Despite this frustation, I'd say I could probably live with lossy on a phone and an, at best, decent DAC, but then there still the issue with messed up tags. Without those messy tags I won't get artist pictures, which makes my lockscreen, music app background and live tile literally fade to gray instead of showing those nice looking photos.

And then there's the issue with Podcasts - I'm not from the US which means I won't see podcasts in the store. The third-party podcast apps from the store are awful - at least to a former Instacast user like me.

These things may seem minor to most people, but it adds up and makes me wonder if I shouldn't just take the easy path and stay with my iPhone, iTunes' lossless support and Instacast on iOS - despite gradients, drop shadows and fake leather backgrounds. This is a shame since the Lumia and WP8 itself are beautiful. In my opinion Microsoft did very well here, but surprisingly screwed up the easy parts. Correct audio meta data, lossless audio support, global availability of podcasts and Airplay-like system-integrated DLNA support should be a no-brainer to a company like Microsoft.
 

Major

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The new Windows Phone app leaves much to be desired. I really don't like how I have no album art anymore. I much rather use my old Zune software, which worked beautifully. They should issue a patch to make it compatible with WP8.
 

The ZennyBoy

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So I'm frustrated in the same area as you all who "appreciate" album art (and by that, I mean can't live without it, lol).
What I noticed though is that it's a hit or miss aspect to getting it to display the album art. I tried downloading the same album to my phone employing several different methods -- even repeating the same methods at times -- and oddly enough, sometimes I would get art to show up on the phone. Sadly it would only be a few tracks on the same album (some with art/ some without).
This saddens me. Especially given that fact that I can't even manually enter every detail just to make album art and metadata download correctly -- not even if I wanted to, and I do want to (yes, I'm that meticulous).
:(
 

BGBrereton

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I've just got a Lumia 920 and am finding this behaviour REALLY annoying! In some cases it replaces the album title, album art and artist name, all apparently based on fairly common track title. I find myself looking at the listing thinking "what's that track - I don't own that". The solution is to turn off "Connect with Xbox Music" but then you lose all the other info. I don't know why it has to try, and fail, to be so clever. Other music playing apps happily use the existing data on the tracks and use that to look up the artist, etc, for additional info. I had originally wondered what the point of Nokia Music app was for but I'm quickly realising that it "just works" compared to Xbox Music.
 

huppy

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The solution is to turn off "Connect with Xbox Music" but then you lose all the other info.

Thanks, I've wasted so much time re-tagging my mp3's with numerous applications and came to the conclusion that it had to be something my phone was doing to mess up the tags.

Two albums, Polica - Give You The Ghost and Daphni - Jiaolong continuously had two entries under 'albums': one with album artwork and the other without.

Then a phantom mp3 kept getting tagged to something i'd never heard of before which when I listened to it quite clearly was something that was missing from somewhere else.

The weird thing was as soon as I unplugged my phone I could see everything was fine. It wasn't until a little while after that the tags got messed around with.

I've disabled xbox music connect and will see how it goes.

I'm guessing this will lose the artwork under the lock screen. Why can't it just show the album cover?
 

bear_lx

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oh boy, this is a hot mess. i spent hours upon hours of re tagging 1000's of songs, by artist, title, and or album art. only to find out that when i got my 920 back it was all jacked up again. it took me awhile to realize that it was xbox music cloud which was the problem. in the upper left hand corner of the xbox music app on my pc, i noticed i could view my music from this pc, or my music from the cloud. and the incorrect tags were all in the cloud. everything on the pc was fine... so i searched and searched for a way to edit music in the cloud, only to find out you cant. the solution was to back up all music on an external HD, delete all music from pc, delete all music from cloud, then re-add music to pc from the back up. however, even after doing that, there were still incorrect tags. moral of the story? xbox music cloud service is awful and worthless... i hope and pray its fixed in 8.1, in the meantime i am using nokia music and it works beautifully. one other note, i have xbox cloud collection off, to avoid the incorrect tags. and i have connect with xbox on, and i dont have any issues with incorrect tags now. but i dont get the album art in the background unless its a purchase from xbox... none of the music i've purchased from itunes, google, or amazon will pan album art in the background... hmm???
 

huppy

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one other note, i have xbox cloud collection off, to avoid the incorrect tags. and i have connect with xbox on, and i dont have any issues with incorrect tags now. but i dont get the album art in the background unless its a purchase from xbox... none of the music i've purchased from itunes, google, or amazon will pan album art in the background... hmm???

I had xbox cloud collection off and connect with xbox on, and I got my tags re-written. Could you keep this thread updated if you do get any problems with the settings you've described?

The album art thing is some kind of a look-up to xbox music to get the artwork. There's an app you can get that goes through all the music on your phone and creates the link itself, and grabs the album art in doing so. I've forgotten what it's called but will update when I'm next to my phone again. I don't know whether this would work with connect with xbox turned off.
 

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