Trying to understand how WP8 interprets ID3 tags.

[pantsaregood]

I've had some MP3s that behave erratically in WP8 - even with Xbox Music syncing disabled. Albums split and album titles display improperly. I have no idea what causes this, and correcting it required removing ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags completely, then retagging the messed up files.

The "year" tag doesn't seem to show up in any capacity, but something does apparently affect year. Some of my albums randomly displayed their release year on my phone, but there were no tags that I saw that correlated with this. It seems WP8 ignores "year" tags altogether. How do I tag albums so "year" is displayed?

 

[mpt15]

I used mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) to tag all my music. I found that I had to have a single "album artist" for an album, and then the artist could vary for each song. If album artist differed for the songs within an album, then the album was split. If album artist is missing, WP reads the artist name.
Also, if album art varied for the songs of an album, the album split.

 

[pantsaregood]

Yeah, I use mp3tag. The issue was that there were some strange hidden tags that were causing a few album names to show up in ways different to how mp3tag, WMP, and the Windows Phone desktop app read them. The only way I could get rid of these "hidden" tags was to completely delete all of the tags and re-embed them. I can't figure out how to manually attach a "year" tag that actually shows up, though.

 

[WPhoney]

Microsoft has lots of work to do to threaten Android and iOS. And they are doing it too slowly.

 

[T Moore]

When WinAmp failed to display my albums and songs correctly I started using mp3 Tag Studio. It can show ID3v2 tags and remove them in mass. Get rid of all of them except attached picture and you will have no problems.