Album art, metadata, etc. What I found that works.

[Guzzler3]

I FINALLY got Xbox Music Windows Phone to properly display all my music the way it should!!! It wasn't easy, but I've been playing around with various settings with various programs for quite a while to get it to work properly.

Here is what I found that works (I emphasize that this is what I have found that works for me).

MP3 metadata:
It HAS to be in ID3v2.3 UTF-16 format, period.
Don't try to have any other format.
NO: ID3v1, ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1, ID3v2.4 UTF-8

For some reason, having ID3v1 and ID3v2.3 both written in the MP3, will cause duplicates.

Album Art:
This sucks, but for me, to get album art to display consistently it needed to be 200x200 pixels. Actually just 200 pixels across, with just a slight fudge of the vertical, but the vertical just needs to be less than or equal to 200.

500x500 was really hit and miss. Sometimes it would display properly, other times not. But 200x200 always worked. Actually anything but 200x200 was still hit-n-miss.

Also, the album art has to be “Front Cover”. Don’t try to have any other artwork attached to the MP3 (Back Cover, Icon, Leaflet, Media, etc.). Again Xbox music just goes stupid when trying to deal with anything else.

So the tools I used:
MP3Tag (Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...))
FastStone Photo Resizer (FastStone Photo Resizer - Powerful Image Converter/Resizer)

I used MP3Tag to adjust the metadata, as needed.

Making sure files were only written in ID3v2.3 UTF-16 format. Set all the album art to “Front Cover” (you can do these two things quickly with all your music shown in MP3tag, right click the album art box, and set cover type to “front cover”, then save). Then extract the album art to an external JPG (Please visit MP3tag discussion forums for steps).

Then used FastStone Photo Resizer to resize all the album art jpg’s to 200x200. (just a few clicks in program)

Then back to MP3Tag to import the externally saved album art back into as “Front Cover” (and delete existing cover art).

Now for trying to get Xbox Music for WP to rebuild its database, without having to reset the phone.

Forget about it!

I tried to delete the songs either within Xbox Music, or the “files” app (Files | Windows Phone Apps+Games Store (United States)).
Even using other methods of deleting the music was fruitless in getting XBM to rebuild its database.

I finally threw in the towel and reset the phone. Before putting my MP3’s back onto the phone (internal storage or microSD), go into the XBM app settings and turn off “Show streaming music in my collection”. After, you can put your music on anyway you like: Drag and drop, Windows Media Player desktop app, Windows phone program/app, etc.

I really, really, wish MS would put an option in the XBM settings to force a database rebuild. I would make life so much easier.

 

[theefman]

Really shouldn't be this hard....
Sent from my Lumia 1020 using Tapatalk

 

[Guzzler3]

Yea, you're preaching to the choir.

 

[anon(5383410)]

download mp3tag. it comes with the settings xbox music will play nice by default. use it to tag and add album covers. Your problems will be solved. Although I agree, there's no reason we should have to worry about any of this. We didn't in Zune.

 

[Mohit K Jain]

Well hello everyone. I was facing all the issues mentioned here and this is what worked for me.
I had loaded all my music on SD card. However, XBM failed to read any data whatsoever. So, this is what i did, I deleted each album USING THE APP and then reloaded all my music. And, guess what, it worked. Just heads up, I have no XBM account, only local music. I hope it helps at least someone.