WP8 XBOX Music not showing artist info

[howard24u]

Apologies if this isn't posted in the correct place. This is my first post.

I recently picked up a Lumia 520 as a gift for my father to use as an .mp3 player and GPS unit. I cataloged all of his CD's and loaded them onto the device, however, almost all of his albums were compilations that include tracks by various artists (Basically "Now that's what I call music" type CD's but with older artists). I used windows media player to rip all the CD's and it had no problem finding the albums and pulling in all of the album details, track listings, track artists, album covers, etc.

Once I loaded all of these on the 520 though, none of the artists show up in the artist view. The only artists that show up are ones that had dedicated albums. All of the compilation albums show up as 'various artists'. Thus if he were trying to search for a particular artist he won't find it. He would either have to search for a specific song title, or know exactly which compilation album to look for. (Seeing as how lots of these albums are things like "Billboard top 20 songs of 1968", he's not going to know where to look... The artists are definitely on there though, if you navigate to a track and play it, it shows the artist name.

How can I fix this? All of the songs are loaded on a micro SD card and not on the device itself.

:unhappysweat:

 

[howard24u]

As some additional information, if I navigate to my phone via "my computer" and select music/artists - all of the artists show up (~600 of them). However on the device itself, there are like 30 total artists only.

 

[Localhorst86]

Hello.

I was facing the same issue todaz, but the other way around. my music collection was cluttered with a bunch of artists that only contained one song. I wanted to consolidate them into "various artists" and found a way to do so.

xbox music cares for the ID3 tag called "album artis" but only if the file also contains a tag "compilation" with the value "1"

so, in my case i only needed to set these tags to consolidate them, you need to remove the "compilation" tag. you can use a tool called mp3tag on windows to mass edit the ID3 tag for multiple files.

sent from my MK808

 

[howard24u]

Awesome, I'll look into this program. Its funny that third party music player apps from the store can list out either album artist or contributing artist but not the Microsoft (or Nokia) music players.

 

[howard24u]

As a summary to anyone else that may encounter this problem. mp3tag is great and allows you to easily edit your entire library of music to correct the album artist, track artists, etc. It took all of about 2 minutes for me to learn how to use it and copy all of the track artists over to the album artist field.

The overall problem however is inherently built into the xbox music app. If you go and replace all of the album artist fields with the track artist (known as "contributing artist" in the ID3 tag) , you will now see all of the artists listed on the "Artists" list on your phone, but it accomplishes this by breaking up every album into several albums - one for each artist that appears on it. As this was a less desirable solution than just having several albums grouped under "various artists", I just went back to the old way.

The work around is to have a third party app like CMPlayer Pro and use this when you want to look for all tracks by a particular artist.

XBOX music could easily fix this by using the "contributing artist" data in the artists list, and then when you select that artist, it shows the albums that include tracks by them, but just doesn't show tracks by the other artists on that compilation album. But if you select the album from the albums list, it will show all tracks. It would take like an hour of programming... The new separate xbox music app that was released today does not solve this problem either.

 

[Localhorst86]

howard24u, IMO Xbox music does it exactly right. The tag you're refering to as "contributing artist" is actually the regular ARTIST tag. See my following point 3. for a reasoning


First, a note: Words writtten in ALL CAPS will denote the actual tag identifier as used in mp3tag or foobar2000 and not the "interpreted" name that windows itself uses.

as an addition to that:

contrary to my first assumption that you need to have the "COMPILATION" tag set to 1 in order for the songs to properly group as the "ALBUMARTIST", you only need to have the "ALBUMARTIST" tag set. The key is, that this tag needs to be ID3v2.3 and not, as I usualy have, ID3v2.4. For some reason, WP8 does not read the "ALBUMARTIST" tag if it's ID3v2.4.

So to summarize:

1. use ID3v2.3. Always!

2. Xbox Music will honor the "ALBUMARTIST" ID3 tag for the library view and will display the "ARTIST" tag when playing music. If you don't want songs to be consolidated under the ALBUMARTIST but show up under the real artists name, simply remove the "ALBUMARTIST" tag and you're good to go

3. Be aware that Xbox Music will only treat an Album as a single album if either ALBUMARTIST or ARTIST match. The reason for this is simple: multiple artists can have an individual album with the same name, but these albums. While these albums are named identically, they are in no way related to each other. (as an example I will use the album name "three", which a lot of artists have released: Search Results - MusicBrainz). If we were to follow your reasoning, all these albums would have to show up as a single album in your library despite containing different artists. That's what the ALBUMARTIST tag is there for: to tell a library that an album is related even though the ARTIST is different as a library can not rely solely on the ALBUM tag to identify related albums so it has to rely on the combination of either ARTIST & ALBUM or ALBUMARTIST & ALBUM. What ID3 would need is a tag like "ALBUMID" that would identify the Album using a unique ID (like the cataloque number of the record). However, currently no such tag exists, so your proposition to show all tracks of the ALBUM 'three' as one album despite different ARTIST and non-identical or missing ALBUMARTIST would be completely wrong. Using the ALBUMARTIST + ALBUM tag to group related tracks as an album but NOT displaying the ALBUMARTIST but ARTIST instead seems like a possible solution without the above mentioned logical flaw, but most people want to use the ALBUMARTIST tag. Maybe Microsoft could incorporate it as a setting ("use ARTIST instead of ALBUMARTIST for library view") but I can see how MS would decide against such a setting: Most people (not familiar with the technical side of ID3 tags) will not know what the setting means.

 

[fiveaces01]

I have used all the correct tags and all my collection showed up with both album and artist artwork on the xbox music hub...however the new "app" for xbox music is missing a big percentage of either the album or artist artwork. I used to use the mpaTool as a workaround for this...but don't see a way to use it in the app??????????? Anyone figured this out yet?

 

[howard24u]

I've found that the MPA tool has about a 5% success rate on finding album covers so I've stopped using it all together. I wasn't able to play around with the new app much because I don't have a music pass. Now I have a whole new problem, where the device completely removes all Artist and Album data on the device despite all of the songs showing up in the Songs list. I'm about to give up on this POS.