[Captivate General] nappent:
As odd as it may sound for some, I do like to have the instantly playability of my music collection on my phone but the Cover Art is never right and no matter how many times I updated it the Music Tags (ID3), they seem to be either applied to the wrong song or not at all. Yet, on my computer they are all correct. After doing some research I discovered the problem. For one Android has a known bug in which it has a hard time reading m4a files especially ones from iTunes. And second, most software does not properly write cover art to mp3 files in a format Android can read. Since my small collection of 1200 audio files is about a 50/50 mix of m4a and mp3 it going to take some time.

You are going to need two software to get this done. Mp3Tag and MediaMonkey. Technically you could do this all via Mp3Tag but in terms of speed MediaMonkey has got it beat in the area of updating the ID3 tags.

First take all of your music from your phone and copy it to your computer. Trying to make updates over a slow USB connection is simply a waste of time. Take the files that are now on your computer and open them in MediaMonkey. Go through and use the “Auto Tag from Web” to make all of your ID3 aka Music tags are updated with the correct information. It’s best to do one Album at a time and if you just have one song of a Album, then to process those next, one by one. This will likely take you a few hours and I’m sure I will lose a couple of you reader when you think “f**k that” after you realize how long it takes to do this.

For those of you that are pushing on to the next step, select all of the music files within MediaMonkey and click on Tools > Advanced Management > Clean ID3v1 and v2 Tags. I know you likely thinking why am I doing this when I just updated them. The problem is that the tags can have differences between ID3v1 and v2 so you need to make sure they are on the same page. When they have conflicting information Android just ignores the tags and displays nothing. So in the task bar in the bottom it will process them. Will take a few mins depending on how nice or crappy of a computer you are running. Next we go back to Tools > Advanced Management > Synchronize Tags. Since MediaMonkey save all of your tags it will apply the correct tags to all of your audio files with no conflicting v1 vs v2 tags.

Once that is completed you are done with MediaMonkey so open up Mp3Tag. Drag and drop only your m4a files. While your tags are as good as MediaMonkey can get them it can add a few tags that can unknowingly cause the Artist to display as “unknown”. In Mp3Tag select all of your files and go to View > Extended Tags. You want to remove the metadata of “TOTALDISCS” and “DISCNUMBER”. Don’t know why Android has an issue with reading this, but it does and that is that.

Next select all of the files again right click on one of files and select “Optimize MP4”. This removes other unwanted tags and compacts the media data which in turn makes it more compatible with Android devices. Make sure to click on the “save” button a few times to make sure all of these changes have been applied to the m4a files.

Next, remove the m4a files from Mp3Tag and drag and drop in your mp3 files. Once loaded you likely noticed the all of your Cover Art is not showing for most if not all of your Mp3 files. So what was the point of MediaMonkey? MediaMonkey, simply has a better interface to get the music tags aka ID3 tags updated with the correct information and at a much faster pace then Mp3Tag software does. So what we need to do next is get that Cover Art updated. For me I really just cared about getting all of my albums updated so I select the mp3’s in the album and click on the down arrow icon next to the blue world icon with the yellow left and right arrow. Then selected “Cover Art > Amazon.com”. Screen shot of the location of that icon below:

Unlike MediaMonkey you will have options to pick from so different options which can make things slower, so make the Artist and Album field appear correct in the search results. Follow the prompt and it will only updated the Cover Art. Repeat the process for all of your music but use the icon to the left which should display “Cover Art#Amazon.com (quick)”. That will help speed up the process.

If you are like me you likely have been working on this for much of day so updating all the single songs can take some time. If you leave any mp3’s without artwork chances are Android is going to assign it some artwork from some other songs. Very annoying in my opinion. So I figured I would just add a white or black Cover Art image to the files I’m now too lazy to find the real cover art. If you are good with Windows Explorer you should be able to find the mp3 based of the “last modified” times that you have not added any cover art to. You can drag and drop those into Mp3Tag and select all of the mp3’s and right click on where the cover art image would normally show a preview. Select the “Add Cover” and add either the White or Black 500x500px sample images I’ve attached below in this thred. Of course you can add your own if needed. It may take a few mins to process. Once completed click on the “Save” button just to make sure all tags and cover art was saved.

At this point its time to transfer all of your music back into your Android Device. Word of warning, if you transfer it back to the folder with the same folder name Android may never notice the changes no matter how many times you restart it. Another bug in the system. For example my music folder was normally called “Music” so I went the windows theme of “My Music”. Rename the folder and replace your music with your now properly tagged music. Go have dinner, have a beer, or watch a movie, and let the transfer do its thing. When completed restart your phone and then open up your Music app or Google Music and the correct art and music tags should be showing. If not, clear the data for those apps and restart your phone again.