I have a curious little problem: my entire music collection plays nicely on the N900. All tags are linked & displayed perfectly. There is only 1 problem: almost all my songs are MP3 files, but I do have a few albums with WMA-coded songs. The N900 plays them without any problem (btw: while this Wiki page doesn't include WMA in the list of playable music files...), but the artists are listed as "name, name", e.g. "Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen". Also, their Genre is given twice (e.g. Rock, Rock).

Very odd. I can't repair this. I fooled around with Mediamonkey but it all looks perfect on my laptop; there is no issue on my laptop nor on my MP3 player. With Mussorgsky I could make the changes to the artist name (i.e. I deleted the comma and 1 name), but this was not reflected/picked up in the artist list (also not after a tracker-processes -r).

Who knows what the link is between WMA and the double artist-name / double genre? How can I remedy this? (apart from converting my WMA files to MP3s)

Bump....

I can't believe that I am the only N900-user who has a problem with the way that WMA files are listed in the Media Player?

Can someone help me??

I think that n900 has so many serious problems that your is negligible.
Apart from jokes, I too have problems with the playlists, but I am not able to help you to solve.

almost all of my music collection is WMA and i have that issue with some artists but not all. some albums are split because of it. My theory is that its to do with the contributing artists field. I have yet to get round to having a look what is different beteen the files though but will have a look as soon as i can.

Yes, definately the contributing artist field that is causing this. Removed this field via windows media player for one song of the Fratellis album, that now appears in media player just as Fratellis and all the rest as Fratellis, Fratellis.

I can only presume MP3 does not hold this data in the ID3 tag

E: Or the N900 media player handles MP3 tags better than WMA...

E2: Dont know if it fixes the genre issue; I always sort my music by artist so never noticed this issue before.

Thanks mornage! This worked! I emptied the "Album Artist" field and it is now looking as it should (so with only one artist name).

The Genres are still displayed double (e.g. Jazz, Jazz). I have no idea how to correct that. Anyway, I hardly use the Sort-by-Genre option so it is not a major issue for me.

It also appears that the songs of WMA albums are listed alphabetically, i.e. it ignores the track-number tag. After some searching I found out that this is in fact a well-known problem on the N900 (see earlier discussion) and is registered as bug 5900: see here, and only remedied by renaming the song-titles (i.e. to let them start with their track-number).

Thanks anyway a lot!

Reply to an old thread. Seems to be that WMA has WM/Genre, WM/GenreID and WM/ProviderStyle and that the N900's player doesn't merge those so to speak. So a WMA file with WM/Genre and WM/GenreID (even tho both might be 'rock') will not be listed together with one just tagged with WM/Genre