I've seen a few threads around where people posted about the Media Player not reading some of their ID3 tags properly. This results in a handful of MP3s getting placed in the "(no artist)" or "(no album)" category.

However, I've never seen anyone list a more definitive solution for this... does anyone have any new ideas about this?

I have only around 600-700 songs (I see some people list they have thousands with no problem).

However, around 50-100 of my songs don't have their ID3 tags read in both the Media Player and in the File Manager. However, I've very carefully written the ID3 tags on my computer before hand using Mp3tag.

I've tried moving the files to different directories, renaming the files, clearing the tracker library, putting only a small number of songs on the phone, etc. But the tags are always read incorrectly. And it's always the same tags.

The only correlation I've seen so far is that these ID3 tags have Chinese characters in them in one place or another. But I have many other songs with Chinese characters in the path names and ID3 tags that are working. So I'm not sure what's wrong with these. In the past when I've had troubles with ID3 tags on other platforms (Symbian S60 or UIQ3), I would always just load up the offending songs in Mp3tag and rewrite all the tags. This would usually solve my problem. But on the N900's media player, it doesn't seem to be so simple.

The only solutions I've found online so far have been to just keep on trying to copy the files over and over again till the media player picks them up. But I'm consistently getting the same songs missed each time.

Did you try with others music players?. Maybe your music player don't recognize the version of ID3 tag you apply to the songs. Try with ID3v1, all the music players may recognize it.

Just a wild guess, maybe it's an encoding issue? Big5 vs GB vs UTF? I rip/encode from my own CDs and quite often the data gotten from freedb.freedb.org is in some encoding which does not display properly in which case I have to enter the info myself.

Thanks for the thoughts! I did try other media players in Maemo, and the ones I tried so far were in fact able to read the ID3 tags correctly.

Regarding encoding, that has always been a problem for me in the past. I may need to check that again, as I can't remember what encoding it was set to (I just know that since I recently moved to Windows 7, I hadn't set my system's non-unicode locale to a Chinese one - so I'm not sure how that interacts with the software I'm using to tag). I know I wrote the tags to use UTF-8 though.

The odd thing, however, is that it's not an entire set of MP3s that are missing. For example, I have an album, and I wrote the tags for those MP3s all at the same time using the same software. But then on the phone, some of those MP3s are missing, while some aren't.

I have one other theory that I need to test in greater detail tonight when I get back home... but essentially the last thing I tried was taking one of the offending MP3s and replacing the Chinese ID3 tags with just plain ASCII names. I renamed the file to also only have ASCII characters. Surprisingly, when I put it back into the media player, that file's tags were still not read!

I'm now thinking that it's no longer an issue with the ID3 tags exclusively. Rather, some part of the file container itself is corrupted or written in a way that Media Player doesn't like. To further test this theory, I took the offending MP3 file and passed it through ffmpeg using the -acodec copy option (essentially, I was trying to just strip the MP3 data out of the container and rewrite it again). I then put back the ASCII ID3 tags and put the file onto the phone.

After doing that, Media Player picked up the ID3 tags just fine.

So it seems that either a portion of the file is corrupted that causes the tracker indexer to fail, or, it's just written in some way that causes problems with this software.

My next step is to try to put the proper Chinese ID3 tags and album art back in... and if that works, I'll run all the offending files through ffmpeg.

Hopefully that'll work - I'll see!

Alright, I've managed to solve it. My ffmpeg idea was not related - the reason why it worked, however, was that ffmpeg stripped out all existing meta information from the file, and when I added it back, I only added ID3v2 tags, whereas a lot of my files have a mixture of ID3v1, ID3v2 and even APEv2 tags, often all at the same time.

Some further testing revealed that the tags would not always be read if I had more than one meta information type in the file.

Thus the simple solution was to just rewrite all my files' meta information as ID3v2.

An easy way to do this in Windows is to use Mp3tag. You can open a whole directory structure with it, and it will read all subdirectories as well (so you can just select your entire music directory).

Select Tools>Options and then under Tags>Mpeg, set these settings:

In the Write settings:
- Uncheck ID3v1
- Uncheck APEv2
- Check ID3v2 - I selected ID3v2.4 UTF-8 in most cases (edit: it seems that album art seemed to work better with ID3v2.3 UTF-16 in some cases).

In the Remove settings:
- Check ID3v1
- Check APE
- Uncheck ID3v2

Click OK to save the options.

Select Edit>Select All Files and then with all files selected:
- Save (click the floppy disk icon) - this will make sure all files have ID3v2 tags
- Remove tags (the red X beside the Save button) - this will remove all tag types except for ID3v2

After I did this, I copied all files back to the internal memory and let Media Player reindex everything.

After doing this, Media Player had all my tags read and categorized properly.

So it did indeed seem to be some sort of meta information conflict. When I previously was rewriting the tags, I wasn't removing the other tag versions, which is why the files that didn't work continued to not work - until I only wrote one type of ID3 tag.

I'm glad you can solve your problem , ¡i told you! the problem was the ID3 version .
Also you can edit the tags on your phone with Audio Tag Tool.

You can also use Mussorgsky to edit tags and adjust album art. Works very well.