Notices

hang on, are you saying if you tag your files with albumartist "various artists", then media player does correctly show just the "artist" tag on the now playing screen? cos that definitely doesn't happen for me!

Yeah, me neither.

nathanielsametz, which tag editor do you use to see the correct Band and Album Artist tags? I've been using mp3tag for a good while now and was convinced everything was fine in that front - the mp3s were always sorted correctly in my old iPod Touch.

Yeah guys the media player is being picky, that or the players we have been using use the same tag that mp3tag does, "BAND" which the n900 clearly doesn't recognize.

Like I said before, just because iTunes or mp3tag is showing the Album Artist area with information doesn't mean it is using the "ALBUMARTIST" tag, it's most likely to be using the "BAND" tag.

I've solved all my Various Artist problems now with mp3tag. Here's how:

1. In mp3tag, get the files up that you want to edit,
2. right click on them and select extended tags
3. click the "add-field" button
4. Field: ALBUMARTIST
Value: Various Artists (or whatever)

5. (optional) While you're in there, clean out any extraneous tags like ITUNNORM and the itunes compilations tag etc. Only remove itunes tags if you are no longer using iTunes as your music library/player thing. (like me, woohoo! Free!)

I haven't taken out the BAND tag because I have no doubt some other players/taggers wont recognize ALBUMARTIST.

I fixed the issue of Various Artists showing as the artist in Now Playing by doing exactly what I've just described up there.

Hope that helps,

nathaniel

The tags are basicaly additional information added before the start or after the end of the sound stream. With mp3tag, you can add custom tags, meaning tags wich have whatever name you want, and what ever value you want. However, mp3tag doesn't suppor aac id3v2 tags for a reason not even the creater of the programs is aware. When i asked him why not support such a feature, he said that this is just not happening. And i don't understant way, there are tagger out there that support this.

Anyway. For a program to recognize ALL the tags a sound file might have, he has to have a way to "scan" the begining and the end, for tag info. If it finds it, then it needs to sort out TAG NAME (which could be anything youre heart desires such as band composer, writer creator, beats per second, album artist, albumartist, etc) and then determine it's value.

This whole thing is messed up since there are a lot of different formats and version of tagging files.

Something universal has to be created, that work on each and every music file, in the same way (adding tag info at the beggining or at the end) and then every music player should have the ability to detect ALL tags and their values from a given sound file.

Since the adding of the tags is at the begiing or at the end, every sound file regardless of format should work with this universal tagging solution.
Just download mp3 tag and add your music files there. Then right click music file and hit extended tags.
A quick look on one of my downloaded mp3, reveals tags like ALBUM ARTIST COMMENT ENCODEDBY LANGUAGE TITLE TRACK WWW YEAR
As you can see there are a lot of extra tags that are just plain and simple useless.
It is the merit of the mp3tag to "see" these extended tags and their values, to bad it doesn't work for aac id3v2, the format i use for my music in N900
The thing is if we had via a program the ability to see modify and add whatever tags and values we like to whatever music file we have, and also players able to see all these tags, Nobody would stop you from adding custom tags like COMMENT to all your files and acctualy add a usefull comment to the file. And since you can see all the tags of a file on that hipotheticaly device that sees all tags, this wouldn't have been a useless thing to do.

Also, apart from this custom tags with custom fields, a LYRICS tags could be created, and the value it holds, could be in information structured in verses this way:
1)Time Information for instance 0.0-34.234
2)No words No lyrics, some sort of distinct sign
3)Time information 34.234-38.354
4)Verse 1
etc etc
The first time information means that that period of time from the start (0.0) until the 34second and 234ms is reached, there is no voice, and from the 34s234ms to 38.354 a voice is heard, and you have the following lyrics.

This way an "educated" lyrics reader could not only see the lyrics, but it can even display them as the song plays for maximum efectivity

If i's knew how to do this, i'd do this myself, but it takes lots of power and acceptance to create a standard.

And since no money is made out of this, i think we will never see things like this and we will always have trouble with tags and sound formats.
Especialy if someone else, decides to implement "their own" tag methods, such as apple for instance, wich would have the interest that the music they sell from their store to work only on their devices.

Bytales I know exactly how you feel. Luckily I solved this issue but it's not this easy for a lot of other issues.

My files are definitely tagged properly by a combination of mp3tag, itunes and mediamonkey but the N900 just doesn't want to know. It is painful cause I spent like a month tagging my 4000 plus songs, downloading album art from amazon (and in many cases I was missing the album so had to search the web for album name first) and embedding the album art. So for the device to be unable to show my tags and album art is really annoying.

Will possibly do some testing later (I have found it so annoying I don't even use the media player anymore and considering buying an mp3 player even though I sold my ipod touch when I was getting the N900) but I think:

1. When I synch with Winamp the device shows both album artist and song artiist. Not ideal because on now playing I get something like "Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson ft Janet Jackon". However, much better than what I normally get which is "Michael Jackson" then I have to figure out/guess who the featured artist is or in the case of compilation albums guess everything since it just shows Various Artists.

Problem with Winamp is I can't get it to synch anywhere but the main folder which then makes file manager unusable but that's what I use for browsing videos and pictures (due to inability to create video categories so sort that out in folders and because the picture app opens up in all images mode so takes ages to start).

2. If the song has idv2 tags I think the device shows song artist properly but not if it has just idv2 tags. Winamp can copy from v3 to v2 but only one song at a time. Have not found any programme that does batch copying.

Will do more testing but as I said I have all but given up on using the N900 as a media player.

Okay did some testing. Doesn't seem to matter whether I sync with Media Monkey, Windows Media Player, Winamp or by drag and drop. In all instances just get the same problem of the media player showing album artist rather than song artist.

Found a song by an artist which featured another artist which showed song artist (so correct info). Compared it with another song by the same artist which featured an artist but which was showing album artist. Could not see any difference whatsover. Both had ID3v2 and ID3v1. Both had info in both song artist and album artist section. So no difference between them whatsoever. Yet the N900 treated them differently.

My conclusion is that the N900 (or at least mine) just shows song artist for a few random songs but shows album artist for most. So the media player aspect of the device is very rubbish as far as I am concerned. In addition to not having proper tagging getting any external playlists to work is a real mission.

Ok FRAK I thought I had this sorted but the Various Arist albums have gone back to displaying Various Artists instead of the individual artists.

Just messed around a bit, I changed the BAND tag to individual artists and the n900 picked it up! So it obviously sees the BAND tag... I'd really like this cleared up. Wtf is going on?

All my stuff gets tagged with Tag&Rename (purchased way back in 2002!). I keep a portable version on the phones storage. Works in Windows and in WINE.

No issues at all.

Any compilation albums cools?