The Media Player seems a bit messed up WRT albums

[RDoc]

I've created a USB stick with about 38GB of music mostly by ripping CD's using MediaMonkey, then synching the library to the USB. At lot of it works fine, and all the music I've tried plays without any problems.

The problem is that single albums wind up showing as more than one album with a few tracks from the actual album on one, and the rest on another. Sometimes it even creates a separate album for each track.

All the tracks are tagged with the same album name according to both MediaMonkey and Windows File Explorer. The track names are typically of the form "01 Marian McPartland - A Foggy Day.mp3" for the album "On 52nd Street", but sometimes they just have the track name. That particular album wound up as two albums, both named "On 52nd Street", one with tracks 1-3, the other with tracks 4-17. Most albums work fine, but at least 10% are messed up. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with how many tracks are on the album, one album only has 4 tracks and it shows up as 2 albums.

Any thoughts?

 

[RDoc]

After some research I've found out several things, but not a solution.

a) The Media player seems to separate Albums by the album name, the album artist, and the album art work. Unfortunately it seems to look up the artwork on it's own, so different tracks in the same album can wind up with different artwork, hence are treated as separate albums.

2) It also seems to cache information about tracks so if you correct tags, they often aren't picked up. There doesn't seem to be a way to force a refresh either.

 

[Kipernicus]

Yup, super frustrating. If only the system would look at the folder organization to determine albums.

Using the folder view is less than ideal because the artist, album name, artwork, etc don't show up for some reason.

 

[ra-san]

Are the albums compilations with multiple artists in them? If so, then the S's media player splits albums into separate albums for each artist on the album. It doesn't know about or pay any attention to the album artist tag, only the artist tag.

If you feel like hassling with it, you can use mp3tag or similar tag editing software, and "fix" (i.e., work around) the issue by replacing the artist tags with the album artist tags. Search the forums here for a thread that goes into this in detail if this does seem like your issue.

 

[wart]

I think I've seen behavior like you're describing. It seems like in some instances the media player is ignoring my metadata and looking up its own metadata online.

Example: Artist Florence + The Machine, album Lungs, Deluxe Edition. There are two discs; the main album and the bonus disc. Whoever entered the bonus disc into freedb put the artist as Florence & The Machine instead of the proper Florence + The Machine. After I ripped the bonus disc I manually fixed the tags on all the mp3 files. But Tesla's media player ignores my fix and creates a second Artist entry for Florence & The Machine. I have some other more obscure stuff with similar problems. Annoying. Wish I could force it to use my metadata, even if it means it can't find album art.

 

[RDoc]

Are the albums compilations with multiple artists in them? If so, then the S's media player splits albums into separate albums for each artist on the album. It doesn't know about or pay any attention to the album artist tag, only the artist tag.

If you feel like hassling with it, you can use mp3tag or similar tag editing software, and "fix" (i.e., work around) the issue by replacing the artist tags with the album artist tags. Search the forums here for a thread that goes into this in detail if this does seem like your issue.

I don't think that's completely the case. I have tracks with the same album and album artist, and different artist tags that the Media Player shows as one album. Part of the problem is that since the Media Player seems to do caching, it's not obvious when you change tags what happened because it's using its own cache, not what's on the USB.

 

[Todd Burch]

After some research I've found out several things, but not a solution.

a) The Media player seems to separate Albums by the album name, the album artist, and the album art work. Unfortunately it seems to look up the artwork on it's own, so different tracks in the same album can wind up with different artwork, hence are treated as separate albums.

2) It also seems to cache information about tracks so if you correct tags, they often aren't picked up. There doesn't seem to be a way to force a refresh either.

Regarding (2), put all of your music into a folder at the root of your USB drive using the date. When you update metadata, update the folder name as well. When you put the USB drive back into the car, it will see the new folder name and clear its cache, reupdating everything.

Regarding (1), you're right--it's jacked up.

 

[Andyw2100]

Regarding (2), put all of your music into a folder at the root of your USB drive using the date. When you update metadata, update the folder name as well. When you put the USB drive back into the car, it will see the new folder name and clear its cache, reupdating everything.

Regarding (1), you're right--it's jacked up.

I'm sure Todd's solution works, because the Model S system looks at the folder name, and only updates the cached information if the folder name has changed.

But another option, if you don't want all the information to have to be recompiled (or whatever it is the car's system does every time) is to simply change the folder name of the album or artist in question. You can do that by simply adding an extra space between words or letters. The folder name won't be seen often anyway, (only when you view by folder or something like that) so if you don't go crazy, this shouldn't bother you too much.