[cloudbaseracer]

I have converted my music collection to MP3 to be used on various portable devices but I get this when viewed on my computer....





It is not a problem when viewed on my phone or other handheld device and even has the album art associated with each song. But since it looks like this on my computer it is difficult to determine which songs to transfer.

What is going on here and how do I correct it?

Cheers,
James

[srb]

I can't read your image, but it's fairly typical for Windows Explorer to not show artist or album tags - unless possibly tagged with Windows Media Player?

It's usually a good idea to have your song files organized by Artist > Album folders, particularly if you want to do a drag and drop into a music folder on an Android device.

But it's much easier to use a music program to sync to a device.  Obviously on Apple iDevices iTunes can be used to sync, and for Android devices I use JRiver Media Center. 

You might be able to get sync functionality from one of the free program editions of MusicBee or MediaMonkey (?), but I've always used the paid JRiver ($50) for Android music sync because it's my primary music program, the sync function works and it has a host of other valuable file, conversion and DSP tools.

I also don't maintain a separately converted MP3 library, but instead convert on the fly while syncing.  A conversion cache folder is automatically maintained on the PC, so if there are no changes to a songfile, it doesn't need conversion next time around.

Steve

[JRace]

RT click the headings (Name, Date Modified), choose More,


then you should see a box that shows you which headings are displayed.




Put a check box beside the ones you want to see.

[srb]

The problem is not that the relevant column headers aren't displayed.  Windows doesn't show the Album or Artist tag info, at least for files tagged in iTunes or JRiver.  As I mused earlier, perhaps it does if tagged in Windows Media Player, but I don't know and haven't tried it.

 

Steve

[JRace]

The problem is not that the relevant column headers aren't displayed.  Windows doesn't show the Album or Artist tag info, at least for files tagged in iTunes or JRiver.  As I mused earlier, perhaps it does if tagged in Windows Media Player, but I don't know and haven't tried it.

Weird.

I don't use iTunes or Jriver, interesting that they do not show.
Wonder why?
MP3's tagged with Foobar or DBPoweramp do show up in explorer for me.

[Armaegis]

iTunes tends to keep it's own personal library and doesn't store information in the individual song files.

Jriver has a setting somewhere that you can enable so it stores the tags in the files itself. I switched mine over years ago; I don't remember where that setting is anymore... However, you can also simply highlight your entire library, right click --> library tools --> and click "update tags (from library)" which should do it.

[srb]

iTunes tends to keep it's own personal library and doesn't store information in the individual song files.

Except for WAV files which have no metadata header and whose tags have to be stored in the iTunes database, all other formats (MP3, AAC, ALAC and AIFF) DO store metadata information in the song file, the exception being Artwork.

If Artwork is automatically downloaded it's stored in the iTunes database.  If the artwork is added through the Get Info command (browsed or pasted) it's stored in the song file.

Steve

[Anonamemouse]

For all tagging issues: Tag&Rename by Softpointer (http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm) is the ultimate tagging tool. Works on all audiofiles that accept tagging.

[JRace]

For all tagging issues: Tag&Rename by Softpointer (http://www.softpointer.com/download.htm) is the ultimate tagging tool. Works on all audiofiles that accept tagging.

Just double checked on my end and (win10/win7) machines show Tag&Rename tagged mp3's info in explorer.
Great program. Excellent folder-renaming tool as well, can name folders based on tags and file info (codec, bitrate etc).

[cloudbaseracer]

For all tagging issues: Tag&Rename by Softpointer (http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm) is the ultimate tagging tool. Works on all audiofiles that accept tagging.

Thanks for the link to this program.  I have been able to run it on the 163 GBs of files and it appears to have worked on almost everything.  I am not sure why it did not work on some.  It was able to do everything as a batch in one pass that took about 2 minutes.  Really fast!  I could not figure out if it is possible to get it to create an Artist folder that then has the albums in folders as well?  Basically, all the files I had were just single files and had not been converted with a program that does the traditional Artist Folder - Album Folder - Songs configuration.  It would be great if this would do that also.  It is too much work to create all of that individually.

Cheers,
James

[Anonamemouse]

Thanks for the link to this program.  I have been able to run it on the 163 GBs of files and it appears to have worked on almost everything.  I am not sure why it did not work on some.  It was able to do everything as a batch in one pass that took about 2 minutes.  Really fast!  I could not figure out if it is possible to get it to create an Artist folder that then has the albums in folders as well?  Basically, all the files I had were just single files and had not been converted with a program that does the traditional Artist Folder - Album Folder - Songs configuration.  It would be great if this would do that also.  It is too much work to create all of that individually.

Cheers,
James

You're welcome!
I don't think it is capable of building an organized structure for you. When I started my library I realized it would end up large, so I immediately implemented tree structures.
My suggestion: every time it annoys you do a bunch. In just a few weeks you'll be all structured.
I have used the following systen:
Main folder: Artist
___secundary folders: Artist - year of release - Album - cd 01

[JRace]

I use this program for bact folder renaming:
http://file-folder-ren.sourceforge.net/

Main Features :

Preview every item to be renamed before comiting changes.
Add any number of operations in any order (v.2 only)
Recursive renamer : load all files in directory and in subdirectories.
Undo changes in case of mistakes.
Regular expression support throughout.
Rename music and image files by their metadata information.
Full unicode support means any character from any language can be used.
Use of all allowed characters under Windows and OSX, all except ':' in Linux.

Not the easiest to use, but very powerful.

My scheme:
\Artist - Year - Album\