I have a large meticulously tagged collection of mp3 songs that work perfectly across different platforms – apart from the Infotainment system (i.e. the USB ports) where a few mp3s come up as unknown artist/album/title and it just displays the filename instead (the tracks play okay).
No matter what I did, tag clean, retag, or try different versions of ID3, different folder structures, different USB sticks, I just could not get the Infotainment system to recognise the tags. It was driving me crazy as there seemed no logic to it!
My usual method of tagging is to first do a tag clean, set my tagging program (MP3Tag) to write only ID3v2 tags and then set the Artist, Album, Title fields. Filenames I always number with leading zeros followed by a space then name. I also set the Track tag but never bother with leading zeros for the tracknumber. The only other field I set is to embed the album cover artwork.
This I generally had a lot of success with when I first bought my MX-5 (a 2016 ND), even with tracks playing in the right order, but after its first service (and Infotainment update) I seemed to start having far more problems. I am now on version 59.00.502 EU N and when new it was 56.00.513 EU N.
Suspecting interference from GraceNote, I disabled the GraceNote database but this made no difference. Curiously, I happened to notice that even with GraceNote disabled, some tracks were still showing tag names that were definitely not how I had tagged them – suggesting that this incorrect tagging had somehow survived even though I had also tried rebooting the Infotainment system. Finally I did a factory reset and after that I could see it was using tags as I had set them – but still several songs coming up as unknown artist/album/title!
To cut a long story short, the solution was to run these problematic songs through an mp3 validator, MP3val (a free tool easily found on sourceforge). This checks the integrity of the mp3 structure and will fix most problems. This did indeed flag up some corruption and a couple of clicks later this was fixed.
Interesting to note that although MP3val was indicating some corruption, it did not seem to cause any issue when playing these songs or displaying the tags on any other platform – so the Infotainment system seems to have little tolerance.
However – after fixing the corrupt files, it still needed one more factory reset to get it reading all tags 100% perfect (and everything plays in the right order). As yet I have not tried to re-enable GraceNote, not sure I will bother having got this far….
Just one final note – I realized that the songs that were causing me problems were all ones I had “inherited”. Anything I have personally ripped from original CDs is generally okay.
No matter what I did, tag clean, retag, or try different versions of ID3, different folder structures, different USB sticks, I just could not get the Infotainment system to recognise the tags. It was driving me crazy as there seemed no logic to it!
My usual method of tagging is to first do a tag clean, set my tagging program (MP3Tag) to write only ID3v2 tags and then set the Artist, Album, Title fields. Filenames I always number with leading zeros followed by a space then name. I also set the Track tag but never bother with leading zeros for the tracknumber. The only other field I set is to embed the album cover artwork.
This I generally had a lot of success with when I first bought my MX-5 (a 2016 ND), even with tracks playing in the right order, but after its first service (and Infotainment update) I seemed to start having far more problems. I am now on version 59.00.502 EU N and when new it was 56.00.513 EU N.
Suspecting interference from GraceNote, I disabled the GraceNote database but this made no difference. Curiously, I happened to notice that even with GraceNote disabled, some tracks were still showing tag names that were definitely not how I had tagged them – suggesting that this incorrect tagging had somehow survived even though I had also tried rebooting the Infotainment system. Finally I did a factory reset and after that I could see it was using tags as I had set them – but still several songs coming up as unknown artist/album/title!
To cut a long story short, the solution was to run these problematic songs through an mp3 validator, MP3val (a free tool easily found on sourceforge). This checks the integrity of the mp3 structure and will fix most problems. This did indeed flag up some corruption and a couple of clicks later this was fixed.
Interesting to note that although MP3val was indicating some corruption, it did not seem to cause any issue when playing these songs or displaying the tags on any other platform – so the Infotainment system seems to have little tolerance.
However – after fixing the corrupt files, it still needed one more factory reset to get it reading all tags 100% perfect (and everything plays in the right order). As yet I have not tried to re-enable GraceNote, not sure I will bother having got this far….
Just one final note – I realized that the songs that were causing me problems were all ones I had “inherited”. Anything I have personally ripped from original CDs is generally okay.
