How is MP3 Name Displayed On Car Player

[bostonman]

I have several MP3s on a USB and play them in my car.

The radio will list them by artist, song title, etc... and, while playing, show the artist name and song title. From what I can tell, the actual file name isn't what is displayed on the screen.

My questions are: how does the radio know an entire set of directories is for one artist, and what determines the name(s) being displayed?

[SeanB]

Very simple, MP3 has included in the file metadata, which is called the ID3 tag, which, in a correctly composed one, has a whole load of information on genre, title, album, artist and a whole lot more, in there as part of the file itself. the car player merely parses this information and displays it on screen, defaulting if it is missing to only having a file name to show instead.

[Andy Watson]

MP3 files can contain "metadata" - i.e. not just audio. Presumably your radio knows how to read these extra data fields.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3

[bostonman]

How is the ID3 tag created, by the person who ripped the song? I think Magic File Renamer will change the ID3 tag to the file name.

Is it safe to do this?

I've noticed some horribly named songs. Usually I use Magic File Renamer to rename the files to Artist - Song Name.mp3 with each directory being the album title, and the main directory being artist.

So if I try matching the ID3 tag to the file name, I'm uncertain whether it will cause the radio to not organize them by artist, album, etc...

[PA0PBZ]

Use an MP3 tag editor, for instance this one: https://www.mp3tag.de/en/

[bostonman]

I like MP3 Tag, but recently found myself needing to do the opposite; rename file names by the ID3 tag.

I found another great program (that expires in thirty-days), ironically enough, named MP3 Tag Pro v12. It does a good job at renaming the file names by the ID3 tag after setting a criteria.

The problem I'm finding: I have 10s of thousands of MP3s on a network drive. It's connected through a switch, through my router, and obviously to my PC. I'm finding that trying to read and rename one discography directory can take several minutes with the program either freezing, or is frozen.

I'm trying to beat the thirty-day expiration period, so I'm trying to figure out how I can get these MP3s renamed quicker. Moving them to my PC will take equally long, so does anyone have a better idea?

[bostonman]

I'm looking to rename file names using the ID3 tag, but doing them individually would take years as I have 10s of thousands of MP3s.

[mikerj]

Several utilities will let you bulk re-name MP3 files based on ID3 tags.  I use ID3Renamer.

[rdl]

The problem I have with tags is that there is little consistency in how the data is entered and formatted from one source to the next. Since I have little use for them myself, first thing I do if I get a file I didn't rip myself is to delete all the tags. Fortunately, Mp3tag does this quickly and easily.

[bostonman]

i was trying to "perfectiony" my songs' tag long time ago

My gripe is the people who rip the CDs have horrible file naming convention. I can understand if an entire discography has file names of a specific format, but each directory is different.

Some time ago, I used Magic File Renamer to rename the files. I would strip the garbage from them, change lowercase, and make the file name simply Artist - Song Title

Recently I realized many discographies have live albums, and, when I play them on my computer, or want to sort them as they are on the CD, I can't because they no longer contain the track number.

Unfortunately not all ID3 tags have the track number, however, I've decided to change what I can to Artist - Track Number - Song Title. Some people make the file name so long that I've lost the file name when copying them over to a network drive or into a sub directory.

Sadly, all my MP3s are on network drives. Either the program I'm using, or the fact it's going through a switch through the "network", takes long to list all the files in a directory and then renaming them seems to cause the program to freeze. What I may do is remove the hard drive internal to the network drive, and connect it directly inside my PC.

Maybe I'll try another program in hopes it's faster and I can avoid swapping the drives.

[rdl]

My gripe is the people who rip the CDs have horrible file naming convention. I can understand if an entire discography has file names of a specific format, but each directory is different.
...

Yeah, this is what I was saying. I have seen in tags lots of stupid stuff, spelling errors, artists listed as genre, crazy incorrect genre and so on. I just gave up on them as being useful and delete immediately.

I have a simple system - mostly just one folder for each album:

 /Artist - Album Name/01 Track Name, 02 Track Name, etc.

I also have a thing about using proper title case, so I had to rename a lot of files at first. Luckily I've been doing this a long time, so not too much trouble anymore.

Another gripe I have is inclusion of low res album cover image in every track. I prefer a high res image, one per album folder.

I know some people who really get into the tagging though, like a hobby. Almost seems the tagging is more important to them than the music.

[ejeffrey]

How is the ID3 tag created, by the person who ripped the song? I think Magic File Renamer will change the ID3 tag to the file name.

Is it safe to do this?

I've noticed some horribly named songs. Usually I use Magic File Renamer to rename the files to Artist - Song Name.mp3 with each directory being the album title, and the main directory being artist.

So if I try matching the ID3 tag to the file name, I'm uncertain whether it will cause the radio to not organize them by artist, album, etc...

Whatever generates the file generates the ID3 tag.  If you use a cd-ripper, it will likely use the CD table of contents (basically the timecodes with the start and stop of each track) as a fingerprint and look it up the metadata on cddb.  Or at least that is how it worked 15 years ago.  Most MP3 players will trust the ID3 tag if it exists and then try to decode the filename / path structure if that fails.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Keep in mind that there are different versions of the tag itself which can get interesting depending on what mood the tag reader is in. Watch out for mp3 files with two tags (of different versions) and a reader that responds to the first one it recognizes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3


Gee. ID3 tags in MP3s. A part of the early 2000's I don't miss.

[ledtester]

I like MP3 Tag, but recently found myself needing to do the opposite; rename file names by the ID3 tag.

I found another great program (that expires in thirty-days), ironically enough, named MP3 Tag Pro v12. It does a good job at renaming the file names by the ID3 tag after setting a criteria.

The problem I'm finding: I have 10s of thousands of MP3s on a network drive. It's connected through a switch, through my router, and obviously to my PC. I'm finding that trying to read and rename one discography directory can take several minutes with the program either freezing, or is frozen.

I'm trying to beat the thirty-day expiration period, so I'm trying to figure out how I can get these MP3s renamed quicker. Moving them to my PC will take equally long, so does anyone have a better idea?

You might try out MusicBrainz Picard. I've never used it myself, but I've used MusicBrainz to identify CD tracks and that worked well.

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

Click "Other Downloads" for Windows and macOS versions.

[Zoli]

I'm looking to rename file names using the ID3 tag, but doing them individually would take years as I have 10s of thousands of MP3s.

MP3tag knows that too, at least for 10 years(estimate based on some timestamps in my archives).

[coromonadalix]

Not all radios work du the ID3 tag, some of them work by the file numbering / naming

I have 2 car radios and a mp3 sound systems at home, and sadly none of them works the same,  one want to folder group them (even on a drive root), one is by the mp3 tag, and the other is by the file naming      erk   

[westfw]

in the MP3 files are all the details related to the artist's name, the name of the song, the album he is part of, etc.

Theoretically.  If the MP3 files are ripped from CDs, most of that info will have been retrieved from some online database by the software that ripped the CD.  And some of that is crowd-sourced and not very reliable.I have a lot of small-scale-produced CDs in tiny sub-sub-genres, and they frequently aren't very recognized.

[PearlKelly]

The mp3 file can be edited and have additional functions, and you can input the image, description, artist, etc. When you download the music, not from the official service, you can see that sometimes is no additional info on these types of songs, only the song and artist name. I very often download music from this site . So if I need to group the files, I use the ID3 tag function to group them by artist or by album. Have a great day, and stay safe these days!

Why can't I save an MP3 after editing it? I get a 500 error.

[GuntherM]

On older devices, like the obsolete Denon mp3 players, the length of the characters was also a thing, like if you put, The Electric Light Orchestra - Mr Blue Sky, it just rejected the mp3, after a firmware update, the problems remained, seems the player was limited with characters used. So we had to shorten the metadata, and then he loaded the files correctly, never seen that before, now we have radio software and this problem isn't any more possible. But, like adds or jingles, we had to check file per file. Pretty annoying.

[coppice]

On older devices, like the obsolete Denon mp3 players, the length of the characters was also a thing, like if you put, The Electric Light Orchestra - Mr Blue Sky, it just rejected the mp3, after a firmware update, the problems remained, seems the player was limited with characters used. So we had to shorten the metadata, and then he loaded the files correctly, never seen that before, now we have radio software and this problem isn't any more possible. But, like adds or jingles, we had to check file per file. Pretty annoying.

Some older device also freak out when they encounter UTF-8 text. UTF-8 is only officially supported in V2.4. Before that there was support for the brain dead UTF-16 format. I assume MS had a hand in that, as they seem to be the only people who thought 16 bit characters made sense in a world with more than 64k characters.

[Twoflower]

Also some older players (software or hardware) can only handle ID3v1 tags. That version has limits in field length and only limited fields. While ID3v2.x allow to embed much more information - even lyrics and cover-art.

If I remember right, one file can have both ID3v1 and ID3v2.x tags coexist. As the ID3v1 is located in the end of the file and the ID3v2.x at the front.