Inconsistent Metadata Behavior

[Spitfirejoe]

Pixel 3A phone -> Bluetooth -> Car Stereo

I finally got a smart phone, and I'm learning to use it with my car stereos. I have seen the same inconsistent behavior in both my new Mazda SUV with the stock head unit, and my old 2003 Ranger pickup with a Pioneer "DEH-X8500 BH" head unit I had Best Buy install years ago. (Actually, I'm going to go take a ride in the Mazda right now to confirm that I'm seeing the same behavior on the different albums I played today while doing a bunch of driving in my truck.)

I'm playing MP3 files from my phone to the Pioneer head unit in my pickup and Mazda SUV via bluetooth. On some albums, I get metadata for the artist / album / song on the first track only. When it switches to the second track, the metadata stays the same. So every song displays the song title from the first song as it plays. This happens on "most" of the albums I've run using this approach. The trouble is, there are some albums that the metadata works fine and each track gets updated as it starts playing. The behavior is not consistent, which makes this hard to figure out.

These are all FLAC files that I have saved on my server, and then were converted to 320 KB MP3 files for use with my iPod in order to save space. They are my rips, using dbPoweramp. All the files have the same general metadata tags; Artist, Title, Album, Track, Year, Genre, Album Artist Sort, Album Sort, and Album Art. I've been pretty careful to update all the info properly, and they all work the same when played through the iPod via hardwire to the USB input on the head unit. I have not tried using the iPod via bluetooth, but that might be a good experiment to run.

Anyone have any pointers for me? What should I look into? This really does not affect my enjoyment of the music much, but I like being able to look down and take note of the song title once in a while.

EDIT: I tried about 20 albums, all but three failed to change the song title when the tracks changed. It doesn't matter which track I started with - that song title stayed on the display. The three that worked? All three were Mary Chapin Carpenter albums. What the hell?

 

[Artie]

Not all devices like all the variations of ID tag. As an experiment, I'd do one experimental group of songs and remove all tags except ID3v1. See if that helps. MP3Tag v2.72 is a great program for this, and I believe it's free.
Early versions of the tags are written at the beginning of the file, and later versions are appended to the end. Your older devices may only be reading the older tag.

https://www.mp3tag.de/en/

 

[Spitfirejoe]

Interesting... I was hoping someone with deeper knowledge of tags would point me toward a solution. Thanks!

Used the phone on a long trip last week with a wired connection and everything worked fine. This anomaly appears to happen only with Bluetooth.

 

[Spitfirejoe]

@Artie - I think you nailed it - just have to confirm with some other albums. I downloaded mp3tag from your link, and I find all my albums are tagged with ID3.v2.3 currently, I pulled a couple albums into mp3tag and have started figuring out how to use the "tools" function, writing the ID3.v1 data to the files. However, now on the "Audio Properties" tab it shows all the files having BOTH tag formats - even though I specified "Remove ID3.v2" when I saved the data. Deleted the albums from my phone, and replaced them with the revised files. Track names change as expected, though one album gave me an unexpected error and would not play. I'll keep playing with it to see what I did wrong.

 

[WaveSeeker]

Interesting. If the track titles always show on the phone but only sometimes on the radio, there must be a bug in the music player app, Android itself, or the Pioneer firmware. I wonder if there's a way to tap the Bluetooth communication without expensive equipment - then one could see the difference between the good and bad cases.

Edit: Looks like there is, see https://source.android.com/devices/bluetooth/verifying_debugging "Debugging with logs". Might be tricky depending on your experience though.

The relevant Bluetooth command is "GetElementAttributes" in s 6.6.1 of https://www.bluetooth.org/docman/handlers/downloaddoc.ashx?doc_id=457082. I imagine what might be going on is: ID3v2 uses Unicode, your player sends the metadata over Bluetooth as Unicode, and the Pioneer gets confused and ignores it (showing the old metadata instead).

 

[Spitfirejoe]

@WaveSeeker - It's not just the Pioneer, as the same thing happened on my 2019 Mazda. I've been running files through MP3tag, and they all work fine on the Mazda. Will try them on the Pioneer unit in my Ranger pickup today.

It's going to take some time to run all my files through the tagger software, but it was fairly easy to learn how to do it. I have not figured out why the Mary Chapin Carpenter albums worked, as they were ripped and converted the same way as most of the others. I use dbPoweramp to rip CD's to flat, save those and then convert them to a mp3 on a different drive for use with portable players.

I wonder if it's my phone... just remembered that I put a bunch of files on my Galaxy tablet. I'm going to see if that exhibits the same behavior with Bluetooth connection to the vehicles. I've only used that function with some Sony but speakers.

 

[WaveSeeker]

The thing is that the car player shouldn't know about or care about the difference between ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. That's all supposed to be decoded on the phone end. If there's a bug, one could track it down, and the vendors were actually responsive to bug reports, maybe it could be fixed. There's the rub - if the problem is on Google's end, there's a faint chance you might get a fix, but if it's on Pioneer's end - well, for one they were recently on the verge of bankruptcy (link). Not likely to have much luck with Mazda either, there are umpteen layers of outsourcing between the car brands and their audio systems.

Have you tried using a different Android app to play the music?

 

[Spitfirejoe]

The thing is that the car player shouldn't know about or care about the difference between ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. That's all supposed to be decoded on the phone end. If there's a bug, one could track it down, and the vendors were actually responsive to bug reports, maybe it could be fixed. There's the rub - if the problem is on Google's end, there's a faint chance you might get a fix, but if it's on Pioneer's end - well, for one they were recently on the verge of bankruptcy (link). Not likely to have much luck with Mazda either, there are umpteen layers of outsourcing between the car brands and their audio systems.

Have you tried using a different Android app to play the music?

No, haven't tried a different app. But, MAN am I ready to dump Google Play Music. Of course, Google has dumped it already and they are trying to shove everything to YouTube Music. Lots of little annoyances in Google Play Music, like I delete an album, but it shows up on the playlist anyway. Of course it doesn't play - there are no music files associated. Just a "ghost" from the thumbnail that doesn't get updated appropriately.

Anyone have a "favorite" music app I should try? I use my own music files, rarely "stream" anything, and only when I'm at home and connected by Wi-Fi. Remember, I'm a smart phone newbie...

Giving BlackPlayer a try now - free version. Apparently it doesn't do streaming at all.

 

[TPettenati]

Anyone have a "favorite" music app I should try?

Give Foobar2000 a try. I've used it on Android and PC, and it works fairly well.

 

[Spitfirejoe]

Tested today with my Galaxy tablet instead of the Pixel phone, and everything seems to work as it should. Song titles and other tagged data change as a new file plays. Using Google Play Music with the "old" versions of my files, not the ones I ran through Mp3tag.

I'm at a loss. Must have just been something wonky on the Pixel phone?