If you put the stick into your pooter and list the files

Then change the text name of each file manually?

A quick Google of "copy music from CD to flash drive" brought up dozens of hits and videos etc of how to do that. Basically "rip" using media player and then copy and paste to the USBdrive.

Look at your music in Explorer. click on a song, right mouse click, properties, . Edit as needed.

Steve.

I can heartily recommend (as a satisfied user for many years, but no connection) Tag & Rename by Softpointer Inc. for re-tagging music files. See here – links to http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm

It's very powerful, so a bit of care needs to be taken, otherwise you might inadveretantly re-tag a whole lot of things you may not wish to.

Regarding your original question about why the information was not displayed in your car, I have found in the past that car systems use the ID3v1 tag (which holds basic info like track title, artist, album, etc.), rather than the expanded ID3v2 tag (which holds the same plus more, like lyrics, publisher, cover art, etc.) – the above software can copy the relevant ID3v2 tags into the ID3v1 'space' which often fixes the issue. Although I suspect more modern cars should be able to cope with either.

Rob

I suspect that what shows depends on the car software. For example, some cars it might play by file name, sometimes by track number. And what then displays is another variable. My current car appears to play by track number but displays track title, not file name. I'm pretty sure that a previous car played by alphabetic order of file name. I doubt that there is a one-size-fits-all answer – you just have to figure out what your car wants/uses and then work with it!

The 2012 Focus outside reads and displays MP3 data off a USB stick or any bluetooth device seamlessly. I wish the ghastly 1.0l 3 cylinder Ecoboom under the bonnet was as effective.

My understanding is the sound track is stored in one format, and the metadata in another. Metadata is data about data, in this case Album, Title, Composer, create date-time and such. It's not essential.

When copied to a USB stick, the sound track and metadata both have to be copied if the metadata is wanted. A simple copy will just transfer the track, which plays OK but has no information. A more sophisticated copy might transfer the metadata in a format the player doesn't understand : Apple not understanding Sony or whatever. When this happens the player ignores the metadata and plays the track, which works because tracks are usually in a well-known format.

It may be fixable. I use VLC as a media player. It can edit metadata as well as play stuff. Opening a downloaded music file, hitting pause and navigating to 'Tools->Media Information' gives me this screen which I can type into. The general information tab is obvious and may be all Vic needs.

The metadata tab is more difficult because it can contain vendor specific information, I think stored as list of keywords and content strings: VendorKEY="whatever the vendor wants". The code needs to be understood to use this, but I guess it's not needed.

VLC is just an example. I expect most full-featured media players will do the same. Simpler ones might not because adding features makes software harder to learn, annoying people who don't need them.

Dave

Kid3 looks like the right tool to me.

Rob (Grindstone Cowboy) said 'Regarding your original question about why the information was not displayed in your car, I have found in the past that car systems use the ID3v1 tag (which holds basic info like track title, artist, album, etc.), rather than the expanded ID3v2 tag (which holds the same plus more, like lyrics, publisher, cover art, etc.) – the above software can copy the relevant ID3v2 tags into the ID3v1 'space' which often fixes the issue. Although I suspect more modern cars should be able to cope with either.'

Trying Kid3 on my 'Ace of Spades' example produces the same answer as VLC, except Kid3 confirms the information is stored in an ID3v1 tag. Also, Kid3 allows more tags to be added:

Note in the screenshot above that Tag 1 is labelled 'ID3v1.1' and Tag 2 is blank (ie not set),

Clicking the 'From Tag 1' button populates Tag 2 by copying Tag 1, and the second tag is labelled ID3v2.3.0

This would fix the problem described by Rob and is worth a try.

The car player gets Album and other display information by searching for tags. If it can't find a tag it can decode, it just plays the track with blank information. I guess the problem is Rob's wrong tag type, or maybe something silly like illegal characters in the text stored in the tag. (Try deleting the text and retyping it.)

'illegal characters' is a complicated subject because many programs are multi-national, supporting non-latin alphabets as well as different currency symbols, umlauts and other complications. It's complicated and chaos ensues when an unrecognised character from one domain escapes into another. Small embedded systems like media players are often limited compared with Linux, Window and Apple which are all full-throttle multi-lingual, which opens the door to mistakes.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 20/08/2022 10:51:11