Exact requirements for ID3 tags to be recognized?

[PapaJDub]

Hi there,

I'm having an issue with playing MP3s from an SD card plugged into the media hub on my '13 Explorer Limited with MyFord Touch (no nav), and I just installed the latest update.

Even after allowing the index to complete, around half of my songs will say "Unknown Artist", and they will either display no album art, or the generic art that comes up based on the tagged genre.

All of my music is properly and meticulously tagged with album, artist, and all kinds of other information, and each tag includes the embedded album art. My media is recognized in all other applications, including iTunes.

I've even run the syncmyitunes app against my library, let it fix the songs, and then tried it. Still have the same issues.

What I'm looking for from Ford is --

1. What ID3 tag version does MFT want? ID3v1, ID3v22, ID3v23, ID3v24? What is/isn't supported?
2. Are there restrictions on certain frames within the ID3 tags that should not be used?
3. Are there restrictions on album art dimensions?
4. Are there filename restrictions that would not be fixed by syncmyitunes?
5. Are there max bitrate or file size restrictions?

This problem is super frustrating, in what otherwise is an amazing product by Ford. I'd love to get this nailed down. I've been looking and comparing between the songs that work and the songs that don't work, trying to find an issue, but coming up empty.

My only other theory is that for some reason it's just not completely indexing the SD card, not sure how I can test that though.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[PapaJDub]

I did an experiment, and put my collection onto an old iPhone 3GS (files unchanged), and plugged it into one of the USB ports. All of my music has title and artist and artwork. It's working 100%.

An interesting note is that when the song starts playing, MFT, for a split second, displays the Gracenote artwork (the generic artwork based on genre such as Pop, Rap, etc.), and then it flips over to the artwork stored on the iPhone.

So, either:

1. When iTunes syncs the music to the iPhone, it converts or strips it down in such a way that makes MFT happy.

or

2. There's just some weird incompatibility with the SD card slot, or even the particular SD card I'm using.

I'll do some more experimenting... However, it's nice just to leave the old iPhone tucked in the SYNC media hub tray too, because my WiFi reaches to the garage, which means it'll sync with iTunes over the air, and I never have to mess with changing out cards again.

 

[Mikepaul]

If you're willing to do some more experimenting, could you transfer the tunes from the iPhone back to the SD card and see if it will now work correctly?

 

[jeffreycowart]

I have been using a utility called MP3Tag and it works well. It allows you to go in and edit the info and update album art. It is very nice to be able to select a entire block of music and change the Genre, so when you use the "play Genre" command it has a good selection. Typically the genre is very specialized like "new age country, contemporary country, etc" I change them all to country.

I haven't had any issues, but I did see somewhere on here that MFT only wants very basic artist, album, song and genre, and that having info in all the other fields like composer, etc can cause issues.

Since emoticons cause big issues with the phonebook, I would assume that special characters will cause problems with the ID tags. Sometimes I have seen the COPYRIGHT symbol in the ID info of many songs, stuck under a publisher or producer tag. I delete that stuff, so maybe that is why mine seems to work well.

 

[roamingphantom]

I have been using a utility called MP3Tag and it works well. QUOTE]



Mp3Tag worked wonders for my ipod and usb music - 15000 songs and never a worry. You do have to put the time in to arrange and update though.