Why does Play Music split my albums?
QOn my Android phone Google’s Play Music app splits some of my albums into different icons in the Albums screen, even though all the files are in the same folder when I copy them across. For example, on my PC I have Johnny Cash’s At Folsomprison in a folder of the same name. When I copy this to my phone the MP3S remain in the same folder, but Play Music displays two album icons — with seven songs under one icon and the remaining 12 under the other. That means I can’t listen to the whole album as intended, without creating a playlist. Thinking it was the phone at fault I tried copying the music to my Android tablet, and exactly the same thing happened. What’s causing this, and is there an easy solution? Nicholas Parkinson
AThe cause is inconsistent metadata, which is non-audio information embedded in your MP3 files. A track’s metadata is also known as its ID3 tag, and includes details such as the artist’s name and album title. Play Music makes use of ID3 tags to organise how it displays music stored on your device.
The reason the app is displaying your Johnny Cash album as two different icons is because of mismatching info in the various ID3 tags. So, for example, seven of the tracks might have the Album Title field as ‘At Folsom Prison’, while the other 12 have it stored as ‘At Folsom Prison.’ — with a full stop. To human eyes that’s clearly the same album title but to a computer database, that little dot means a different title.
When ripping an album from an original CD, the ripping software refers to an online database to add the metadata. This information is generally accurate and consistent, but not always (because a human would have added it somewhere along the line). But MP3S downloaded from websites and online services are more likely to have inconsistent metadata, simply because the files could be from anywhere.
The solution is to ensure the affected albums’ metadata is consistent. In Windows, right-click a track, choose Properties, then click the Details tab. Now do the same again with a track that Play Music thinks is from a ‘different’ album, then cross-check the fields for mismatches. When you spot a difference, click to edit the affected field, then click OK.
This is labour-intensive so if you have a lot of problematic files then download a free tag-editing tool, such as Mp3tag ( www.mp3tag.de). Open the File menu, click ‘Add directory’ then select your music folder. With the tags tabulated by Mp3tag it’s easier to spot mismatches: now just click to select an affected track, then correct the information in the left-hand pane (see screenshot).