Related
HTC Audio Manager is a fantastic piece of software, so how come their Picture/Video manager is so terrible? Maybe it's me, but I can't find:
1. An "open file" option. How the heck am I supposed to open a file in a specific location?
2. A "sort albums alphabetically option". Okay, fine, I can accept that it's going to scan and include every single album on my device. But how am I supposed to find anything if there is no way to sort the albums?
3. A way to show only picture files or only video files. If I want to watch videos, how the hell am I supposed to find them?
I am a lifelong windows mobile user, but it's this kind of thing that REALLY drives me nuts. You want email? Sure, but you won't get a "mark all as read" button, or the ability to create rules (hence reducing the email functionality to the level of the iFail). You want to watch videos and look at pictures? Sure, we'll give you great codec support but no way to actually get to the videos.....
Am I a total idiot or is this piece of software really that bad?
You'll need to browse to where your video file is. To do this, tap the left soft key "Albums" and navigate accordingly.
However, it doesn't support many video formats. So I use it only to play back video that's taken with my device. All other videos, I use Coreplayer.
For some reason, HTC Album wasn't picking up my "Video" folder that I created on my storage drive. In fact, it still isn't - I just got it to work but only by creating a subfolder within the main "Video" folder. It only sees the subfolder.
This brings me to my next question - right now, the albums list is incredibly cluttered. Is there a way to either sort it alphabetically, or make HTC Album recognize a folder structure? Instead of the vast jumble of random subfolders (all of my pictures and video are organized meticulously), it would be much easier to have a seperate "Pictures" and "Video" folder, with subfolders such as "Movies, TV Shows", etc under each one.
Is this possible?
Anyone know how to make HTC Album rescan? I deleted a bunch of picture folders but it's still showing them.
my albums are seperated into different folders based on what they are and it works great. I just browse into the folder from HTC Album to whatever i want to watch or look at.
Here is how you rescan the library.
under device, application data, htc...there is a .vol file. Delete this, and the music application will rescan your library.
Lucky for me I still mainly buy CD and not downloads
So, how to I copy my CD's via my win7 pc to desire complete with album art work?
I've tried two options.
One is doubleTwist
The problem I have with it is it's slow at times, especially when starting and the initial sync with your device. It also handles tagging for compilation albums very poorly. For example I have a Motown album. Obviously there is no main album artist, and each track has an artist. In iTunes there are separate fields for Album artist and Track artist. doubleTwist can't parse this data and creates an album on your sd card for EACH and every artist it finds. So rather than my folders being organised as on my PC like Artist>Album>tracks, with this Motown album being found in Various Artists>Motown 50>tracks, I ended up with dozens of extra artists each with their own album called Motown 50. So there would be a Stevie Wonder folder...he'd have an album called Motown 50...then there'd be a Marvin Gaye folder and he'd have an album called Motown 50 too. SO as you can imagine the Album view on the media player looked a mess! There's also a complimentary Android app in the market which is actually much better than the built in music player. You also don't have to use the desktop app to use the Android app so give that a spin either way.
Next option is MediaMonkey
Now this is much better. It not only helps you organise your music, allowing for tags that even iTunes doesn't handle, but it will fetch album art for albums you don't have them for...as well as tag info for tracks you haven't tagged. The downside is it's not the most user friendly of apps. I got a few settings wrong and it scattered my music in random locations all over my SD card...it was hell to clean up. It managed to maintain my albums and tagging though. You just have to be very careful with it.
I use MediaMonkey to manage my mp3 library and to sync with my mp3 player. Not the prettiest of programs and sometimes not that intuitive when you first start to use it buit its very powerful - free too unless you want it to rip mp3s for you then you gotta pay for the Gold edition. You can though always use another ripper.
For my Desire though I just copy and paste the files to the SD card. MediaMonkey has already sorted out all the tags and album art for me so those are part of the file copied. I find it's far easier this way.
why can you just do what I do , copy them over in HDD mode , or even take out the Mme card and copy them over , and add a jpg to the folder where the album is .. eg album called wham be in a folder called wham with wham artwork as a small jpg... easy ...
dgattenb said:
why can you just do what I do , copy them over in HDD mode , or even take out the Mme card and copy them over , and add a jpg to the folder where the album is .. eg album called wham be in a folder called wham with wham artwork as a small jpg... easy ...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
works well
On a Win7 PC you have everything you need without installing any other software
Open up Windows Media Player and use that to BURN the CD. This will create a WMA (go for the WMA lossless option if you want the best quality) file.
Windows Media Player will automatically identify the CD, download track and album info and even the album art information if you want.
You can now start creating playlists. These are lists of tracks/albums that you add to.
Now connect your Desire in HDD mode. Media Player will take you through the sync process and allow you to choose which playlists to sync.
Now everytime you connect your Desire to your PC and run Windows Media Player, it will automatically sync your playlists to your device where you can then listen.
For some reason, most people forget about Windows Media player yet for a non iTunes user it is probably the best solution out there because it does the sync part so well
@ mark
works brilliantly
Im going to go against the grain and NOT recommend Media Monkey (although I do love the program) it just isn't reliable for ID3v1 tags.
Use whichever program you want to rip the mp3, there's a host of free software out there on 30 day trial, or limited use, all of which will do the job.
Use Tag Clinic (currently 4.3)
to fix your tags, use only ID3v1 tags, strip out any id3v2 tags (there are two seperate views for the two tag version in Tag Clinic, which is what makes it better and simpler than other software.)
Also only use the id3v1 generes that are available int he dropdown list, this I found as the only way to get reliable genres to stick.
Add jpegs of your album art to each folder, keep the dimensions less than 300px X 300px otherwise some players will not show it, regardless as to whether the file is available. also call the jpg, folder.jpg. (this is where media monkey IS helpful as you can copy an image from google images and paste it into the album art preview window and select 'save a copy to the folder as folder.jpg'
you should be all set, this I've learned after piddling around for hours trying to get MixZing to work with my SD music collection. I've read all the posts and made a few discoveries on my own.
Until ID3v2 tags are recognised (or recognised in parallel with ID3v1 tags) then this is the only way to get your collection showing properly.
As much as I hated iTunes, I could manually sync music onto my iPod Touch my dragging files directly into iTunes.
Most of my Music is on external hard drive and DVDs I've burned so I don't want to add everything to my collection just to sync the music to WP7.
Is there a more convenient way of doing this?
The most convenient way is to add the music to your collection. Then you can drag and drop anything onto the Phone icon at the bottom left of the screen.
I'm not sure why you believe doing this to be inconvenient?
Because like I've said my music is spread over multiple back up disks and drives. I don't want to spend forever adding particular folders/subfolders into the collection which in fact modifies the windows libraries as well.
I'm a bit confused. Is it that you don't want to add the music to your library. Or is it that you find it a nuisance to add the files to your library?
Whichever the case, I think the only solution is to add them to your Zune library. Don't know if there's another way to sync media to your phone. If you have stuff on an external HD, you can just select that HD drive letter, and it'll go through all the folders for ya.
Didn't you have to add them to iTunes in order to drag them over to your iPod?
digger1985 said:
As much as I hated iTunes, I could manually sync music onto my iPod Touch my dragging files directly into iTunes.
Most of my Music is on external hard drive and DVDs I've burned so I don't want to add everything to my collection just to sync the music to WP7.
Is there a more convenient way of doing this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just use the USB mass storage bypass method and drag and drop the files and/or folders into the Music folder under Storage. All your music will appear in Zune on your phone.
I'm curious what the general consensus seems to be on WP7 users being forced to use the Zune software (as opposed to whatever they currently use on their computer, such as itunes). Do you think this creates an obstacle that may prevent some potential WP users from buying a WP7 device?
Zune software, for me, has been pretty buggy, sluggish, and problematic. The microsoft zune website only installs the 32 bit version - there's no option for the 64 bit version. I'm not sure if that's the reason for the app running so lamely on my computer and sucking up 20% of my i5 cpu.
Also, using the Zune software requires you not only to reorganize your music library, but to re-rate everything differently due to it having a completely different and limited 'ratings' system.
If Microsoft is interested in making things easy to use, adapting to their software should be as easy as possible. Zune is too big a change from the big music players currently being used by almost everyone.
Zune has been the best transition I've made in a long time. Windows media player is buggy and kinda does what it want, iOS is ram-hungry and too... Apple... i don't know how else to put it. Zune as a whole has been a clean transition and the first music player that almost seems like it knows me.
The transition hasn't been hard for me neither. But my music library is only around 7 gigs big.
My problems with the zune software are the following:
- Autoplaylists not as robust as in itunes. Cannot organize to your liking (only by some of their options).
- Autoplaylists refresh visually (they flicker every 5-6 seconds) and if you scroll down too far in a playlist, items appear as "not found" until the playlist refreshes itself and finds the files. This may sound confusing, but I'm basically saying this: Autoplaylists are very buggy.
-Uncustomizable UI (big fonts, lots of unused space, tons of marketplace links hogging up space).
-App takes up around 170mb, compared to 80mb for itunes. It also hogs your cpu (my i5 is at 15-20%, no matter what 'display' setting I have enabled)
-Cannot sync with anything but a zune or WP. Now that zune is discontinued, this software is officially only good for windows phones.
-Cannot tweak playback volume of individual songs, like you can in itunes.
-Cannot set start/end points, like you can in itunes.
-Cannot edit MANY id3 tag fields, such as comments.
-UI is sluggish compared to the basic text-based itunes UI.
-No global hotkeys - aside from next, previous, and play/pause, there are no shortcuts you can hit when the app is not in focus (such as change media player volume, fastforward, etc).
-When minimized, app toolbar flickers between song name, artist, and album. This is distracting. It should simply display the song title in the toolbar, and thats it. No blinking please.
-No minimize to notification area feature.
-Scrolling up and down too fast or too far is slow and stuttery. I've tried this on different computers that are more powerful and this is just how it is.
-The rating system.
-Disliked songs shouldn't play in a mix unless you manually click them (similarly to unchecked songs in itunes).
-Liked and 'unrated' songs are considered the two positive ratings, while dislike is the negative rating. this is weird but fine. However, if you sort songs by 'rating', it sorts Liked->Disliked->Unrated. What sense does this make?
-The 'check for updates' button doesnt work. Sends me an error. I've reinstalled the app twice now.
-Cannot show date of song, date added, etc columns in ANY of the apps views, other than the 'songs' view. Really irritating. You cant change the order of columns in anything other than 'song' view as well.
This probably isn't the place for this, but thought I'd flesh out why Zune isn't ready to be a proprietary app for a leading smartphone. Zune fans may put up with this, the same way itunes fans put up with itunes on Windows. But the masses won't.
Itunes works great on macs. Zune should work great on Windows. Instead, it feels like I'm using a flash app on a website.
i was using zune before i bought my phone, enough said
I don't even need half of the things op has men..tioned
Sent from my OMNIA7 using XDA Windows Phone 7 App
And I don't need any cable sync.. I am happy with cloud. Period.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1106841
Sent from my OMNIA7 using XDA Windows Phone 7 App
I am using this ****ty app so can't really post long but I will try to answer some of your questions...
I am guessing you are not a Zune pass user... Cosif u use zunepass you will never feel the need to edit id3 tags.
And the concept behind loving or disliking a track is to make ur personalized picks more accurate... The more tracks u like, more accurate picks section become...
UI is visually based and not font based... Gone is ur need to edit fonts... UI is designed so that u browse collection by album ar
Sent from my OMNIA7 using XDA Windows Phone 7 App
I never said I'm against the rating system. I'm saying its got only 3 levels whereas a normal rating system has 6 (the 5-star rating system).
Also, I edit IDv3 tags for songs I already have because the Zune software is only able to sort auto playlists by idv3 tag data.
This will be the case for other people who are importing their entire library from itunes/winamp/whatever to Zune.
That is the whole purpose of the topic. People moving OVER to zune.
Also, the pass is not an option for everyone depending on where you live. Again, this is not itunse - Zune has no right demanding proprietary status imo. It's not up to the task, especially for users outside of the US
Browse albums by their art covers...
You can arrange songs/albums/artists alphabetical or by date added added... There com the date you were asking for... I don't know if it shows exact date or not.. But if you select arrange by date added.. Than your most recently downloaded album is on top...
Sent from my OMNIA7 using XDA Windows Phone 7 App
To you above 4 replies, about the 'sorting'.
This is basic sorting that has been around for forever. Sorting by date in album view is not new, nor not at all what I was talking about. Perhaps reread the post so you're more informed with what I was saying. That would be a good way to go about responding to a topic
Does anyone with some experience with other music management apps have anything to say?
I personally find it brilliant, looks really cool as well with a nice easy UI e.g. big chunky text and its really smooth.
I like the way on the now playing screen you have a giant wallpaper of your albums etc.
Half of those things in that big list someone mentioned sound utterly pointless to me, I mean no global hot keys? Who really needs that. I thought thats what a mouse is for.
I also use itunes on my pc as I have an iPad but I hate the interface
Sent from my TITAN X310e using XDA Windows Phone 7 App
I once had over 70g of nicely organized music UNTIL I got a 20g Zune mp3 player and was forced to use the Zune software...now I've got 120g of mixed up crap.
Zune's a piece of junk, I prefer to use MediaMonkey.
Why you need the 70g of music stored on your PC when you have it all nicely organized on zunepass cloud system for you and you can get it anytime you want and delete it back again...
I don't think Zune desktop is a music collectors device... Its an application to play music, not store and organize your music collection..
I threw away my 60GB of old tiesto collection once I found zunepass... It already has a better better music collection than why I had collected from torrents...
Subscribe to zunepass... And you will see that you are spending more time in listening to music than organizing and collecting it.
Sent from my OMNIA7 using XDA Windows Phone 7 App
???
Not sure I don't mind zune but my issue is not being able to sync with Outlook. I hate the cloud and would perfer to keep my contacts and calender info on my computer not out in the air for any hacker to find on microsoft. I use it because I wanted to upgrade to WP7. If there was a way to sync with Outlook(not Outlook Connector) I would.
Purple11 said:
Why you need the 70g of music stored on your PC when you have it all nicely organized on zunepass cloud system for you and you can get it anytime you want and delete it back again...
I don't think Zune desktop is a music collectors device... Its an application to play music, not store and organize your music collection..
I threw away my 60GB of old tiesto collection once I found zunepass... It already has a better better music collection than why I had collected from torrents...
Subscribe to zunepass... And you will see that you are spending more time in listening to music than organizing and collecting it.
Sent from my OMNIA7 using XDA Windows Phone 7 App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
1. zunepass isnt worldwide.
2. if it is proprietary, then it MUST be up to the task of managing your music library, since it will be replacing itunes, wmp, winamp, and so forth.
3. Cloud requires constant data connection. Again, you're missing the point and living in a bubble.
This proprietary software doesn't have any business being proprietary. It's a great piece of software but it is not up to the task of being run worldwide on people's computers with full support and features.
guyver76 said:
Not sure I don't mind zune but my issue is not being able to sync with Outlook. I hate the cloud and would perfer to keep my contacts and calender info on my computer not out in the air for any hacker to find on microsoft. I use it because I wanted to upgrade to WP7. If there was a way to sync with Outlook(not Outlook Connector) I would.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
even so, email by defintion is cloud. when you email someone their contact and email info is whittled away to the cloud. The cloud is just a fancy term for how modern computers work anyways. So if you're worried about hackers on MS servers, you'd best not use the internet to communicate as any sort of data set over the internet can be intercepted.
well... you DONT have to use it.
i got a windows phone and sometimes i use it but usually i use jetaudio, the only reason for using Zune software for Windows Phone its for updating windows phone AND drag and drop music i want in my windows phone. after that i only use it because i want to.
i use it because its nice, it got a nice interface, and of course its not like you have to use everything from it, like, i use mp3tag to fix some music tag i got. but still you could find tag info from internet with Zune.
but only because you have Windows Phone, automatically you cant use some other player. its only for synching and updating not for playing music or fix tags if you don't like it.
If you want your mp3 player to be synched to your computer, with the same playlists and everything, you have to use the same program. WP doesn't allow you to sync with your winamp playlists or itunes playlists or so forth.
Yes, you could just plop files into your WP in an unorganized fashion if you like. Clearly that isn't the point of view of this thread. Come on now
Smart Playlists in Zune kind of suck compared to iTunes
Good day,
Can anyone with a real live Galaxy Nexus (or even another handset hacked and running Android 4.0) confirm if the music-playing-alphabetically bug STILL exists? If you aren't familiar, let me explain. This problem is well documented and has existed for years in various versions of Android. (Do a Google search for "android music alphabetical order" and you'll see years of posts from all over the Internet, about tons of devices, regarding this issue.)
As briefly as possible, the bug is that media in non-MP3 format (notably M4A and WMA) ignores track numbers in metadata tags and instead gets sorted and displayed alphabetically. I had great hope that this would be fixed in Google Music, but can confirm that this application on my Galaxy S II running 2.3.4 still does this wrong.
To duplicate, just do the following: place a full, correctly-tagged, album in M4A or WMA format on the phone using any method you like (USB Storage or MHL via Windows Media, makes no difference) then attempt to play the album in real life track order. It doesn't work. Android refuses to read the tags on anything except MP3's and thus defaults to alphabetical order. (It ignores embedded album art too, for the record. And just to confirm: YES. All my music is meticulously tagged, and even a tagging app on the Android phone confirms that it sees the track numbers.) It's an M4A- or WMA-and-Android problem.
I won't go on a rant about how utterly inexcusable this is (although it absolutely is) and how my WP7 and iOS devices handle this very simple task just fine. Except: it is inexcusable, and those OS's DO handle this just fine. As someone who frequently listens to albums in real-life track order, and who doesn't have the time to transcode all my music just to satisfy a buggy OS, it honestly renders an Android device nearly useless to me. I'm interested in the Galaxy Nexus, but after purchasing a Galaxy S II and being disappointed with this bug, I'm not inclined to get a Nexus if it can't do this properly either. Can anyone confirm if this works properly on a Galaxy Nexus and/or in Android 4.0?
Thanks much,
Adam
it honestly renders an Android device nearly useless to me.*
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I leave it to someone with an ICS phone or rom to answer your question, but until then you can help yourself with a little app.
Use MediaFix from the market to update your MediaStore database with the correct informations: https://market.android.com/details?id=eu.gorgonloop.MediaFix
gokpog --
Thanks for the reply. I had forgotten completely about the existence of MediaFix. It's even installed on my GS2, but I use the device so sporadically I forgot all about it. (As you may have detected from my post, I just picked it up again for the purpose of checking out Google Music.) I suspect you'd agree with me that such a utility shouldn't even need to exist, but hey, a fix is a fix.
Still, I'm quite interested to see if Google has addressed this properly in 4.0.
Again, thanks,
Adam
Hi
gokpog said:
I leave it to someone with an ICS phone or rom to answer your question, but until then you can help yourself with a little app.
Use MediaFix from the market to update your MediaStore database with the correct informations: https://market.android.com/details?id=eu.gorgonloop.MediaFix
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm going to check this out and see if it fixes the album art bug. I am anal about properly tagging my collection and it burns me that the media services screw up the album art all the time. I mean come on all the mp3 in each album all have the same art, album, and artist and it still assigns random wrong art to albums and tracks. I just don't get it.
EDIT: looks like it only works for mp4. Oh well.
Sent from my Nexus S using Tapatalk
leew1979 said:
I won't go on a rant about how utterly inexcusable this is (although it absolutely is) and how my WP7 and iOS devices handle this very simple task just fine. Except: it is inexcusable, and those OS's DO handle this just fine. As someone who frequently listens to albums in real-life track order, and who doesn't have the time to transcode all my music just to satisfy a buggy OS, it honestly renders an Android device nearly useless to me. I'm interested in the Galaxy Nexus, but after purchasing a Galaxy S II and being disappointed with this bug, I'm not inclined to get a Nexus if it can't do this properly either. Can anyone confirm if this works properly on a Galaxy Nexus and/or in Android 4.0?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Since when does iOS or Android support WMA?
Solved... ish...
It was really an accident that I learned about the WMA bit. Windows Media Player understands and syncs to the phone but insists on conversion of MP4 to WMA, with no way to turn this off -- as verified flatly by an official Microsoft answer. The Galaxy sees and will play the tracks but refuses to read the tags or album art in the WMA file. I would have been willing to (grudgingly) accept using WMA files on the phone, but not at the expense of making the original problem worse. Natch.
After some more research and testing I have ascertained that -- bafflingly -- the problem is directly related to the method of file transfer. MP4 files (but still not WMA as discussed above) which are put onto the phone using the MTP sync protocol get recognized fine, tags, art, and track numbers... All correct. The problem is therefore that files written using USB Mass Storage are the screwed up ones. (Sorry, DoubleTwist, you lose too.) So, in a roundabout way this seems it will be fixed with the Galaxy Nexus in that it only supports MTP. Someone geekier than me, please feel free to speculate or flat-out school me on why this difference exists. I do understand that MTP works at the logical file level rather than the lower block level of Mass Storage, and thus I can understand why the Galaxy Nexus can't support Mass Storage (no way to dismount the single partition)... but back to the Galaxy S II, I am still perplexed at how the phone fully understands files laid down one way but doesn't for the exact same files laid down another way.
So now, for me it's either manual copies in Windows Explorer (sucks, no way to easily and automatically add new albums using smart playlists, as I do with iTunes for my iOS devices and Zune for my WP7 phone) or use a media manager which supports MTP but which also doesn't force WMA conversion. This therefore knocks out WMP and Songbird. So far, then, this means it's either Kies (and hell will freeze solid before I use that garbage routinely) or MusicBee which seems to work fine, but damn, this has been a long way round a problem which shouldn't exist at all... And which would also seem to leave Mac and Linux users still out in the cold, as MTP is basically a Windows-only technology. Bah.
Any other suggestions, anyone?
Regards
Adam
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA App