Anyone else having issues with Xbox Music not recognizing metadata, album a

By Anthony Tosie
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Anthony Tosie Veteran

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There's about 4 songs I have that Xbox Music for some reason refuses to recognize the album art for on my Surface. The problem is all the album art and metadata is correct, but Xbox Music refuses to accept them for some reason. Even in the desktop the album art shows up on the file icons.

Since there's no music app on the desktop you can use, I've tried going back to my PC to clear the art and input new art and it's not working. I went as far as re-ripping one of the CDs that had a file with missing art and making sure the art for all the files was proper, but it's still not accepting it. I cleared the music library, thinking maybe if I took the location of the music out (it's on a microSD card) that it would re-load everything and see the correct info. Except it's giving me the same stuff when I add the folder back to the music directory.

Anyone have any tips? I'm guessing it's caching the info somewhere, which is why it won't recognize that the files and art have been changed. But it's odd it didn't accept the correct art to begin with.

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Anthony Tosie Veteran

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Run it through foobar2000 and use the rebuild function and rewrite the id3 tag. It'll probably work after that.

Well I completely re-ripped one CD and yet it's still appearing with the same old metadata and lacks album art, so I think the previous data was being cached. I also already rewrote the id3 tags for the songs with missing art (forgot to mention that) before and that didn't work.

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coresx

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In my case, it totally went to town on my music. Showed up losts of different metadata when it was perfectly fine on my PC through Zune, WMP.

I guess it updated the data as that setting was ticked on Xbox Music but there was nothing wrong with the metadata before hand. I'll have to double check but sure all tags were perfect.

So, how do you clear the cache metadata before I try and fix what it's showing somehow?

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Anthony Tosie Veteran

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In my case, it totally went to town on my music. Showed up losts of different metadata when it was perfectly fine on my PC through Zune, WMP.

I guess it updated the data as that setting was ticked on Xbox Music but there was nothing wrong with the metadata before hand. I'll have to double check but sure all tags were perfect.

So, how do you clear the cache metadata before I try and fix what it's showing somehow?

Man, if I knew, I'd tell you :laugh: I've done everything I can think of. I fixed the data and art that were showing up incorrectly, I re-ripped one of the albums completely, I removed my collection from my music library, I changed the folder my MicroSD card is mounted to and added the new folder to the library, etc. The app is caching the data from the songs somewhere, because by re-ripping at a different bitrate I created brand new files, and I also slightly changed some of the metadata so it was different from last time.

I had the setting unticked because when I do that it always screws up my data, but I even turned it on and nothing changed.

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Auroka

Posted
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I've been having tons of sorting issues with Xbox Music. Everything was perfect in Zune but now half of my library is a mess.

Now all of a sudden nothing is syncing.

ZAY9M.png

aKjWD.png

More info just leads to xbox.com and says "There's no Web Help topic specific to this error."

Hopefully you don't run into all the problems I'm having. :/

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Anthony Tosie Veteran

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Check to see if those songs are tagged with id3 v2.4

MS software doesn't support ID3 2.4 tags (windows explorer, WMP, and zune don't anyway, I haven't used xbox music but I suspect it doesn't either).

Nope, they're not. They even show up fine in explorer on the desktop in Windows RT.

Now Xbox Music isn't finding about 100 of my songs for some reason. I took the collection out of my library then re-added them and now they're not all being found.

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Eric Veteran

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The RT app doesn't use the same database as the desktop. It builds a new one in protected storage. Same goes for artwork - it downloads it again. You could try uninstalling the app and re-downloading it from the store.

They really need to get on the stick with their in-house apps. They're lousy.

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~Johnny

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The app is caching the data from the songs somewhere,

If you want to know, it's database is located at : {User}\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.ZuneMusic_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\Database as an edb file.

As far as I know, all WinRT music applications get their metadata and album art from querying the Window Search Indexer, so whatever happens you'll need to make sure that it can index the tags you're using properly. And of course, the Windows Search Indexer has a habit of routinely just not indexing some files for no reason in particular.

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jakem1

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The RT app doesn't use the same database as the desktop. It builds a new one in protected storage. Same goes for artwork - it downloads it again. You could try uninstalling the app and re-downloading it from the store.

They really need to get on the stick with their in-house apps. They're lousy.

Yep, I'm not too happy with the music app in particular either. I've had similar problems with metadata, the performance is pretty awful (my music library is pointing to my home server) and the constant pop-up ads that interrupt my music are inexcusable IMO.

Has anyone tried an alternative music player from the store that they can recommend?

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Anthony Tosie Veteran

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If you want to know, it's database is located at : {User}\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.ZuneMusic_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\Database as an edb file.

As far as I know, all WinRT music applications get their metadata and album art from querying the Window Search Indexer, so whatever happens you'll need to make sure that it can index the tags you're using properly. And of course, the Windows Search Indexer has a habit of routinely just not indexing some files for no reason in particular.

Do you think deleting all the files in that folder would cause the app/search indexer to look at the files again for their data when I add the folder back to my music library?

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~Johnny

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Do you think deleting all the files in that folder would cause the app/search indexer to look at the files again for their data when I add the folder back to my music library?

I think the only sure fire way to get the app to ask the search indexer again is to uninstall it and then reinstall it. As for the search indexer itself, you should be able to go into the folders in File Explorer on the desktop and see if it's actually properly indexing the metadata for those files (i.e. searching artist:"Jason Mraz" should return only files where Jason Mraz is in the artist metadata tag, and any files it doesn't pick up aren't being indexed properly). You could force an entire rebuild of the Windows Search Indexer database, but deleting folders should do.

Try maybe moving the files into a non indexable location (like a memory stick), and then moving them back, possibly into a different folder?

Has anyone tried an alternative music player from the store that they can recommend?

The one in my signature I made - it wasn't designed as a music player per s? but people are using it as such over Xbox Music, so your mileage may vary. There's no ads, but it doesn't play DRM'd files or open playlists either. Unfortunately I'd say the metadata pick up would probably be exactly the same though, because we both rely on the Windows Search Indexer to give us all that data quickly (which is frankly the only way to do it without waiting a very long time to manually scan all your files). It should at the least perform a bit better though.

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jakem1

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The one in my signature I made - it wasn't designed as a music player per s? but people are using it as such over Xbox Music, so your mileage may vary. There's no ads, but it doesn't play DRM'd files or open playlists either. Unfortunately I'd say the metadata pick up would probably be exactly the same though, because we both rely on the Windows Search Indexer to give us all that data quickly (which is frankly the only way to do it without waiting a very long time to manually scan all your files). It should at the least perform a bit better though.

Thanks Johnny. I'll check it out.

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Anthony Tosie Veteran

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I think the only sure fire way to get the app to ask the search indexer again is to uninstall it and then reinstall it. As for the search indexer itself, you should be able to go into the folders in File Explorer on the desktop and see if it's actually properly indexing the metadata for those files (i.e. searching artist:"Jason Mraz" should return only files where Jason Mraz is in the artist metadata tag, and any files it doesn't pick up aren't being indexed properly). You could force an entire rebuild of the Windows Search Indexer database, but deleting folders should do.

Try maybe moving the files into a non indexable location (like a memory stick), and then moving them back, possibly into a different folder?

I've tried the moving folders option, but no such luck. The metadata is working correctly in the desktop search, so I don't think it's the files themselves.

I'll try uninstalling the Music app and letting you know how it goes.

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Anthony Tosie Veteran

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Well, it's definitely not my music files that are the issue.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the app and now even more albums have missing artwork -- and the albums that previously had missing artwork now don't. So there's some problem with the app somewhere.

  • 3 weeks later...
Rising Star

Sekyal

Posted
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I've had a recent issue that is troubling and nearly the same. Music apps including Music Info showed all my metadata, now all the album isn't showing, but shows fine in any desktop application. I first noticed a problem that Music Info didn't show my music at all. However even the default Music app has no artwork. Another music app I tried shows no artwork.

I had windows rebuild the index and still nothing. I have no idea what caused this except for possibly a recent update to Windows 8 as that is the last major change that occurred.

I supposed I could see about rolling back that update, but just hate getting into that.

  • 3 weeks later...
Neowinian

JudasI

Posted
Posted

Here's a Microsoft Community/Answers post about a WHOLE list of issues with Xbox Music. More people should get onboard with this.

http://answers.micro...69-4626090289a3

That's a brill list.... MS really need to do something. I've just picked up a Surface, copied a small selection of tunes across and found that it's renamed some of the albums, replaced album artwork, and doesn't appear to be group compilations correctly so they appear as a single album. Not impressed, tbh....

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srprimeaux

Posted
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There's a Match Album Info feature in the Music App, but 1) it doesn't match the correct album half the time and 2) the Music App forgets the album matches when you exit the App and relaunch it.

It's a mess.

I just use the Zune software. If they get rid of it without replacing it with something equal to or greater: I'm going to lose my head.

  • TrevorLahey and Aergan
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TrevorLahey

Posted
Posted

There's a Match Album Info feature in the Music App, but 1) it doesn't match the correct album half the time and 2) the Music App forgets the album matches when you exit the App and relaunch it.

It's a mess.

I just use the Zune software. If they get rid of it without replacing it with something equal to or greater: I'm going to lose my head.

ditto. Can't believe nobody at Microsoft has said anything about it, or there have been leaks about fixing the stuff... I can't imagine anybody saying it works good,,,

Grand Master

Aergan

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I'm beyond ****ed with some of the matches I got lumbered with on the Xbox Cloud. How Rotting Christ gets matched to Nora ****ing Jones is beyond my understanding.

I've since removed my library, removed the app, reinstalled the app and quickly disabled the feature.

Severely limited in functionality for music management compared to Zune - almost a sick joke really.

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