Things I've learned about Jukebox
06-26-2013, 10:08 AM
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Things I've learned about Jukebox
I own a 2013 Audi Q5 (prestige). One feature I really enjoy is the wonderful sound system! But I struggled a bit in learning how to properly load my music into the Jukebox. In case you have run into similar problems, I thought I'd take the time to share what I've learned.
1. Loading via the SD card can take a long time, so be careful how much you attempt to load all at once.
I use a 16GB SD card to load music into Jukebox. It works fine. But you can store a lot of music on a 16GB card. It will load the music in the background, which is nice, but should you have problems with the music files (like those I ran into below), you may find you will have to delete all the music, fix the issues, load up the card again and start over.
I went through this process several times before deciding that I was better off loading my music in smaller chunks, like 2-3 artists at a time (or 10-15 albums at a time). After I load them up I check them in the album browser and the artist list to make sure the songs are correct.
Why wouldn't the loaded music songs be correct? See below.
2. Mysterious album duplicates.
Have you seen this when using the album browser? You know you loaded one album by a specific artist, but when you go to the album browser you see two albums (with the same name) by this artist! How did this happen?
Well, it turns out that several things can cause this, and they all have to do with "music tags".
Music tags are metadata associated with every digital song file. For my purposes here, I will only deal with these specific tags: contributing artists, album, title, and #. You can easily see these tags by looking a directory list of a song file in the Music directory of a PC, for example.
Album duplicates can happen when you load up an album that consists of two CDs by the same artist (e.g., "30-Years of Grand Funk [CD1]" and "30-years of Grand Funk [CD2]"). We look at this and think, "Yeah, two CDs, but one album." Jukebox, however, looks at this differently.
As far as I can determine, Jukebox pays very close attention to song tags (in fact, I think tags are the ONLY thing it cares about). In the example I'm describing here, Jukebox looks at the song tags, sees that there are two CDs by the same artist and says "Aha! These are really two different albums because the album name tags are different!" Jukebox doesn't care that they are both included in one artist's album or that the album name tags both include "30-Years of Grand Funk", instead it interprets the different album name tags as two distinct albums! And what you end up with is two album covers being displayed that appear to be the same, although if you look at the songs each has, you'll see they are really two different CDs by the same artist.
If you are okay with this, fine. I found that I prefer merging both CDs into a single album file and ending up with one album cover in the album browser. Doing this though, led me to discover some other things about Jukebox and music tags. See below.
3. Multiple albums found for single artist, but some only contain one song.
As mentioned above, Jukebox only interprets music tags. So what happens when you have an album that is by one band, but certain songs on that album include a "featured artist"? Well, digital song tags will often list the artist as one thing (e.g., Jeff Beck) for everything on the album but that one song where Jimmy Page was a featured artist. For that one song the tag is different (e.g., "Jeff Beck: with featured artist"). Jukebox, in its robotic fashion, looks at the different song tag and then creates a separate album for that one song! So now you have an album hanging out there with only one song in it! Gah!
The fix for this is to modify the song tags for that album to say the same thing, e.g. "Jeff Beck", thus removing the "featured artist" designation. Jukebox will then interpret all the songs as belonging to the same artist/album, and order will have been restored to the universe.
I will talk about what free tools I use to edit music tags at the end.
4. I loaded an album, but the songs are being played in a different sequence!
Jukebox only pays attention to music tags (yeah, I'm emphasizing this). One important tag to know about is "#". This hashtag represents the number order that a song is given on a particular album. Jukebox only looks at # and ignores the number we may have given songs on an album (e.g., 01-song, 02-song, etc.)!
Most often, the numbers we give a song and the # tag will match, so no harm done. But there are cases where these things will become skewed. How?
Well, the example I gave above fits the bill where I say that I will often merge two CDs into one album file. Typically, the songs on CD1 and CD2 both start with 01. So if you have 6 songs on CD1 and 4 songs on CD2, the # tags for the merged album will look like: 1,2,3,4,5,6, 1, 2, 3, 4. This is a problem! Jukebox will attempt to play the songs in order, based on the # tags. I haven't studied this closely to see how Jukebox sorts this out, other than to immediately notice songs were not being played in the proper order (i.e., the order I wanted them played in), but I do know that correcting the # tags so they are numbered sequentially fixes the issue. A perfect example, perhaps, of a computer doing exactly what it is told to do instead of what we "mean" it to do.
You can also run into this issue if you copy a bunch of songs from different albums into a single file to simulate a playlist and load it into jukebox. Chances are they will all have different # tags. Playing that file will result in something similar to a shuffle experience. If you're happy with that, great, otherwise change the # tags to be in the order you want them played before loading and away you go.
Another situation is when you download music from the Internet (make sure it's legal folks). Tags from downloaded music can often be screwed up. Do the prep work and review the song tags to make sure that artist, album, # are the way they should be before you load them into Jukebox. You'll be happier for it!
5. I loaded an album into Jukebox, but the album cover doesn't show up in the album browser!
Just like song tags, every music file has an associated album cover. Just like tags again, this album cover can be modified. In the vast majority of cases, you won't have to worry about this. But, if you do run into this issue, it's because you didn't check the song tags in Windows Explorer on your PC before you loaded them up! And if you run into this situation, there are free tools to help you fix it. See below.
6. I loaded up my music, but the volume levels are different from one album to another!
This is a common problem, I think. It is easily remedied by a free tool I use, described below.
7. My tools for fixing these problems.
Here are the tools I use for fixing these problems:
A. MP3TAG (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/).
This app is free and will allow you to easily fix the album cover issue and any tag issues as well. It works great!
B. MP3GAIN (http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/).
This is another free tool that will allow you to set a standard volume level, then easily apply that volume level to a song, an album, a hundred albums. Very nice!
I hope you find these lessons learned of some value!
1. Loading via the SD card can take a long time, so be careful how much you attempt to load all at once.
I use a 16GB SD card to load music into Jukebox. It works fine. But you can store a lot of music on a 16GB card. It will load the music in the background, which is nice, but should you have problems with the music files (like those I ran into below), you may find you will have to delete all the music, fix the issues, load up the card again and start over.
I went through this process several times before deciding that I was better off loading my music in smaller chunks, like 2-3 artists at a time (or 10-15 albums at a time). After I load them up I check them in the album browser and the artist list to make sure the songs are correct.
Why wouldn't the loaded music songs be correct? See below.
2. Mysterious album duplicates.
Have you seen this when using the album browser? You know you loaded one album by a specific artist, but when you go to the album browser you see two albums (with the same name) by this artist! How did this happen?
Well, it turns out that several things can cause this, and they all have to do with "music tags".
Music tags are metadata associated with every digital song file. For my purposes here, I will only deal with these specific tags: contributing artists, album, title, and #. You can easily see these tags by looking a directory list of a song file in the Music directory of a PC, for example.
Album duplicates can happen when you load up an album that consists of two CDs by the same artist (e.g., "30-Years of Grand Funk [CD1]" and "30-years of Grand Funk [CD2]"). We look at this and think, "Yeah, two CDs, but one album." Jukebox, however, looks at this differently.
As far as I can determine, Jukebox pays very close attention to song tags (in fact, I think tags are the ONLY thing it cares about). In the example I'm describing here, Jukebox looks at the song tags, sees that there are two CDs by the same artist and says "Aha! These are really two different albums because the album name tags are different!" Jukebox doesn't care that they are both included in one artist's album or that the album name tags both include "30-Years of Grand Funk", instead it interprets the different album name tags as two distinct albums! And what you end up with is two album covers being displayed that appear to be the same, although if you look at the songs each has, you'll see they are really two different CDs by the same artist.
If you are okay with this, fine. I found that I prefer merging both CDs into a single album file and ending up with one album cover in the album browser. Doing this though, led me to discover some other things about Jukebox and music tags. See below.
3. Multiple albums found for single artist, but some only contain one song.
As mentioned above, Jukebox only interprets music tags. So what happens when you have an album that is by one band, but certain songs on that album include a "featured artist"? Well, digital song tags will often list the artist as one thing (e.g., Jeff Beck) for everything on the album but that one song where Jimmy Page was a featured artist. For that one song the tag is different (e.g., "Jeff Beck: with featured artist"). Jukebox, in its robotic fashion, looks at the different song tag and then creates a separate album for that one song! So now you have an album hanging out there with only one song in it! Gah!
The fix for this is to modify the song tags for that album to say the same thing, e.g. "Jeff Beck", thus removing the "featured artist" designation. Jukebox will then interpret all the songs as belonging to the same artist/album, and order will have been restored to the universe.
I will talk about what free tools I use to edit music tags at the end.
4. I loaded an album, but the songs are being played in a different sequence!
Jukebox only pays attention to music tags (yeah, I'm emphasizing this). One important tag to know about is "#". This hashtag represents the number order that a song is given on a particular album. Jukebox only looks at # and ignores the number we may have given songs on an album (e.g., 01-song, 02-song, etc.)!
Most often, the numbers we give a song and the # tag will match, so no harm done. But there are cases where these things will become skewed. How?
Well, the example I gave above fits the bill where I say that I will often merge two CDs into one album file. Typically, the songs on CD1 and CD2 both start with 01. So if you have 6 songs on CD1 and 4 songs on CD2, the # tags for the merged album will look like: 1,2,3,4,5,6, 1, 2, 3, 4. This is a problem! Jukebox will attempt to play the songs in order, based on the # tags. I haven't studied this closely to see how Jukebox sorts this out, other than to immediately notice songs were not being played in the proper order (i.e., the order I wanted them played in), but I do know that correcting the # tags so they are numbered sequentially fixes the issue. A perfect example, perhaps, of a computer doing exactly what it is told to do instead of what we "mean" it to do.
You can also run into this issue if you copy a bunch of songs from different albums into a single file to simulate a playlist and load it into jukebox. Chances are they will all have different # tags. Playing that file will result in something similar to a shuffle experience. If you're happy with that, great, otherwise change the # tags to be in the order you want them played before loading and away you go.
Another situation is when you download music from the Internet (make sure it's legal folks). Tags from downloaded music can often be screwed up. Do the prep work and review the song tags to make sure that artist, album, # are the way they should be before you load them into Jukebox. You'll be happier for it!
5. I loaded an album into Jukebox, but the album cover doesn't show up in the album browser!
Just like song tags, every music file has an associated album cover. Just like tags again, this album cover can be modified. In the vast majority of cases, you won't have to worry about this. But, if you do run into this issue, it's because you didn't check the song tags in Windows Explorer on your PC before you loaded them up! And if you run into this situation, there are free tools to help you fix it. See below.
6. I loaded up my music, but the volume levels are different from one album to another!
This is a common problem, I think. It is easily remedied by a free tool I use, described below.
7. My tools for fixing these problems.
Here are the tools I use for fixing these problems:
A. MP3TAG (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/).
This app is free and will allow you to easily fix the album cover issue and any tag issues as well. It works great!
B. MP3GAIN (http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/).
This is another free tool that will allow you to set a standard volume level, then easily apply that volume level to a song, an album, a hundred albums. Very nice!
I hope you find these lessons learned of some value!
06-26-2013, 11:41 AM
#2
AudiWorld Super User
Thanks for this!; saving this post for when I get the vehicle to U.S. from ED
A prospective wealth of info, and indeed I already sensed that Jukebox had some nuances to it.
Thanks for the time to troubleshoot and then post!
Thanks for the time to troubleshoot and then post!
06-26-2013, 11:58 AM
#4
AudiWorld Super User
Great info, thanks. I would also point out that many of the ID tag issues you encountered would be similar when either loading iTunes songs to the Jukebox from an SD card or from an iPhone through the AMI. I have several multi-artist albums that exhibit separate albums from iTunes that I've been thus far too lazy to modify. I'll get there eventually.
06-26-2013, 12:21 PM
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Great post. Thanks for the tips. I recently bought a 2010 Q5 and havent begun the process of filling up the drive yet. Its high up on my todo list though. Thanks again.
06-26-2013, 12:51 PM
#6
AudiWorld Super User
Be aware of the capacity limitations of the Jukebox: 3000 files on about 20GB of available media space on the hard drive (the rest of the 40GB drive is dedicated to the MMI operating system, maps, etc.). An SD card is limited to 5000 files and both are limited to 1000 files in a playlist.
For those with the MMI 3G Nav+, this thread on the entertainment options might be of interest:
https://www.audiworld.com/forums/sho....php?t=2840907
For those with the MMI 3G Nav+, this thread on the entertainment options might be of interest:
https://www.audiworld.com/forums/sho....php?t=2840907
06-26-2013, 06:57 PM
#7
AudiWorld Senior Member
Did you try to put a number in the "Discnumber" field in Mp3tag and remove [CD1]/[CD2] so that the album names are exactly the same? I'm not sure if the MMI reads the Discnumber tag so that it plays the tracks in the correct order, on the first CD then the second CD, despite them having duplicate track numbers starting from 1 for both CDs.
At home I use foobar2000 and sometimes I do want to search for all songs with an artist, even if that artist was only a featured artist. foobar, iTunes, Windows Media Player and mp3tag make use of an "Album Artist" field, so you can put just the main artist or "Various Artists" here and all of the artists in the regular "Artist" field. That way, all the tracks on the album are still listed together under the album artist. Furthermore, there is a way to enter artists individually. In foobar you separate them with a semi-colon. In mp3tag, use a forward slash " / ". Then you will be able to search or list songs containing an individual artist.
HOWEVER, the MMI does not recognize the Album Artist field, so you will have the problem with each artist combination making a separate 'album' listing. I only have a few albums that I did like this, so I just change them back to only having the main artist when I copy them to a SD card to import to the jukebox.
So a compromise is to put the featured artists in the "Comments" field. foobar and most programs (but not the MMI) should be able to search this field, but you won't be able to show the featured artists on the regular library screen.
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06-28-2013, 04:27 PM
#8
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I appreciate the information. I have quit using the jukebox as it has all of the issues you mention. Instead, I just copy the music to SD cards and play it from there. The folders are preserved as I want them not as order by some embedded tag.
06-29-2013, 11:38 AM
#9
AudiWorld Super User
The only things you lose with an SD card vs the Jukebox are the Album cover flow and being able to randomize all songs on the drive vs only in an album on the card. On the other hand, as you wrote, you avoid the tagging issues with the SD card. Sonically, as far as I can tell, they are identical due to the digital domain.
