[holzlondon]

Has anyone else imported music manually, switched on the xbox live service, and had a handful of mp3 tags completely screwed up?

It's a minor issue, but a little annoying. I ended up re-importing everything, leaving the xbox service off, and it leaves them in peace, but i kind of liked the artist profiles and imagery.

BTW, using WP8 on a Lumia 920

[ramrac]

Isn't there an option to turn automatic metadata download on and off? Zune has that, every other music program has that.

[AngryNil]

Happened with the Zune software too. Just turn off automatic retrieval of metadata if possible, if not you might have to disable any sync to Xbox Music.

[thirdsun]

Same problem here. It seems as if the service has different versions of the same album and splits your albums even if the tags have been fine before. I also noticed that this happens a lot with lower-/upper-case letters in albums which turn into 2 albums only distinguishable by a "the" or "The" in the title.
This behavior can be avoided by turning off the option of "completing" meta data, but then you won't receive artist info and pictures.

Also my library which is Apple lossless encoded (Mac user) gets transcoded during syncing without any option to avoid this.

These two issues make me think about returning the Lumia and staying with the iPhone as I'm serious about music.

[paulm187]

Same problem here. It seems as if the service has different versions of the same album and splits your albums even if the tags have been fine before. I also noticed that this happens a lot with lower-/upper-case letters in albums which turn into 2 albums only distinguishable by a "the" or "The" in the title.
This behavior can be avoided by turning off the option of "completing" meta data, but then you won't receive artist info and pictures.

Also my library which is Apple lossless encoded (Mac user) gets transcoded during syncing without any option to avoid this.

These two issues make me think about returning the Lumia and staying with the iPhone as I'm serious about music.

I havn't got my new phone yet but according to this post http://forums.wpcentral.com/windows-...ion/201922.htm WP8 can play WMA lossless. So you could convert your music to this format to play as lossless audio on your Windows Phone. Unfortunately ALAC is Apple's proprietary lossless format and WMA Lossless is Microsoft's so they are not going to work in each others devices without transcoding.

[igoramadas]

Has anyone else imported music manually, switched on the xbox live service, and had a handful of mp3 tags completely screwed up?

It's a minor issue, but a little annoying. I ended up re-importing everything, leaving the xbox service off, and it leaves them in peace, but i kind of liked the artist profiles and imagery.

BTW, using WP8 on a Lumia 920

Not sure about Xbox Music but the Zune client has its own database and won't update existing ID3 tags. I know this because my old Zune library was organised with updated album/track/cover art details, but if I open the same files on VLC or foobar2000 it will show different and outdated information.

Will confirm if Xbox music has the same behaviour when I go back home tonight.

[thirdsun]

I havn't got my new phone yet but according to this post http://forums.wpcentral.com/windows-...ion/201922.htm WP8 can play WMA lossless. So you could convert your music to this format to play as lossless audio on your Windows Phone. Unfortunately ALAC is Apple's proprietary lossless format and WMA Lossless is Microsoft's so they are not going to work in each others devices without transcoding.

Tell me about it, Apple Lossless certainly isn't the holy grail when it comes to support on other players and devices, but WMA lossless is even worse. I'm still a mac user and I don't see that changing anytime soon, so WMA would drive me even further away from any common standard. Of course, the answer to those issues would be FLAC and while I understand that lossless audio is a niche interest to the general public, I have a hard time accepting that Android seems to be the only platform supporting it. I mean, it's not like supporting a codec, that is the de facto standard in lossless audio, is difficult to implement or requires a lot of ressources - this is just a case of not caring and applies to Microsoft and Apple alike.

Despite this frustation, I'd say I could probably live with lossy on a phone and an, at best, decent DAC, but then there still the issue with messed up tags. Without those messy tags I won't get artist pictures, which makes my lockscreen, music app background and live tile literally fade to gray instead of showing those nice looking photos.

And then there's the issue with Podcasts - I'm not from the US which means I won't see podcasts in the store. The third-party podcast apps from the store are awful - at least to a former Instacast user like me.

These things may seem minor to most people, but it adds up and makes me wonder if I shouldn't just take the easy path and stay with my iPhone, iTunes' lossless support and Instacast on iOS - despite gradients, drop shadows and fake leather backgrounds. This is a shame since the Lumia and WP8 itself are beautiful. In my opinion Microsoft did very well here, but surprisingly screwed up the easy parts. Correct audio meta data, lossless audio support, global availability of podcasts and Airplay-like system-integrated DLNA support should be a no-brainer to a company like Microsoft.

[Major]

The new Windows Phone app leaves much to be desired. I really don't like how I have no album art anymore. I much rather use my old Zune software, which worked beautifully. They should issue a patch to make it compatible with WP8.

[The ZennyBoy]

So I'm frustrated in the same area as you all who "appreciate" album art (and by that, I mean can't live without it, lol).
What I noticed though is that it's a hit or miss aspect to getting it to display the album art. I tried downloading the same album to my phone employing several different methods -- even repeating the same methods at times -- and oddly enough, sometimes I would get art to show up on the phone. Sadly it would only be a few tracks on the same album (some with art/ some without).
This saddens me. Especially given that fact that I can't even manually enter every detail just to make album art and metadata download correctly -- not even if I wanted to, and I do want to (yes, I'm that meticulous).
:(

[BGBrereton]

I've just got a Lumia 920 and am finding this behaviour REALLY annoying! In some cases it replaces the album title, album art and artist name, all apparently based on fairly common track title. I find myself looking at the listing thinking "what's that track - I don't own that". The solution is to turn off "Connect with Xbox Music" but then you lose all the other info. I don't know why it has to try, and fail, to be so clever. Other music playing apps happily use the existing data on the tracks and use that to look up the artist, etc, for additional info. I had originally wondered what the point of Nokia Music app was for but I'm quickly realising that it "just works" compared to Xbox Music.