Copying Music from B2

[Mike Rawson]

Hi All,

I've had my B2 for 6 months or so, and have now finished ripping my CDs.  I've bought a shiny new remote hard drive and done a full backup, which worked fine.

However, possibly in my ignorance, I thought I would be able to simply plug that into my PC and copy some of the music to my Android phone.  Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to work quite so easily!   After much faffing, I realised there was also the option to do an export, so I tried that, but it appears to be the same.

When I look on my PC, everything is laid out in the file structure that I expect to see, namely music/artist/album/tracks.  When I copy things to my phone, however, different things seems to happen.  Sometimes all is fine, but sometimes I am getting Unknown Artist at track level rather than the actual artist's name.  

It gets much worse with albums that weren't found in the search when I ripped them, and which I renamed on the web UI.  When I copy these, I get "Album 141" (for example, and the tracks are just track 01, track 02, etc.  

Any ideas, anyone?

Thanks, 

Mike

[Daniel Taylor]

You've encountered the basic difference between the way the B2 keeps track of the music (by folder and track names) and how some other music systems do it (by metadata, aka tags).  The B2 does not use the tag info.  So if you want to access the music by a music system that needs the tag info, you may have to add it yourself.  I say "may" have to add it because I had thought that the B2 would write some minimal tag info when the disc wsa ripped.  But apparently this doesn't happen all the time.  There is a function on the B2 to Retag Music (Maintenance menu), but it is documented as experimental.  If you want to be 100% certaint that the tags are as you want them you have to add it yourself.  There are many programs for your computer that will let you do that.  Once of the most popular is mp3tag (which also works for FLAC files) which is a free download and is a great program to have.

[Mike Rawson]

Thanks for that Daniel.  I suspected it was something along those lines (let's face it, life is never straightforward!).  I shall have a look at mp3tag.