A818 problem

[shaneharrison1]

Hey,

I have been trying to sort this problem out for a while now, i love my new a818 but as opposed to my old ipod where everything "just works" this thing is a nightmare. First it wouldn't display album art so i then figured out after browsing these forums that i needed to download some kind of mp3 tag editor. Now the problem is :

I have a mac so i transfer my songs through drag and drop or through a program called synctunes, that syncs my itunes with my walkman. Basically though the walkman picks and chooses which songs it wants to read the tags from. As with each different change of music some albums/artists will be recognised and the others it just relegates to unknown artist, unknown album, unknown genre and unknown year. SO i have 7.3gb of music with only like 20 albums showing. I have at least 500 songs or something in my unknown folder. Its annoying! I know its not sync tunes as basically all synctunes does is drag and drop it for me. Plus normal drag and drop doesn't work properly either...

Please can anyone help me, otherwise i'm going to have to call support or something.

cheers

Shane

[ceres]

Hey,

I have been trying to sort this problem out for a while now, i love my new a818 but as opposed to my old ipod where everything "just works" this thing is a nightmare. First it wouldn't display album art so i then figured out after browsing these forums that i needed to download some kind of mp3 tag editor. Now the problem is :

I have a mac so i transfer my songs through drag and drop or through a program called synctunes, that syncs my itunes with my walkman. Basically though the walkman picks and chooses which songs it wants to read the tags from. As with each different change of music some albums/artists will be recognised and the others it just relegates to unknown artist, unknown album, unknown genre and unknown year. SO i have 7.3gb of music with only like 20 albums showing. I have at least 500 songs or something in my unknown folder. Its annoying! I know its not sync tunes as basically all synctunes does is drag and drop it for me. Plus normal drag and drop doesn't work properly either...

Please can anyone help me, otherwise i'm going to have to call support or something.

cheers

Shane

Okay, as you are on a mac and use itunes there is a very easy solution to your album art problems.

You see, with itunes album art fetched from the its is stored in a seperate database and NOT embedded in the music file itself which is necessary in order to have it

show up on your walkman. Provided that your tags per se (artist - album - song - year) are all right I would advise you to download and run this tool: http://www.tune-instructor.de/0001_Data/TuneInstructor.dmg

The webpage itself is in German. AFAIK, there is an option to set the program itself to English. Anyway, you let itunes dl all the album art it can find, highlight your entire music libraray, bring tune instructor into focus and mark "embed album art". Tune instructur will embed all album art directly into the tag and your files are ready to be transferred to your walkman. I did that myself on more than 8000 tracks and the entire operation was done in a matter of 5 minutes or so. Amazing. You can also use tune instructor to keep your library tidy and well organized. BTW, drag and drop works perfectly under osx 10.5.1. Just make sure you don´t connect your walkman to the usb ports on your keyboard. Those don´t provide enough current.

[shaneharrison1]

awesome thanks for the advice on the album art. I will see if it solves my id tag woes though as that is my major problem. Could it be that my 818 simply isn't creating the library properly each time as sometimes some artists get shown as the proper artist and sometimes they don't. have tried formatting, deleting everything, converting mp3s to aac, but none of it seems to help.

also btw where in tune instructor can i change the language to english, have searched preferences etc, but can't find it.

thanks

[ceres]

awesome thanks for the advice on the album art. I will see if it solves my id tag woes though as that is my major problem. Could it be that my 818 simply isn't creating the library properly each time as sometimes some artists get shown as the proper artist and sometimes they don't. have tried formatting, deleting everything, converting mp3s to aac, but none of it seems to help.

also btw where in tune instructor can i change the language to english, have searched preferences etc, but can't find it.

thanks

You are right. there is no English ui.

Anyway, as I said highlight the entire library, pick Nützliches (useful) and then Einsetzen (embed). Magic will happen.

One more thing: Make sure that you don´t try to transfer aac lossless files bc those cannot be played by your walkman.

Make sure to drop all music files in the "Music" folder on your 818.

Edited December 20, 2007 by ceres

[shaneharrison1]

thanks again, have transferred files of all different sorts, AAC and MP3, they are all not protected, using correct tags and now with embedded album art. BUT with some albums the 818 files it correctly under album and artist and the others it shows everything as unknown except the file name. I have no idea what is going on and i'm going to ring sony when i get back but if someone can help me solve my problem thatd be great. Everything is drag and dropped into music on the walkman and itunes shows tags are intact. I don't know whats going on.