I have a bunch of music files, some of which seem to have incomplete listings. My phone will not play them unless they have artist and album categories showing. How do I add those in so they play right?
It sounds like your file tags aren’t correct or incomplete.
I use Mp3tag which is free. It’s a nice little program. I’m not sure if it supports the music file type that you have. But, it’s worth checking.
Mp3 tag supports a lot of different music formats. It will write new tags to an entire folder of music in one mouse click. That’s very useful if you have folders setup for each Cd that was ripped.
You can manually check the tags on a music file (Win 7) by right clicking on the file and selecting Properties. Click the ID-tag tab. You’ll see all the tag fields and what is currently saved in them. A lot will probably be blank because there’s a lot of optional tags that aren’t used very much.
After rereading the OP it does sound like the same problem I had with my Creative MP3 player. The player uses the Artist and Genre tag to automatically categorize the music under my players menus. The player redoes its menus immediately after I copy my new music and then turn off/on the player. I can pull my music up by artist, genre or Album title.
The track tag is extremely critical because that’s what tells my mp3 player what order to play the songs in. Without that tag you’ll get some very unexpected play sequences.
MP3 tag will resequence your tracks however you want.
Well, crap. Apparently that’s not the problem, because when I open these songs in that program, they list with the artist and title just fine. I really thought I’d figured this one out. Darn.
Songs play fine on the computer. When transferred to the SD card for my Android phone, some show up in the song list but are not playable. When I try to play them, I get an error message. The only thing in common seemed to be that the artist was not listed, but I guess it’s something else. Sad now.
I use the following tags… They are the ones my player requires for its menus. If one is blank the music still plays. It just gets organized under the blank tag. So if there’s 5 cd’s with blank Artist, I’ll see a blank Artist on my player with 5 cd’s grouped under it. Then I know I got 5 cd’s that need retagging. 
Artist
Title
Album
Track
Year
Genre
Okay, I’m officially mystified. I checked a song that would not play before to make sure it has everything listed, and it does. I tried playing it on the computer, and it was fine. I put it on the SD card and it played fine from there, and then disconnected the phone from the computer and it’s still fine. It would not play fifteen minutes ago, and I have changed nothing.
I have no idea what’s going on.
Oh, and apparently adding those files caused it to forget my custom ringtones…
Ok, if a hidden text file called .nomedia is found in a folder, Android Media Player will not scan that folder or any child folders for ringtones or songs. A few times, I have had one of these files created in the root of my sdcard, instantly preventing the media scanner from finding my music or my custom ringtones/alarms.
My suggestion is to get ES File Manager from the Marketplace, set the menu option to show hidden files, and check your SDCard for these files, deleting those you do not want.
Also, you do need to run a media scan in the default Android player to pick up new files.
Si
I think there was a file that says nomedia. I say “I think” because this morning the phone is not recognizing that there is an SD card inserted at all. I tried it in another phone and it isn’t recognized there either. So apparently I killed it somehow? Will attempt reformatting.
Have you tried a different app for listening to music on your phone? I use Winamp on my PC and on my Android phone. It works great on both. There is free version and paid version of Winamp in the Android Market.