I just want a media player that ignores id3 tags

As part of the TMBG fanclub I got an album of a live show in Ashbury park. The songs weren't new but it was fun to hear the guys chat between sets and I wanted to load it to my phone so the next time we were stuck on a long car ride I could listen to it with Amanda. I copied the files to my phone, putting them into a new folder under the system-designated 'Music' directory.

Last weekend I found myself in a position to listen to those songs during the drive to elkhorn slough. Unfortunately I forgot this is the wrong way to listen to music.

I have an android phone running lineageos (a version of android without tracking or advertisements) and I don't have any google apps including the google app store which is a cesspool of malware and marketing. I rarely listen to music on my phone and I've used the built-in media player to my collection on shuffle. It doesn't matter what the files are called when you listen to everything on shuffle and it was only when I wanted to listen to my tmbg songs in order that I remembered there are no android media players that will ignore id3 tags.

About 60% of the 7000 files in my mp3 collection have missing or misleading tags. Also, the entire collection consists of individual songs - not albums. I had albums once decades ago (before id3 tags even) but I aggressively delete songs and my collection now looks like a cabinet of curiosities; a vast assortment of unique gems. There might be 3500 different artists in my collection.

I've tried some of the automatic mp3 tagging tools that using naming heuristics and online fingerprinting but they don't work. They assume you have a collection of albums (I don't) and they otherwise require manually typing in artists and albums - an exercise I have no interest in that would take weeks of work.

I use filenames to tell mp3s apart. It works well and I hate that the rest of the world has decided we should use invisible metadata to identify media files. You might ask why I don't use playlists. A playlist is just a text file with a list of songs in order - simple right? m3u's have a specific format. You can't just make a text file with a list of songs.

It's insane that I can have a list of files:

tmbg_song_1.mp3
tmbg_song_2.mp3
tmbg_song_3.mp3
tmbg_song_4.mp3

But the media player will only display this as:

(1)_unknown
bad tag
bobby_\;droptables
(99)_''

Because the id3 tags are messed up and the recommended solution is to use a separate playlist file, with it's own unique format, to refer back to the sensible file names.

I spent 20 minutes of our car ride to the slough messing with my media player. It refused to show me the files (because they were in a subdirectory? ) - but I could see them if I looked at the 'recent files' tab. All of the files had tags but the tags don't indicate the order in which they should play (like the filenames do) so there was no way for me to know if I was playing things in order. Eventually I gave up in frustration and deleted the whole album (using the file manager) because I was so irritated I never wanted to feel this way again and there was a chance, some time in the distant future, when I might forget and go looking again for the setting to just show me the damn file names.

posted by na on November 19, 2020 21:08