[awardwinningdan]

I love the the Blue and Me MP3 player in the Giulietta, but it does seem to be a bit fussy about what it plays and what it doesn't. I have a USB flash drive loaded with around 15 albums. All of these are MP3, but some of them aren't found by the Blue and Me player - annoying!

I wondered if anyone had experienced the same problem, and if you've got any suggestions? Bitrate possibly?

I purchase MP3s through Amazon, and although some of these work, others don't. Maybe it just has it's own choice in music? For example it loves Daft Punk's Tron soundtrack, but Adele not so much..

 

[WTFH]

What is the directory structure of the albums? How many tracks are there in total on the drive? What bit rate are they ripped at?

 

[rprout]

MP3 fix

The problem you have is due to tags and filenames. The Blue and Me system is very very fussy. Issues include the length of filenames, the length of tags, invalid characters in filenames and tags amongst other problems. Go and buy the program from this link. http://www.spoelstrait.nl/BluMeUSB
You put the music on your USB stick, then run the program and it will fix everything for you. Cost is around 5 euros.

PS - This is not my program - I purchased it after struggling with the same problems you have and can vouch that it works perfectly.

 

[canelli]

Thanks for posting that link. I'll also have a look at it.

I copied folders across to my USB stick directly from itunes and it seems to work ok. The only annoyance I had was that even though each song started with the track number it still played them in alphabetical order. It will be interesting to see if this program solves that mystery.

We have only had the G for 5 days and absolutely loving it so far .

 

[PR]

Great, I will give that a try. I put a load of songs on a mem stick for my recent trip to Italy in the Bravo, it only ended up playing about half of them, got very repetative! :lol:

 

[awardwinningdan]

What is the directory structure of the albums? How many tracks are there in total on the drive? What bit rate are they ripped at?

There are around 12 albums, each with 11-18 songs in. They aren't ripped, but downloaded straight from Amazon. The bitrates vary from track to track, but I could'nt see any pattern emerging where a certain bitrate worked.

The structure is sperate folders for each album, with tracks in each folder - nothing more complex than that.

 

[awardwinningdan]

The problem you have is due to tags and filenames. The Blue and Me system is very very fussy. Issues include the length of filenames, the length of tags, invalid characters in filenames and tags amongst other problems. Go and buy the program from this link. http://www.spoelstrait.nl/BluMeUSB
You put the music on your USB stick, then run the program and it will fix everything for you. Cost is around 5 euros.

PS - This is not my program - I purchased it after struggling with the same problems you have and can vouch that it works perfectly.

Looks interesting. It seems that it is not the bitate which is the issue then, but to do with length of tags, filenames etc. I assume there must be a way to change these manually, instead of BlueMeUSB?

 

[canelli]

Thought I'd report back on using the BluMeUSB program.

I copied album folders from itunes directly onto a USB stick and they palyed ok in the car except that they played the songs in alphabetical order instead of track order. I paid 5 euro, downloaded the BluMeUSB program and tried it on the USB stick. The problem was that it only looks for MP3s and deletes everything else. As a result it deleted all the itunes m4a files!

A quick google search found a free program to convert m4a files to MP3 so I cleaned up the USB stick, recopied the folders from itunes, converted them to MP3 and ran BluMeUSB again. It cleaned up all the extra files ok but one of the albums was a compilation so BluMeUSB created a new folder for each artist and then a sub folder with the album name containing another folder with the song. It took about 20 minutes in windows explorer to reorganise the songs back into the one folder.

One a positive note though, the songs now play in track order and MP3 file sizes are smaller with no noticeable deterioration in sound quality.

Hope this helps someone not to make the same mistake.

If you wanted to clean up the files manually, it might be worthwhile going into the properties of each MP3 and editing the song title (removing invalid characters and adding the track No. at the beginning) and removing the comments. I noticed that after I ran BluMeUSB the comments just said BlueMeUSB ver **.

I'm starting to love the bose sound system - tested it out with the remastered Queen Greatest Hits I album and it really rocked!

 

[GhostyDog]

An alternative to the paid for app would be tagscanner, you can use this to change the ID tag version to one more compatible with blue&me and it will also go away and fill in missing information from the internet

 

[rprout]

For a free program that can edit tags try using foobar on the PC. However I quickly came to the conclusion that the amount of time it would take me to manually check and modify almost 2000 filenames and tags compared to paying 5 euros for a program that would do it for me was a bit of a no brainer. After all if the car had cost 5 euros extra but had played all of your tracks without an issue you wouldn't have worried about the increase in price.

 

[Guest]

Mp3Tag works fine for this, is automatic and is free.


I can supply an export of the convert actions/scripts I used to anyone who needs them

 

[Guest]

Mp3Tag works fine for this, is automatic and is free.

I can vouch for MP3tag too. If you have ANY organisational structure to how your music is stored you have a lot of control over how to automate building the tags/metadata

 

[awardwinningdan]

Ok. So I used MP3tag to make the tags as simple as possible, took out alll non-standard characters out of the titles, replaced spaces with underscores and still nothing! So I changed the bitrate and sample rate to match the figures in the blue and me manual. Still no luck. I'm stumped!

 

[mathew]

OMG this sounds well complicated for technophobes like me. I may just pay some street urchin to do it for me...lol

 

[Guest]

You called!

Will code for food

 

[mathew]

wow - just food. Fine - any requests?

 

[dpat]

Mp3Tag works fine for this, is automatic and is free.


I can supply an export of the convert actions/scripts I used to anyone who needs them

would be nice thanks Nev as I have tried Magic MP3 tagger and this did nothing at all for a lot of effort. I don't find MP3Tag very intuitive however

For some reason this 159 has problems reading the same USB drive that worked perfectly in my previous two 159's

 

[FR290]

Quick question guys but will this get around this problem?

Blue&Me iPod iPhone Adaptor | Blue And Me Adaptor

 

[Stewart1]

Mp3Tag works fine for this, is automatic and is free.

I can supply an export of the convert actions/scripts I used to anyone who needs them

Hi Nev

I've been using Mp3Tag for a while - would be keen to see your scripts.

 

[Alfred TI]

Quick question guys but will this get around this problem?

Blue&Me iPod iPhone Adaptor | Blue And Me Adaptor

Only needed in 2010 G's (and v early 2011's i believe) if you are using an ipod touch or iphone. I believe the op is trying to play music off a USB stick.