Any audio file tag experts here?

[Ancientangler]

Here's a puzzle: I have a Spotify playlist containing the cover songs for my band and I want to mix in some of our originals so everything's in one place. I know how to add what Spotify calls "local files" - the mp3s which live on my Android phone or tablet, but when I go to find them, Spotify doesn't recognize the names of a few of the tracks. These tracks show in Spotify with only numerical identifying info like 204758_8455. If I use VLC, Poweramp or the built-in player which came with the phone, they have no problem recognizing the names I see in my file manager.

So....I installed an audio tag editor and inspected the problem files. None of them show the numerical ID which Spotify sees. They show actual song titles. These files were all supplied by our band leader and they were created over a period of years. I have no info about how they were done.

I have no idea whether tag editors vary in their effectiveness. If anyone has one they've used on an Android device or an Ubuntu (Linux) computer, light me up with ideas. Obviously, I can still put the errant files in my Spotify playlist, but it would help to have titles that work!

 

[Wood and Wire]

Try using something like iTunes, right click on the track (I take it you're saying that the actual mp3 file name is "204758_8455" ?), and select "get info" / "song info".

Once the info editor appears, you can go to the tab that lets you edit the metadata, with fields such as song title, song number, disc number, artist, composer, album etc.

 

[Karl Kaminski]

have you checked other online streamers to see if the titles appear?
Possibly Spotify has 'their own' method of denoting/creating metadata for their platform?

 

[Aloe]

well, it seems like you need to set id3 tags, not rely on filenames.
generally you can set them in almost any audio player, including vlc.

in vlc do ctrl+i, set artist, track name (album and year are optional) and click 'save'. that's it.

 

[JamesCarter]

Sounds like an ID3 tag issue, not a missing-info issue. Spotify's pickier than VLC/Poweramp about which ID3v2 version it'll actually read — some encoders write v2.4, Spotify wants v2.3, and it just falls back to the filename instead of erroring out. Given the files came from different years/tools, that'd explain why only some are broken.
On Ubuntu I'd try Kid3 (sudo apt install kid3) — has a batch mode so you can convert the whole folder to ID3v2.3 in one shot instead of digging through each file.