Zune Software question

[QueBert]

GF has a Zune and her software does that picture slidshow thing for a lot of her artists. I don't have a Zune but I installed the software and am not getting the slideshow. I've tried a bunch of songs, I looked 5 of them up in the marketplace and when I play the sample the slideshow works. My tags are all uniform with no extra info outside of artist/album/track title/track #. She doesn't have a Zune Pass and none of her music was bought from the marketplace. Why the hell am I not getting images?

 

[ockky]

do your albums have cover art?

 

[QueBert]

do your albums have cover art?

Yes, well every album I could find covers for. When I play I get the cover art wallpaper thing, but it never transitions into the artist pics. I noticed on my GF it's very random sometimes. Like it doesn't care about the artist name and uses the song titles. I just played a song I ripped a few weeks ago from a CD, nothing. my ID3 tag is perfect, I went into the marketplace, played the 30 sec clip and the pics started to come up after a few seconds. This is madness

*EDIT* yeah, I found a song it worked on, but it didn't work on another song on the same album, the tags are identical except for track title. Unless my computer is weird, it doesn't work based off artist name. Which sucks, it worked on other songs too from the same artist, but it's very random which ones it works with.

 

[QueBert]

*BUMP* in the hopes somebody knows about this and can explain it to me.

So I figured out it's not based off artist name, I *thought* it was based off how many plays the song has. So the popular ones showed the images. As I stated my tags are as uniform as I can get. And my 2nd theory seems to be correct, because when I play a song where pics come up, it'll display a play count for the song for everyone who has a Zune account.

But I have played songs that should easily have 100K+ plays and I get no pics and no play count info. So I'm back to square 1 trying to figure out how the stupid Zune software decides when and when not to show pictures. I played about 100 songs from 4 artists and I literally got pictures maybe 15 times. With no real reason why I'd one for one song, and the next song by the same artist on the same album nothing.

 

[Gooberlx2]

It may be best to use the "find album info" feature for your albums (right-click in album view), and use the info provided in the Zune Marketplace. Perhaps spelling discrepancies in track titles, etc. could prevent the slide show.

 

[QueBert]

It may be best to use the "find album info" feature for your albums (right-click in album view), and use the info provided in the Zune Marketplace. Perhaps spelling discrepancies in track titles, etc. could prevent the slide show.

I've done this, I just did it again, I looked up an album I ripped from CD a month or 2 ago. It came right up in the marketplace. Now I don't know if they have a naming criteria for songs they use. I can't seem to look at info that deep in the marketplace. But here's how all my mp3's are named

\artist\album\track #-track title.mp3

My ID3 tags only have artist, album, track number and genre. I don't have any tracks from the marketplace to dissect and see what tags they use and don't use.

if anyone here has a song from there and can post what fields they use in the tags that would be great. A song just played on my PC with no slideshow but the same song in the marketplace did.

 

[QueBert]

I'm not 100% why, but it started to work. Too bad most of my music is from artists not nearly popular enough to have pics on there. But for the ones I do it's a nice touch.

 

[Gooberlx2]

I do know that Zune Software and WMP handle tags and and organization pretty much the same.

File organization goes as ".../Album Artist/Album/Track# Title.xxx" (no hyphen between track # and title)

They use the "Album Artist" tag to label the artist for the album. "Artist" is usually filled with the same thing, but if the album artist tag is empty then Zune/WMP may not recognize the artist correctly.

For soundtracks/compilations album artist gets filled as "various artists" and the track's artist is put in the "artist" tag. That way the organization and sorting still works in the software, and you get to see the real artist for each track.