Music Collection Issues

Why resurrect this very stale thread?  We're on 3.0 now and it's significantly different than 'a year ago.'  xqwzts, if you want to flush your collection due to possible corruption... use the Zune media collection reset tool.  If you have other specific unique concerns, post a new thread with details.

This is still broken on the latest version.

Bought a CD, ripped it through the Zune software but it pulled some incorrect data [not an issue since I always re-tag all my music using MP3Tag]
Re-tagged the music, cleared all the tags so only the id3 v2.3 UTF-16 ones exist. The metadata is definitely correct and it shows up correctly in Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player, and MP3Tag.

The Zune software still shows the incorrect tags.
Deleting ZuneStore.sdf and recreating it made absolutely no difference. I've also found something else "interesting": even though I have no monitored folders [I manually add each album to my library] upon clearing the sdf database the Zune software automatically detected and added 180 mp3s. How did it know where to look if these aren't monitored folders? Surely the sdf data is not being completely cleared or the data is not all held in that one file... which could explain why deleting it doesn't solve the bogus metadata problems.

I'm still on my 1st gen Zune30... but I know that I for one won't be upgrading. We're in the 3rd generation now and the situation hasn't improved, the complaints all us early adopters had a year ago are all still valid, the team is always silent, the promising hardware is effectively crippled by horrible software and a baffling and alienating corporate policy - the future doesn't look much brighter either.

I knew it had to be something simple!!  it looks like this 2.5 update fixed some other issues too!!!   I will wipe my Zune and resync  later on this evening and see how it goes...  I thought the metadata option was there if I changed metadata, never dawned on me that it was you guys...  Awesome!!!!!   (if it works, I am sceptical but it makes perfect sense.)   Thank you in advance because I am sure this will be the cure!!     

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Bye

You can simply turn off the updated missing metadata in settings and we won't go get metadata for your files.

Just so you understand the process after you have moved the database to the side. We walk the watched folders looking for music. We add the music and read the metadata out of the file headers. Once we have that metadata we lookup using the same metadata lookup engine WMP uses(WMIS)...to find out which albums these tracks match. Depending on the data in the header of these files, this is done by uniqueIDs that are in the file, by a Table Of Contents(TOC) from the CD it was ripped from, or those aren't available...simply the text(using algorithms to match similar text) of the metadata in the file(album name, album artist, track name, track number, track duration, etc).

When the data comes back we will fill in missing data, but don't overwrite existing data(unless you have changed the defualt by checking the overwrite existing metadata in settings). Also if you use our UI to change the metadata by hand, we mark that it was user edited, and write that change to the file's metadata.

The one peice that becomes troublesome is that in some cases users can have a uniqueID in a file from WMP...but that UniqueID isn't the correct ID for that track and results in very different track metadata coming back.

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Zach Johnson Zune Client Development Lead .: This posting is provided as-is with no warranties, no rights :.

Well, I purchased the 2nd Gen 80 GB, and I love my Zune more than life.  This softwre however is very trying.  I have over 30 GB of music that I sync'd and I wasn't upgrading from the old version  I went straight to the latest version.  When displayed in the Zune Software and on the Zune the collection is very jacked up.  And I have spent very extensive time and even bought a tag editor so I could make sure all of the "metadata" in my collection is correct and I really thought the issue was under the "album artist" field so for each folder I have I would make sure it was a single artist instead of including the contributing artist.  For instance Tupac seems to be the one I am having the most trouble with.  So I change all the artist fields to Tupac, The genre to Rap, and then I name the albums.   I clear my zune,  I rename the entire Zune Database folder, and reimport the library, and then it freaks out again,  I get under artist listings things like 2 pac, or tupac shakur, or tupac and the outlawz.  But in my My Music folders under Tupac there is no metadata with any of this information.  So I think what is happeneing is once the software recognizes an album it connects to the market place and downloads its own metadata to associate with the albums...  This is just getting very old.  I have tried everything.  It even changes the genre to what ever the freak it wants to make it.   So for instance everything in my collection has been given either Rock, Alternative, Indie, Rap, Country, or Audio Book for a genre.  Yet after sync'ing i have 400 different genres...  I feel like all of this time I am putting into making sure the Meta data is correct or set up the way I want it so my collection is organized the way I think it should be is wasted time.  Oh its great for playing music off the PC or streaming to my XBox 360, but the Zune is like the "jerry's kid" of my electronic world...   Please help or fix this issue..  Un tie your market place somehow.. or allow us to copy things directly to the darn zune with out 3rd party software.  I won't even bring up the fact that I take wmv videos or mp4 videos and it still converts them taking 2 hours to do so.  Here is a novel Idea, its the microsoft Zune correct?  How about we use WMP to sync.....  Ohhhh wow....  Because WMP sees my collection the way I want it to... And well I guess that would be too easy.  I will keep my zune in hopes that this will get fixed or someone figures out  way to hack it so I can use it the way I want. 

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Bye

Unless you were upgrading a Zune 30, you will not have that file. That was the old filename used by v1. Hope that help.

David

I'm not able to find CurrentDatabase_365.wmbd I can find ZuneSotre.sdf though.

The only problem is YOU CAN'T EVEN GO IN AND FIX IT MANUALLY(strike that; the biggest of many problems). I now have over 200 songs that are listed as various artists so on my zune i cant find them because they are also on some crazy named album i have never heard of. At least i cant figure it out and im 30 years old and have been using computers since the apple 2c so im not a moron on them and i shouldnt have to be a computer tech to be able to change the name of an artist or album or song.  I agree with you all THIS SUCKS!!!!

Not working. I followed the steps for Vista and no good. The path leads nowhere for me, The files CurrentDatabase_365.wmdb and ZuneStore.sdf  are nowhere to be found. I searched for them (and variations) with no luck. I even uninstalled Zune and downloaded it again, hoping the fix was in a newer version but again nothing. Anyone got any ideas?

so uh yeahh...im following the directions, I cant find the CurrentDatabase_365.wmdb file.....did i miss something?

ok i fixed most of the issues i had with multiple songs. no matter what i do i can't change ONE song from continuing to add it self everytime i connect the device.  i have followed all the ideas, i checked all the tags, downloaded media monkey made sure the tags were correct. 

i even deleted the song and redownloaded it,  and it still goes.

this is really annoying now.

Can some please explain to me why out of the blue my Zune has decided that none of the songs in my library IN the Zune suddenly don't exists??  I'm talking about a song that it just played a few min ago too.  What the Hell type piece of crap did Microsoft send out as an update??  As a buisness analyst I would be fired for approving this type software to be released. 

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Right now the way I feel about Zune, it SUCKS and I wish I had bought an iPod instead!!!!!