Brad Poulton

This blog post is based on Music Manager version 1.0.23.1334 and Windows 7 64-bit.

I want to share my experiences with Google Music. I started out just trying to upload all of my music without preparing any of it. This turned out to be a big mistake. First, Google Music Manager stopped uploading my songs after about 150-200 songs and would never recover even after a restart of the computer. Second,  I had albums with incorrect cover art and songs with wrong titles. It was a mess. If you are at that point, then don’t worry you can still recover from this!

1. Clean Up Your Music with TagScanner

http://www.xdlab.ru/en/download.htm

My first recommendation is to forget about Google Music until after you have fixed the tags in your music. Regardless of what music file type you use (MP3, WMA, etc) your music will have tags describing the artist, album, and other information. I used two tools to fix all of the information in these tags. My first recommendation is TagScanner. Most tag editors can download the tag information for you, but TagScanner does it slightly different by allowing you to search for more than just the album name. The other program I used was MP3Tag. It worked very well and I actually used both programs. I used MP3Tag to put each song into its own folder based on artist name and album name. Then I used TagScanner to download the tag information and the album cover art. I attached the cover art to each file not just to each album folder. With TagScanner I was able to import over 1,000 files and sort them by artist, etc. I removed inaccurate and unnecessary information like comments and encoded by data. I was also able to change the name of the file so it matched the tag information. I learned after uploading the music that you need to change a setting in TagScanner to force it to save to all tag types (APEv2, ID3v2.3, ID3v1.1). TagScanner can read from APE and ID3 tag types, but if you are not careful it will only write to one tag type. In the upper right area of the window, I changed the setting from “Auto” to “Complete” which makes it write to all three tag types. This way Google Music will always read the correct information and not an outdated APE or ID3v1 tag. If you change your tag information Music Manager will see it as a new song!

2. Start the Uploading

After I got a large chunk of my music cleaned up and tagged properly, I started uploading all 1,000+ songs that were ready. Once again, the Music Manager software failed to upload all the songs. After doing some research, I found out that the logs for the software are stored at:

C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Google\MusicManager

I used Notepad++ and its silent refresh feature to watch the logs as Music Manager attempted to upload songs. By reviewing the logs and reading Google Group posts, I learned that Music Manager has problems with certain WMA files and will not upload them. To help figure this out I upload the songs in artist sized chunks. I would upload all songs from one artist and if a WMA file was in the folder, it would not get uploaded. I plan on converting the offending WMA files to MP3 and attempting to re-upload them.

Update: I was successful in converting the WMA files to MP3 and uploading them that way. I used Free MP3 WMA Converter to do the conversion. It kept some of the tag information, but loses the cover art. I would recommend going back and updating the tag information in TagScanner before uploading. I also choose the “Remove original file after conversion” option to prevent duplicates.

http://www.koyotesoft.com/audio-software/free-mp3-wma-converter.html

3. Post Upload

After I did all of this work, I figured Google would meet me half way and use the tag information I so painstaking entered. I am now noticing on some of my songs the tag information is being stripped or not used. I have 20 or so songs that after being uploaded have no album or artist information. I finally realized that TagScanner is setup by default to read APE (tag type) format and write to whatever tag type is available. So Google must have an order to how they read in the tag information. It must start with one format and ignore the other tag types. In TagScanner you can read one type of tag and write to another. So I had set TagScanner to read APE, then ID3v2, then ID3v1, but not write to APE. So I was reading one tag and then not writing to it. I updated the previous section to reflect this. Then I uploaded more songs and noticed that my previously uploaded songs were being re-uploaded! By changing the tag information, Music Manager “forgot” that those songs had been uploaded.

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