My music display

[MikeA]

Alrighty folks,

I have no clue where the best place is to post this, so I'm starting here.

I have a 2012 Street Glide with a stock Radio/CD Player. It plays MP3 files. I'm on a different laptop where I take my music in MP3 format and write it out to a CD so I can have anywhere from 100-200 songs on a single CD for my long trips.

The songs have meta tags, and when I burned my music, some of them weren't displaying correctly. The first screen shows Track 1, then it changes to ***3 on the top and ***W on the bottom when it plays a song from "3 Doors Down" called "When I'm Gone" but it didn't do that for all of them.

So I used a program to edit the tags and just load them with Title and Artist, with all the other tags removed. Now every single song is displayed just like the problem song I had earlier.

What does the CD Player display when you have songs from a CD in MP3 format? As in - what tags? Trying to figure it out so I can have some visual display of the song playing on the bike.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[JOSH1]

Get a app called TUNEUP for your computer! I am mac but I think you can get it for p.c as well. It takes your music library and makes it perfect songs, artist, playlist, everything!!

[MikeA]

Um... Yeah. I actually have that tool and don't like it, so I kept using MP3TAG. The question is more technical regarding the HK Radio in the 2012SG and what it really displays.

The most current configuration that works best (though I want better) is to rename the music file with just the song name and to keep some information that won't adversely alter the radio display, I migrated the original file name "ARTIST - TITLE.MP3" into an extended tag called ORIGFILENAME. Below is a play-by-play example...

Step 1: Download file and save it with Artist - Title format (eg... Goo Goo Dolls - Give a Little Bit.mp3)

Step 2: Use MP3TAG to eliminate all tags everywhere, unconditionally.

Step 3: Use MP3TAG to populate tags from the filename format. At this time I did one pass using the filename to the %origfilename% extended tag.

Step 4: Same as step 3 to populate tags from the filename format. This time, I did one pass using the filename top the %origartist% - %subtitle% extended tags (and yes, use the format with the dash).

Step 5: Using MP3TAG, use a tag to populate the filename. This last time I did one pass using the %subtitle% extended tag to rename my file. (PS, the extension stays the same).

This seems to be the best I can do without trying the software update for the radio, which I know if it screws up, I can not get back to where I really am. I learned that even though there are major TMS320 releases, I was told there are so many bug fixes and tweaks that the software download will differ every few weeks.

My last step is to use another tool to copy the files to a CD-R disk. The way my music is set to encode, I am using 112kb quality yielding about 200 songs on a blank "80 minute - 700MB" style CD from Staples. No iPod anything hanging from the handlebars.

Still, I want to see the Song Title on the top and Artist (temporarily or constantly) on the bottom of the display.

Still looking for the holy grail of answers here... I don't like to settle on something like this... but I don't want to spend big bucks to swap out a radio.

[pdvr]

Mike, I had the same problems with mp3's that I bought from Amazon. The Harmon unit would not acknowledge the songs although they played on every other device. Songs that I ripped from CD's played fine. My solution was to convert the mp3's to .wav (standard CD file) and then back to MP3. This stripped out the mp3 info from Amazon and re-encoded it. All songs play fine doing it this way.

When a new song starts the artist name and the song title appear on the head unit. The song title then returns to the clock and the artist name remains. I use an old version of Roxio Media Creator to burn the mp3's to a data disc.

[Danglide]

the key for me was to edit the tags to version 1.1.if there's a higher version tag than that on the mp3's,the HK won't recognize them.

kind of a pain,but I have a separate directory where I copy mp3's to,then edit the tags to ver.1.1,then copy from there to CD.

so what you need is a good tag editor,in my case I use KID3-qt in Ubuntu linux.Some of them still have the amazon tag,seem to play just fine,but I try to strip that out as well.

[MikeA]

Originally Posted by Danglide

the key for me was to edit the tags to version 1.1.if there's a higher version tag than that on the mp3's,the HK won't recognize them.

:
:

so what you need is a good tag editor,in my case I use KID3-qt in Ubuntu linux. Some of them still have the amazon tag, seem to play just fine, but I try to strip that out as well.

Thank heaven I'm not just a Windows guy! I do run an Ubuntu 10.04LTS desktop in the house.

Actually, the one thing I can't seem to do with the Windows program is to force the tags to a different format. Even a wipe out and reload of a v1.1 common tags shows that the format is still v2.3.

Do you see that the HK Display is clean even with keeping the %artist% and %title% tags intact?

Originally Posted by Danglide

:
:

kind of a pain,but I have a separate directory where I copy mp3's to,then edit the tags to ver.1.1,then copy from there to CD.
:
:

What was a pain was experimenting and burning through 12 blank CDs and I still only came up with a half-way decent work-around.

Thanks so much for all of this.

[MikeA]

Originally Posted by pdvr

Mike, I had the same problems with mp3's that I bought from Amazon. The Harmon unit would not acknowledge the songs although they played on every other device. Songs that I ripped from CD's played fine. My solution was to convert the mp3's to .wav (standard CD file) and then back to MP3. This stripped out the mp3 info from Amazon and re-encoded it. All songs play fine doing it this way.

When a new song starts the artist name and the song title appear on the head unit. The song title then returns to the clock and the artist name remains. I use an old version of Roxio Media Creator to burn the mp3's to a data disc.

Good info. Some follow-up questions though...

1. What is the "washed" version of the ID3 Tags you are using?
2. What's an example of one of your file names?
3. What ID3 tags are in use with file name supplied above?

That might help solve the mystery altogether.

[pdvr]

Originally Posted by MikeA

Good info. Some follow-up questions though...

1. What is the "washed" version of the ID3 Tags you are using?
2. What's an example of one of your file names?
3. What ID3 tags are in use with file name supplied above?

That might help solve the mystery altogether.

I believe Amazon encodes in Ver 2. When I convert to Wav and re-encode I am using ID3 Ver 1. This will strip out everything except Artist Name, Title, Length, and BitRate. The file name is the song title. Again, I use Roxio Media Creator. I think the problem with the Harley HK unit is it cannot handle ID3 tags greater than Ver 1.

[<G Man>]

This may be off base, but there are usually different choices in authoring software for burning a data CD or a mp3 CD.

A data CD can be used to burn mp3's onto a disc which can be played directly on most mp3 players.

A mp3 CD is similar to a data CD except that it also includes a m3u file which is a playlist to be read by the mp3 player. The m3u file contains info about the music tracks including the artist and song titles.

I don't have a HD sound system, but it might be worth trying to burn a "mp3 CD" instead of a "data CD" if you have not tried that yet.

[MikeA]

You would think the people from HK are able to help... but most of their tech support is from the Phillipines and they can't do very much in providing any information about the OEM unit.

Before I do that, I want to wait for @danglide and @pvdr for some more information.

[Larbaldi]

Originally Posted by MikeA

Um... Yeah. I actually have that tool and don't like it, so I kept using MP3TAG. The question is more technical regarding the HK Radio in the 2012SG and what it really displays.

The most current configuration that works best (though I want better) is to rename the music file with just the song name and to keep some information that won't adversely alter the radio display, I migrated the original file name "ARTIST - TITLE.MP3" into an extended tag called ORIGFILENAME. Below is a play-by-play example...

Step 1: Download file and save it with Artist - Title format (eg... Goo Goo Dolls - Give a Little Bit.mp3)

Step 2: Use MP3TAG to eliminate all tags everywhere, unconditionally.

Step 3: Use MP3TAG to populate tags from the filename format. At this time I did one pass using the filename to the %origfilename% extended tag.

Step 4: Same as step 3 to populate tags from the filename format. This time, I did one pass using the filename top the %origartist% - %subtitle% extended tags (and yes, use the format with the dash).

Step 5: Using MP3TAG, use a tag to populate the filename. This last time I did one pass using the %subtitle% extended tag to rename my file. (PS, the extension stays the same).

This seems to be the best I can do without trying the software update for the radio, which I know if it screws up, I can not get back to where I really am. I learned that even though there are major TMS320 releases, I was told there are so many bug fixes and tweaks that the software download will differ every few weeks.

My last step is to use another tool to copy the files to a CD-R disk. The way my music is set to encode, I am using 112kb quality yielding about 200 songs on a blank "80 minute - 700MB" style CD from Staples. No iPod anything hanging from the handlebars.

Still, I want to see the Song Title on the top and Artist (temporarily or constantly) on the bottom of the display.

Still looking for the holy grail of answers here... I don't like to settle on something like this... but I don't want to spend big bucks to swap out a radio.

All these are excellent ... and you may want to remove ( eliminate ) all album artwork associated with the file when you are making a *.mp3 disc too ... The HK unit does not like the art and may/will skip over or not even show the track on the disc.

[MikeA]

Originally Posted by Larbaldi

All these are excellent ... and you may want to remove ( eliminate ) all album artwork associated with the file when you are making a *.mp3 disc too ... The HK unit does not like the art and may/will skip over or not even show the track on the disc.

Well, I thought that was assumed in my Step 2 to delete all existing tags unconditionally. I did do significant research before posting here... and I still have more testing to do. Stay tuned.

[Larbaldi]

Originally Posted by MikeA

Well, I thought that was assumed in my Step 2 to delete all existing tags unconditionally. I did do significant research before posting here... and I still have more testing to do. Stay tuned.

Gee ... Didn't mean to step on your toes ... I was taught to never assume anything ... I was just trying to help ... I'm sure that there are more than a few who don't know the difference or correlation between tags and artwork ... If all were aware, this thread probably wouldn't be needed in the first place ... or maybe I just assumed that!

[MikeA]

No... You didn't at all. Was geeking out rather than getting obnoxious, apologies for that.

It's just amazing that there is so much of this research on here and there is nothing really definitive posted as a solution. To that, there are so many posts on here that insist to eliminate the artwork, and I found with the program I started out with, I noticed that the removal of everything using the MP3TAG program included the removal of the artwork. Didn't elaborate on that because of the results I got.

I'm still experimenting with this with whatever free time I have. I have lots of resources available to me, but I'm trying to keep the instructions to a Windows-only solution for most everyone else on this forum to benefit from.

There isn't any good step-by-step instructions I found on this forum - hence the earlier post you found - and I want everybody to benefit from this... preferably in an inexpensive manner so that nobody has to do major "surgery" on their HK Radios. I considered going down that road and I thought this was a significant "bad thing" to do.

I'd rather mess up thousands of file tags than the settings on my ride. I can always use another software tool to locate tags on the internet.

Anyways, I want to get this right for all of us and provide clear and easy instructions (from software downloads to screen-shots of what to click) for everyone to use.

Cheers!!!

[Larbaldi]

We're cool Mike ... Keep up the good work ... Screen shots would be an excellent idea for those who are having problems.