I imported a couple dozen albums to the onboard Music Collection (2017 F60) last week from USB (each album was in their own named folder, with a folder.jpg cover image, and all songs were properly-tagged MP3 files.)

One of these albums was Motley Crue's "Greatest Hits." Everything looked good - covers and all.

Yesterday I put a few more albums onto a USB stick and imported them. Among those were Billy Idol's "Greatest Hits" and ZZ Top's "Greatest Hits" (yes, I grew up in the 80's.)

After importing the files from that stick, when I browse the music collection by Album, neither Motley Crue's or Billy Idol's "Greatest Hits" album shows up, but ZZ Top's does. And when you click into it, you get all of the tracks from all three of those "Greatest Hits" albums.

Browsing by artist, I believe each album shows up individually (I'll need to confirm tonight) but when you browse the entire collection by album it dumps all three "Greatest Hits" discs into the one by ZZ Top. Maybe because it was the last one imported?

Can anyone confirm this behavior and this is just "how it is" or am I (hopefully) doing something wrong? I suppose a workaround would be to change each album title to something like "Greatest Hits ([Artist])" but that's a kludge I'd like to avoid.

 

Here's what I've learned over time dealing with a USB drive and MP3 files.

1. No MP3s with a bit rate over 256k. It will cause them to skip or pause during playback.

2. The MINI radio makes its own folders based on the artists and albums listed in the properties or metadata in the MP3 files. In your case I would bet there is an artist folder (not on your USB) but in the MINI named Unknown. In there you will find your songs. The files are fine. But they may not have the metadata of the album artist In the properties.

3. Yes naming and characters can matter. Some file systems don't like anything other than alphanumeric. I can't say that MINIs system does, but it's a good practice for file naming.

4. Yes you can batch change properties but it is time consuming. If you are pulling files from iTunes, that is the best/easiest way to modify the songs' data. If using Windows explorer you can select the songs from an artist, right click and choose properties. Go to the Details tab and make sure the album artist and contributing (?) artist have the right info in them.

NOTE: I am typing this on my iPhone and from memory. I will return later on a computer and correct any errors.

5. The USB is best formatted as Fat32.

6. Delete any files that won't play. The MINI system sorts through all the files to be able to sort them as artist or genre, and all that data comes from within the files. So remove any clutter.

Hope this helps.
Asylum Sound

 

Nope, but I appreciate the bump.

 

I'm guessing you have to browse by artist or do some re tagging. Audio Shell tagger on Windows is a pretty simple way to do this. Just right click on all the selected songs of an album and make the changes.

My more simplistic 2014 doesn't have this issue, wifes 2016 probably has the issue but I can barely navigate that damn device anyway.

 

Yeah, from my experience so far this is what I'm thinking. Before I commit to that, I'm hoping someone gives it a try so at least I can confirm it's just "how it is" and I'm not overlooking something completely stupid.