WD TV Live – Not Displaying Artist and Album info

I have read much on this forum about artist and album info not appearing when playing a music track. This includes using the Media Library and Get info features and creating xml files with the required info at the album level.

I am playing music tracks successfully from my Win 7 PC through the home network.

When I display any song in windows explorer on my PC the File (track) name artist and album are displayed. Since the WD TV box is reading the file and playing it directly from the PC shared (Network Shares) disk drive, why cannot it read and display the artist and album?

Also, I have successfully created and played songs thru the WD TV box using playlists created as .pls .m3u and .wpl all of which contain the filename, artist and album details. None of these display the data embedded in each track in the play list when it is playing.

Creating xml files at the album folder level should be unnecessary when the data is already available in standard formats.

Am I missing something here? If I am, I apologize in advance?

sachqwe,

Some computer-centric media players will read all content and scan for album art stored as pictures within folders at once (Even if hidden) in order to show the artwork. This approach does not work with your WD TV because it is specifically looking for music files while playing music.

What you do, is to embed the album art into the songs themselves. This will “attach” the artworks to the songs themselves as opposed to the folders holding the songs and individual picture files used as covers.

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Thanks for the reply. How do you “embed the album art into the songs themselves”?

Personally, i use Mp3tag    http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

For more software, just Google it.

Mp3tag example screenshot (embedded coverart into songs)

Thanks for the update. I have embedded cover art into some songs using Mp3tag and WD TV displays it when playing. That’s great.

What I am really asking for is how to get WD TV to display the artist and album names alongside the song name at the bottom of the screen when playing. I have not needed to use Mp3tag to insert artist and album since they are already embedded. Window 7 explorer displays this embedded information as does Mp3tag when accessing a file so we know it is available. Why does WD TV not read and display this information when playing a song?

if it’s additional info about the track that is already present and not displayed

then you either need to choose a different view mode

or you might need to make edits the the theme

by editing the proper xml’s to display that info

you might want to take a look in the theme forum to see some of the mods already done, maybe they will already display the info you want