I bought a Japanese album online - all the songs came with Japanese metadata, including album name, track name and artist name. Using Mp3tag, I replaced all of the Japanese metadata with new English metadata, and that updated English metadata is successfully being read by VLC on my computer.
However, when I transferred that album to my phone, instead of the new English track names and artist names showing up on my music player, the original Japanese metadata is still being shown. I tried using multiple audio apps on my phone - MusicSpeedChanger and Puslar, but neither of them seem to be able to read the new English metadata that I wrote, and they somehow are still reading the original Japanese metadata instead.
I even transferred some of the songs back from my phone to my computer, but when I opened those files in Mp3tag the English metadata is read, and there's no sign of the Japanese metadata at all. I have no idea how my phone's music apps are even able to read the Japanese track names - as far as I can tell using Mp3tag, the Japanese metadata has been completely re-written with the English track names. But clearly, the Japanese metadata must still be stored in the files somewhere.
I would like to wipe the Japanese metadata entirely, so that the English track names, album name and artist names show up on my phone. Any help is much appreciated!
The files are .m4a files, by the way.
To be sure what kind of tags you have written in your *.m4a files, could you please open one of this songs in Mp3tag and then press Alt+T (extended tag view windows).
Please attach a screenshot from this window in your answer.
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Maybe your phone (iPhone? Android?) is using online internet sources to show this japanese metadata and ignores the existing local metadata completely.
As a test:
Could you transfer the same song to another phone and check if you still only see japanese metadata?
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Here is a screenshot of the extended tag view. As far as I am aware, neither of the music player apps get tag data from internet sources, as every other album I have transferred to my phone has displayed my custom metadata correctly. I will try transferring the songs to another phone later today when I have access to another phone.
Another old trick is to rename the file slightly (e.g. add an underscore somewhere), import the file again and then see what the player does.
Okay, so update! I ended up getting it to work, albeit using a slightly annoying method - I just ended up converting the audio files to FLAC rather than M4A, and now the correct song data shows up on my phone, which is great! I'm sure that there obviously must be some way of getting the metadata to show up correctly for the M4A files, but this way works and now I can stop pulling my hair out at least! Thanks for the advice, LyricsLover and ohrenkino!
What was the result of this test?
Are you sure the original files were actually m4a, and not just audio files with the wrong extension?
