How I got a better Music app experience by changing ID3 tags

Hi all,

Because I had troubles with Auxio and AntennaPod not playing in the background (now solved), I tried to improve my experience with the stock Mudita Music app. Those who use the Mudita Kompakt ‘as intended’ (without sideloading) may find this useful.

I use an ID3/FLAC tag editor like Tag Editor Light for Mac (there are many alternatives) to edit the song title in the tag. The Music app sorts the song by song title and plays them also in alphabetical order, which opens up some possibilities. Thus, what I did was:

  • Make a copy of the music I want to play on the Kompakt (in case I mess up, I have the originals)
  • Change the title according to how I want to group and in what order to play. For music, I usually want to play by artist, and then by album. So I changed the titles as follows: Artist (abbreviated) - Album (abbreviated) - song # - Title. Like that I can play an album in its entirety and in the right order. For collections (e.g. ‘Golden 70s’) I just put Album (abbreviated) - song # - title. The artists anyway is displayed. The abbreviations are because otherwise the title gets too long and the real title is cut off.
  • Podcasts downloaded from www.listennotes.com I similarly change the title tag and let it start with ‘ZZ’ so all podcasts are shown at the end of the list. I put them in a folder ‘Podcasts’ in the Music folder (the Music app doesn’t see audio files in the default podcasts folder).

Some screenshots:



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This is awesome! What a great work-around until the device evolves over time to accommodate user experiences like this. Thanks!

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