How to edit id3-tags (MP3 tags) in Marshmallow?

Question

Ok, so I'm not got to act like I know what I'm talking about, but I've done a fair bit of googling and stuff like 'write permissions' have come up over and over again when searching id3 tag editors.

My question is, how do I edit my music titles? ie album name and song title. Some of my songs have unknown artist or album.

I have a LG G4 with marshmallow 6.0, my old G4 had lollipop and I could edit my music with an app. That phone got run over, my new G4 now has marshmallow. I bought it a few weeks ago.

The apps that claimed to work don't, black music player had a built in editor and it looked promising, it let me edit my music but after exiting the app and going back in, it had changed back to the original title.(two hours of my life I can't get back.)

So is there anyway around this with a simple fix? Nothing too technical please like 'rooting' whatever that is....or I've read you can convert your external sd card to become an extension of your internal storage somehow...and I've heard bad things about that too, like lag and storage issues.

I just want to organise my music....something I enjoy doing.

So any ideas would be great 😊 Thanks, Beck.

Answer 1

You need not rely on the apps that help you edit the MP3 tags easily.. As @Somberi said, maybe the developers could have abandoned their projects..

There's a very tedious solution anyway, by which you can edit the ID3 tags manually.

Steps:

1. Download any Hex Editor app for Android.

2. Open the mp3 file using that Hex Editor.

3. Scroll to the end of the file..
   The last 128bytes over there is used to store the metadata (ID3 tags)

4. Just note the last 128bytes & try to recognize the tag-names used there by converting each byte to corresponding ASCII. For example, the hex bytes 45 6D 69 6E 65 6D corresponds to the ASCII string Eminem ;)

Just change it as required (by converting your ASCII text to Hex bytes) & overwrite it in the corresponding location. Also note that each tag-name is separated by a sequence of spaces (20 20 20 20 ...... in Hex), or in some cases, sequence of null-bytes (00 00 00 00 ......), which varies for different ID3 versions.

(This might also help: A Quick Study on MP3 file structure )

When you need to edit multiple MP3 files, this process is really exhausting..
In that case, you may wait till the app developers update their apps (with proper permissions) for Marshmallow, or you can do it easily on your computer, even using VLC Media Player (Tools->Media Information)

Answer 2

Because Google put new restrictions on app accessing the file storage in Version 6, many old apps will not work. The solution is to use Version 5 or older devices if you want to stick with the same apps. Or, wait for the apps to get updated. Or, you can search for new apps that are compatible with Version 6.

ID3 tag editing is extremely file IO intensive - it will also waste battery. This is best done on a desktop.