Syncing music changes file names, album art, and artist, how do I change this?

Question

I've been trying to clean up music for hours on end. I've made sure composers are cleared, 'album artists' is how I want it to be, and I've been using programs like mp3Tag and the Windows Phone app for Desktop to get my music just right.

But for some reason, the phone changes the names of artists - what I enter into the properties are changed when synced into the phone, to bands I've never heard of.

If this is a 'smart' song recognition system, how do I turn it off? How can I change artists and song names once they're in the phone? And are there better tagging programs out there, because Windows Phone is obviously not reading the tags I'm writing for my music!

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The Windows Phone app for desktop is notorious for being terrible (though to be fair, it's still marked as beta). Have you tried just adding files via File Explorer? In my experience this causes the least trouble. The Windows Phone app for Windows 8 seems to be working correctly now too.

Another possibility is that Xbox Music on the phone is correcting tags for you - you can turn this off in settings -> applications -> music + videos -> connect with xbox music -> off. I haven't experienced problems with this setting before, but it's there to try if the other syncing programs don't work.