LG :: EnV3 Transferring Music Files To Phone

I am happy to report success in copying music files to my LG enV3 (VX9200)! I have now loaded 2000 music files onto a 16Gb Micro SD card and gotten the phone to properly read <title>, <artist>, <track>, <album>, and <genre> for all of these files. Unfortunately, this was only after much trial, error, pain, and suffering.Here's what I have deduced about how the enV 3 wants to see music files organized:

1. To avoid silly mistakes, do use the phone to format your Micro SD card.

2. But to save time and achieve reliable transfers, move your music onto the formatted card using a USB card reader, plugged directly into your computer. Putting the phone into USB Mass Transfer mode, or trying to use the 'Sync' routine, is slow at best and ends up in failure more times than not.

3. Music files go into the "my_music" folder on the card.

4. Within "my_music", what works well is the following directory structure: my_ music /<artist>/<album> /<track>_ <title>But you have to follow some special rules:

5. The enV 3 doesn't seem to like like spaces or special characters in directory or file names, and I think it wants only one period (the one before the .mp3 extension). Special characters include the 'usual suspects': . ^ $ | ? * + [ ] ( ) { } /

6. The enV 3 doesn't seem to like directories or file names to be longer than 32 characters

7. Finally, to have album art displayed, it wants to see the file "AlbumArt.jpg" in each <album> folder.

I may be wrong about some of the rules -- but I can report that when I followed the rules, things worked as they never had before.My guess is that other Verizon LG phones work the same way. (You'd think that Verizon or LG would document this somewhere, but NO!)

Now -- you'd better believe I wasn't going to manually edit the directories and filenames to meet the enV 3's picky requirements -- not for 2000 files!Instead, I worked with the freeware program Mp3tag (available here) and wrote an Mp3tag script (available here) to do the dirty work.
Step 1 was to 'clone' my music files by copying my entire music library -- all of the mp3 files, which had been organized by iTunes -- into a new directory which I labeled 'Music_Backup'.
Step 2 was to read this cloned library into Mp3tag.
Step 3 was to run my Mp3tag script, which parsed/renamed/moved all the music files under a new directory on my computer (called 'Ready-For-LG-Phone')
Step 4 was to copy this new directory structure onto the Micro SD card

From there I popped the card into the phone, and at long last it has become a usable music player.(The one thing I haven't figured out is how to get playlists into the phone.)To use this process, you're going to have to get familiar with Mp3tag, or come up with a way using the tagger of your choice to meet the requirements I've listed above.But I can tell you that there's light at the end of the tunnel. Best wishes and good luck!