grossmsj

I suspect all of these steps aren't necessary, but that's what I did. For example, I suspect steps 7&8 (stripping off tags) aren't necessary, but I could see the tagging scheme had both ID3V1 and ID3V2 and I thought that might not be good.
As you suspected, getting it down to Various Artists is important so there aren't 14 artist/album combinations (with a unique album for each one). The numbering scheme is important to get things to play in the right order. And I'm now convinced one has to do something to clear out the old database that had bad information in it.

I may have spoken too soon about getting M4A working for me. I want to do more checking on that this weekend. It worked when I tried it, but I don't know if that's because I had already put MP3 files in the system which read fine. I'll have to clean everything up.

It shouldn't be this hard.

ua549

My last and final experiment indicates that there is NO way to fix this issue. I've been beating a deal horse.
Part 1 -
I changed title tags to nonsensical character strings. This had no effect on the displayed titles, etc. Evidently COMAND gets all of its data from Gracenote.
Part 2 -
I deleted all of the tags. Windows 10 Groove player can play the music, but there is no info in its list of albums, etc. COMAND plays the music and has complete indexing of album, artist, etc. along with album art. In other words COMAND takes all information from Gracenote and ignores the mp3 tags. The screwed up "track is an album" listings are from Gracenote.

grossmsj

Sent you a PM. I think we can do this for your album. Not so hopeful for other formats

grossmsj

I think this is mostly true, but not entirely.
Gracenote has a few different ways to index your music.

Every digital album will have a header file that specifies where a track starts and stops. This is specified in small fractions of a second. So the fairly unique sequence of start and stop times can identify an album, almost uniquely in its database. So if there is no metadata or it's basically gibberish, it can figure out your album.

Another way is to look at the metadata and see how that matches its database. If there are matches there it will recognize the music. It seems to recognize at least some of the metadata as I was able to rewrite your artists as 'Various Artists' and it took that. Maybe it was just a lucky set of circumstances.

It can also identify music by digital signatures, but that may just be for desktop systems. I don't know.

After I reset my database and loaded just the M4A version of Exile on Main Street I got back the same old problems. :>(
Can get it to work for MP3, and nothing else. Maybe I'll move to France or Australia. Melbourne is pretty nice this time of year I'd guess.

grossmsj

I got a nice email from a Gracenote representative. I'm grateful they took the time they did for a problem they don't own. She even went far enough to search for Mercedes Benz information that might be helpful (the link that was sent has no relevant information).
Mercedes Benz's response was "ask your dealer". He told me to 'try a different USB drive, that usually works', and that he'd have a factory representative contact me (which hasn't happened). I'd still like to get to the bottom of this. If anyone knows how to get past Mercedes Benz Customer Support and get in contact with actual technical experts please let me know.

From Gracenote:
Thank you for writing. Although Gracenote has been delivering solutions in the automotive market since 2001, each car company has a slightly different strategy for helping their customers and distributing database updates to their customers.

The way this works is that the automaker has their own development department that built a product that's licensed to use our recognition technology. They have signed a contract with Gracenote so that we can provide them recognition technology and updates. We provide them a static library of music which needs to be updated periodically.

We are a business-to-business technology company. We then provide the car company updates at regular intervals according to their contract, and they distribute updates to their consumers (that would be you). Because I'm not familiar with the product in your vehicle, and don’t have any technical manuals, I'm at a disadvantage here.

If your own dealer is not helpful, the headquarters should be able to easily answer your questions. They would best know how the car manufacturer is providing information and updates for you - their customer.

Now I did some searching and it looks like you can find a technical manual or support here:

http://www.mercedes-benz-mobile.com/us/en/#passenger

Sincerely,