Garmin Express podcast metadata missing causing poor user experience

bump.  Any update on addressing this?  Many podcasts and episode titles are showing up as random letters and digits due to missing embedded metadata in the mp3s.  For example:

• Crime Junkie shows up as 9BA4
  • episode Dec 20 2022 Damien Nettles shows up as B9954A8FD2CE
  • https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crime-junkie/id1322200189?i=1000546245450

You can find the transfer logs in:

~/Library/Application Support/Garmin/Express/Logs

The file transfers are in the Service.txt files

In my case looks like it's pulling mp3s from the apple podcast cache at:

~/Library/Group Containers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts/Library/Cache

The files in question didn't have Album or Title metadata set in the mp3's.  The Album is the showname for podcasts.

I ran a test and updated the metadata on one of the files with ffmpeg to confirm that the missing metadata is the problem

• FILE=6F40CD32-FCCF-4B40-B8ED-EC9055D8ABED.mp3
• ffmpeg -i  $FILE -c copy -metadata album="mad money album" -metadata title="jan 4 2022 mad money" $FILE-new.mp3
• rm -f $FILE
• mv $FILE-new.mp3 $FILE

The ran a re-sync with garmin express and now the track shows up properly :D 

So it really comes down to:

1. The people publishing the podcast's are not embedding the proper metadata in the mp3
2. Apple is not requiring publishers to add the proper metadata nor updating the metadata if it is missing
3. Garmin could check for missing metadata and add it prior to sync but does not do so

The Garmin Express GUI app is able to pull the album and title name somehow (not sure how..maybe querying the Apple Podcast app database file directly?) so perhaps an ambitious engineer at Garmin could add a feature in the next version of Garmin Express to check for metadata in the mp3 prior to sync and update the mp3 file metadata for album and title so that it displays properly on the watch.

This would be a HUGE user experience lift for thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people so hopefully the right person sees this and takes a stab at it.

I just bought a Venu 2S and this sounds like the problem I'm having. About half of the podcasts I downloaded show up with meaningless names on my Venu.  It's a really big inconvenience and disappointing that it doesn't sound like there's a fix for it. A subscription to Spotify or the others is too expensive and so far downloading from Apple's Podcasts using Garmin Express is the only alternative I've found, but this issue makes it not a very good option.

Wow, thanks! This sounds like it should do the trick, which is great. Unfortunately I'm not super tech savvy, so if you don't mind giving me a little tech support, i would really appreciate it. I went to the GitHub link and saw the Python 3 requirement and downloaded that. I also installed mutagen successfully. I tried pasting in the code into Terminal but below is what I got. Any idea what the issue is?

Last login: Sun May 15 19:03:05 on ttys000

jillsmith@MacBook-Pro ~ % python3 -c "$(wget -q -O - ">raw.githubusercontent.com/.../fixPodcastMetadata.py)"

zsh: command not found: wget

sorry.  forgot wget is not included.  curl should be.  updated my comment above.  try that command

It worked - thanks so much! This is such a huge improvement. Garmin owes you and I do, too.

May 1,000 camels of fortune run through your tent, sir. Those missing names is a daily pain for me and your script did the trick.

An elegant piece of code.