Creative Mediasource Organizer Losing Year T

Question

I use Windows XP, Creative Mediasource Organizer version 3.30.35 and my player is a Zen MicroPhoto 8G. I have over 4000 MP3 files organized with id tags in Creative Mediasource Organizer. These are almost exclusivly?MP3 files that I recorded myself. Of the 4000 files?there are only a handful, just?one album that could possibly find tag information?to pull from the internet. Yesterday,?more than?200 of my mp3 files?had blank?year tags. I entered the correct year in several dozen of these so that only about 65 had blank year tags. Then I closed the software and turned of my computer. Today I opened Creative Mediasource Organizer to work on filling in those blank year tags. There were over 400 blank year tags today. What is happening? I have PC Music Library open. I select a single file, right click, click properties, click tag information, enter the year in the year field, click OK. Then I right click and select "update tag" click "yes" to confirm that I want the changes to apply to the file itself and not just to the PC Media Library. Please, someone help me understand why?the number of blank year tags is growing instead of shrinking? What can I do to retain the information I enter in these tags?

Answer 1

YESTERDAY:?Monday March 2, 2007:?I edited my media library from within Creative MediaSource so that there are no files without a valid year in the year tag. For?each MP3 file the other standard tags also contain meaningful data. These are?title, artist, album and?genre,?but not track. I don't see any practical way to use the track field for some of these files, so not all of them have a track number. The files I want in my media library are all the MP3 and WMA files within C:/MP3 and it's subfolders. The properties of C:/MP3 as viewed from "My Computer" are 3922 files and 249 folders. About a dozen are WMA files and one is a text file. All the others are MP3 files. The problem is that?there are quite a number of duplicate entries. And the Media Library is reporting several hundred more files within C:/MP3?than "My Computer" is reporting there.
I used "Tools/Settings/PC Media Library/ Delete invalid entries" but it did NOT remove the duplicate entries. Exiting the program and opening it again did not correct the count either. So I selected ALL the files, right clicked, and selected "update tags." I clicked YES to update the tag data from the media library to the files. When that operation was completed, I deleted all the files from the library but not from the computer. And?now I am?importing all the files within C:/MP3?back into the library. It says "now transferring 859 of 3920 files." This is good! 3920 is very close to 3922 minus the one text file. I want to see if, when this transfer is finished, I will have the correct number of MP3 files in my media library, and I want to see if the tag data, including the year data, remains?intact after this transfer. The transfer is complete. I do have 3920 files in my media library now and the data in the id tags appears to be intact. Hopefully, this will still be the case when I open the software tomorrow. THE NEXT DAY:?Tuesday, March 3, 2007: Grrr! I now have 3950 files in my media library where it should be only 3920. I did not add anything ?or make any edits. Exactly 30 of these entries?have blank year fields. I'm thinking that Creative MediaSource is NOT?loosing the data in year tags as I first thought, rather it's ADDING entries that are identical to existing entries except that the year fields in the added entries are empty. I think that if I enter the correct year data, I will end up with 30 entries that are truly exact duplicates. I don't see a pattern or clue to tell me why these 30 and not the others ... they have different artists, different albums, genres and the data in the missing year fields was not all the same. In the track fields, a few are blank, but most of them have data. "Tools/Settings/PC Music Library/Clean up now" did not elimiinate these 30 extra entries. Looking at the properties of C:/MP3 from "My Computer" still shows 3922 files (one is a text file) ... From my experiments yesterday, I am pretty sure that I can delete these 30 extra entries and be left with valid entries for all my files. This is frustrating. I'm hoping that these observations will be helpful to a programmer working on the next version of Creative MediaSource. I would send these comments directly to them, but they don't seem to provide a way for me to do that.