ITunes, ID3 Tags, and Metadata

Oh hai der!
I'm new and I'm so sorry if this questioned has been answered before. But I've done some research on the web and I've got some questions about iTunes and what it does to my music.
First, here's my situation. I love iTunes, it's awesome, helps me edit my library beautifully. But that's only when all the songs, movies, videos, and so on have their information. Otherwise it's a huge mess. Which is what I'm dealing with.
I like to use XBMC. I own a Samsung Galaxy S2, and an iPod Touch. The files I've edited and whose data I've put in manually, show up wonderfully on my iPod. But not my Samsung and media library software, or other device. I was wondering if iTunes actually edits the metadata and ID3 tags of the actual file in my computer. Not just in the iTunes program. See, let's say I have a song titled "Track 01 ", and in iTunes I change the name of the track to "Yesterday". Will iTunes actually edit the title of the song WITHIN the file itself? Or just in iTunes itself? So that after I edit the title within iTunes, it shows up in other software, such as XBMC, and devices like my Galaxy S2 as "Yesterday" and not "Track 01"?
I don't get my music from iTunes. I've only got a few albums from iTunes, that's it. But for the rest, they're not from iTunes. It may not sound like a lot to most of you. But I've got a library that's over 50GB's large in music. That's over 8,000 songs. Only about 1,000 of those songs have their data such as lyrics, artwork, artist, album, and so on. But for the rest of the 7,000 songs, it's just a mess. I've looked up many programs that edit my library for me. But I'm in a situation where I can't spend much money. So I'm looking for freeware. But that's not all.
I'm looking for a piece of software that'll implement lyrics, artwork, album, artist, etc, into the song file itself. Or just in iTunes? I know of TuneUp, and Rinse My Music. I was wondering if there was other software out there? I've also heard of Beets, but it seems way too complicated for me to install properly.
So to summarize, what I want to know is:
1) Is there some freeware out there that'll help me edit my iTunes library?
2) Does editing song info within iTunes actually do anything to the song file itself?
3) Will I have to use some other software that organizes my media and actually edits a file's properties to display proper data?

Similar Messages

Itunes does not read id3 tags and its a problem

Ok I have 60 gig of music and all of it is labeled correctly in id3 tags. But when i add them all to itunes some of the songs are blank with no information at all but if i go into "show in explorer" the information in the id3 tags instantly pops up. I'v searched google and found nothing so i hope someone can tell me a fix or another program to use that will organise my music like itunes does and also can put music on my ipod. So please help me with the problem.
Thanks

It doesn't work. I'v already tried that. I'v even tried converting the id3 tags and then removing them from the libray and adding them again. Still nothing. It might help if someone could tell me where itunes gets it information for its tags when you add music to its libray seeing as it doesn't use id3 tags for the information like any smart program does.

ID3 tags and Nee

Sorry if this has been asked before or is really obvious :P
I have a Zen Neeon and the currently playing song appears on the screen as only a title. There is no artist. All my songs are tagged with ID3 v and 2. The only way I can get the player to scroll Artist - Title is by removing all ID3 tags and having the filename be Artist - Title.mp3 (it does not display the .mp3 extension when playing a track). Is this the way it works? I was under the impression from the FAQs and a little snooping that Zens could read ID3 tags? Obviously they can because it gets the track title information out fine, but not the artist. Is there a simple option I'm missing?
Edit: .0 firmware and using Winamp to edit my ID3 tags, put the songs on the player by drag and drop in ExplorerMessage Edited by SR on 08-3-2006 03:53 PM

Hey, first of all, thanks for your help, but I'm still in problems.
I have noticed that itunes imports the music files before I alter the ID3 tags (from backup files). However, as soon as I try to add the same file to my itunes library after I have edited the ID3 file (via windows itself), itunes does not add the file to its library anymore. This is happening to a considerable amount of my music. When I try to play the same files in windows mediaplayer, they play without a problem, so I guess the problem is with itunes.
Somebody can please help me out, because I like to be in control of my music, and not itunes,
adios Gregorius

Will LR4 import my video tags and metadata I've applied in Bridge?

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ID3 tags and itunes refusing to add music to library

As my music collection is growing, I decided to organize it a bit more and fill in the different ID3 tags in windows.
I have emptied my itunes library before I did all this, and after changing the ID3 tags I added the different albums back to itunes.
However, for some reason itunes does not want to import several albums anymore, while they do play in windows media player. Furthermore, itunes refuses in many cases to make use of the new ID3 tags I made. Even after uninstalling and reinstalling itunes, itunes seems to remember my settings and the ID3 tags the different MP3s had before.
Anyone a clue what is happening here? Has it someting to do with the new version of itunes, or is it something else?
ciao, Gregorius

Hey, first of all, thanks for your help, but I'm still in problems.
I have noticed that itunes imports the music files before I alter the ID3 tags (from backup files). However, as soon as I try to add the same file to my itunes library after I have edited the ID3 file (via windows itself), itunes does not add the file to its library anymore. This is happening to a considerable amount of my music. When I try to play the same files in windows mediaplayer, they play without a problem, so I guess the problem is with itunes.
Somebody can please help me out, because I like to be in control of my music, and not itunes,
adios Gregorius

ITunes "grouping" tag - ID3 tags and file rewriting

From Wikipedia's entry about ID3 tags:
"ID3v2.2 and 2.3 require that the tag data precede the file. Whilst for streaming data this is absolutely required, for static data it means that the entire audio file must be updated to insert data at the front of the file. For initial tagging this incurs a large penalty as every file must be re-written."
So what I'm wondering, essentially, is whether the "grouping" tag in iTunes is a part of the ID3 tag information, which would mean that altering this tag necessitates re-writing the entire file. I don't like the idea of this, because I'd be paranoid/anal about the possibility of introducing errors in the process. However, I'd love to use the "grouping" tag for creating smart playlists. So does anyone have any more information about this tag? Thanks.

iTunes uses the TPE2 frame tag for grouping. This is also known as the 'Band/Orchestra/Accompaniment' frame which is included in the list you linked to. This isn't a guess - I've been playing about with dnuos and querying id3 tags in mp3 files. I can confirm it is a id3v2 frame.
As to having to re-write the entire file. Yes this is likely but the id3v2 standard also covers padding which can be used to avoid a complete re-write in these situations. Whether or not this happens in the case of iTunes I couldn't tell you.
As far as worring about quality or reliability when performing this... If a player (in this case iTunes) can't even write some tags you probably need to be worrying about using it full stop. Damage could also happen if the storage device itself is dying but again you don't want to be using it full stop.

Itunes is messing up ID3 tags and song info.

I am wondering, why is itunes keeps on changing ID3 tags.
For example. All my "The Thunderlords" songs have been changed to"thunderlords,the" Which I do not like. AC/DC got changed to DC/ac and the art was gone. Random comment such as "0" have been added to nearly every song. The album "The Wall" has been labled as "Wall, The" I do not like this >_> is THE wall not wall the. What the .... is wall the? It's not like I go around says "what heck the?" or "halo above his head the" I'm not Yoda! I'd just like to know how to stop itunes from editing this without my permission.
All songs are MP3's. Details:
96 kpbs (mono)/ 192 kpbs (Stereo), Normal Stereo, optimized for MMX/SSE, using MP
Message was edited by: iRockers

Welcome to the world of Gracenotes. This is the database that Itunes reads to name your files. Apple pays a royalty to these clowns and this is what you get; misspellings and just plain wrong info.
I constantly sort and edit my 1300 CD collection so I would suggest you learn to do the same within iTunes. If the author names are reversed, fix one then copy. Itunes will let you select and change multiple fields once you learn to do multiple selection..not hard but tedious at times.
Apple needs to threaten to let us use the free CDDB for an alternate look up and a swap button on authors names, and so forth..

Itunes, ID3 tags, & hard drive corruption

My wife is having a strange problem with her iMac, and it’s got me a bit mystified. I’m hoping someone here can shed some light on what might be going on. I apologize in advance for the long post.
The problem is that when she plays some songs in iTunes, and entirely different (wrong) song plays instead. Most songs play fine, but some just play entirely different songs (or sections of a song or podcast). All of the tracks are MP3 (either 192 kbps or 256 kbps) and almost all of them were encoded using Windows Media Player on an XP machine. Initially, I copied the music over from an NTFS drive to a newly formatted (Mac OS/HFS+) drive on the Mac, then I ran iTunes and created the library. At that point, everything seemed fine. All the meta data (song title, album title, artist, album artist, genre, album art) showed up in iTunes, and everything played correctly.
Now we’re getting this weird behavior where we play some songs and get the wrong music. At first I thought the iTunes library files (ITL and/or XML) had been corrupted, but it seems on closer inspection that the entire hard drive has been corrupted. When I look at the files on Mac hard drive via the Finder, all seems ok – the directory structure is intact, the file names and sizes are all correct, and a Get Info on any MP3 file shows that the ID3 data is all there and seems accurate. This is true even for the songs that play wrong, but if I play one of those songs using the little mini player in the Get Info dialog, the wrong song plays (the same wrong song as in iTunes). So now I’m getting the behavior straight off the drive, with iTunes closed and the iTunes library completely out of the equation.
Some other interesting clues/evidence:
* This has happened before. When her first hard drive got corrupted (in the same way), I was mystified but chalked it up as a bad hard drive and got her a new one. Then we started over with a clean HFS+ formatted drive and clean music files and built a new iTunes library. And now the same thing has happened again. So I don’t think it’s just a bad hard drive.
* It seems to be progressive. That is, everything was fine in the beginning, but over time more and more files get messed up. We know this because we have a backup that’s about a month old on which we can locate files that are fine (on the backup) but that are messed up on her connected day-to-day drive. So it seems like some activity on the drive is causing problems that are growing over time.
* There is some weird meta data (ID3) behavior. I copied a few hundred MP3 files from the Mac drive back to the PC (over our home network) and looked at them in the Windows Explorer. The first thing I saw was that the same (wrong) music played for the bad tracks as had on the Mac. And I also saw that a lot of ID3 tags were not showing on the Windows side. Lots of tracks have no ID3 data (album, artist, genre, etc. is missing) when I look at them on the PC. There are many albums where tags show up correctly for some of the tracks but not for others. In fact, the number of files where the ID3 tags aren’t visible on the PC far exceeds the number of songs that play incorrectly on the Mac. When I look back on the Mac at the songs that have no ID3 data on the PC and do a Get Info, I see the ID3 data.
* Often, though I can’t say always for sure, the wrong music that plays on the Mac is stuff that has been recently added. Either podcasts or music that my wife has added since the initial library was established.
My best guess (though still full of holes):
Something is confusing the Mac OS into writing on top of occupied space on the hard drive or into mapping files incorrectly in the drive’s allocation table, and chaos results. The Mac doesn’t think anything is wrong, and it shows everything as being clean in the Finder. So I started thinking about the kind of reads & writes my wife is doing on that drive. She rips new CDs to add to the library, she downloads new Podcasts and deletes old ones, and she changes ID3 tags.
I’m focusing on the changing ID3 tag activity. My wife doesn’t like the way I tag genre. I like big broad categories, an she likes smaller, more specific categories. So she has gone through the initial library of 42K+ songs and changed the genre on thousands of songs. She’s change some from Pop to Power Pop or from Pop to Indie Pop or from Rock to Indie Rock, etc. Both WMP (where the tags were created) and iTunes support ID3v2.3, and so these two programs ought to be able to change tags in a totally interchangeable and safe way. But what if iTunes writes its new genre tags in a way that’s slightly different from WMP? Could iTunes be writing to memory/disk locations that are outside the boundaries of the file and thus creating some kind of buffer overrun?
It really doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it does tie back to the evidence that this has something to do with meta data, gets worse over time, happened on more than one disk, and seems to be a file allocation table issue.
Even if I get to the bottom of this, I think my wife’s HD is toast for sure. Here’s what I think I will do: I’ll reformat the drive, re-copy the music over from the PC, and build a new iTunes library. Then, first thing, I’ll open iTunes, select all the songs in the new library, and run “Convert ID3 Tags” to ID3v2.4. If that works and everything behaves correctly, I’ll try to change some genre tags and test the results. The problem is that the library is so large that problems can go undetected for a long time, so maybe I should do this first with a small subset of the music as a trial run.
The thing I want to avoid is having to do this (ever) again, so I’d feel more comfortable if I understood the bug/problem before just following this guess (which feels like a roll of the dice). If anyone has seem similar behavior or has heard of any IDS incompatibilities between WMP 11 and iTunes 7, I’d love to hear about it. Any help is appreciated.
Jim

Wow, that was a long and detailed post. I haven't the energy to reply in equal fervor, but I will just say that lately these boards have been peppered with posts from people whose MP3s are being eaten alive by iTunes. What I don't get is why you suspect the hard drive is at fault. Unless the rest of the system is caving in, I don't think there's any reason to suspect a failing drive. Check the S.M.A.R.T. status in Disk Utility if you haven't already, and perform whatever maintenance you believe is in order.
For the most reliable ID3 tag editing, I'd certainly recommend using foobar2000 on a Windows PC (or a Mac with Windows installed) or MP3Tag. I would definitely, at least for the time being, not put your huge music collection at risk by doing any further editing of the tags in iTunes.

ID3 Tags and multiple Libraries

I think I really have 2 separate questions here.
1) I have an external hard drive at work with all my music files on it. I use iTunes to listen to these songs at work. I have spent a lot of time adding song ratings, and album art, and cleaning up some of the album titles, song names, etc. on these songs. I copied all of these music files to my hard drive on my home computer. I don't listen to music on my home computer very often. Is there a way to copy over all of the updated song information to the library on my home computer?
2) I assume that much of the information about a song (artist, album, etc.) is stored in the ID3 tags. Is there any way to write ID3 information to a file from iTunes?

Some, but not all of the information is stored in the ID3 tag. Examples of information not stored included (but are not limited to): ratings, play counts, date added, and last played.
If you want to transfer information about some songs, you can put those songs into a playlist, then export it as a text file (select the playlist, then File..Export). On the other computer, you can then import it. NOTE: if the path (folder) of the song is different on the two computers, you will need to edit the text file before importing it on the second computer.
Also note that the exported playlist still does not contain all of the iTunes information. But it does have the rating, play count, and some other stuff not stored in the ID3 tag.

ITunes ID3 tags handling for artwork

I have created MP3 versions of my band's artwork for inclusion in an online radio. I am running into some issues with ID3 tags.    The MP3s show the artwork and everything just fine on my Mac. However the artwork doesn't show up in the radio software (Centova) when the files are uploaded. Because of this, I've got a crash course in ID3 tags--at least the album artwork tags.
It turns out, in ID3 tags version 2, there are no less than 15 different ID3 tags reserved for artwork--meaning you can attach up to 15 separate pieces of artwork (in theory) to each MP3 file. Here are the tag reservations:
$00     Other
$01     32x32 pixels 'file icon' (PNG only)
$02     Other file icon
$03     Cover (front)
$04     Cover (back)
$05     Leaflet page
$06     Media (e.g. label side of CD)
$07     Lead artist/lead performer/soloist
$08     Artist/performer
$09     Conductor
$0A     Band/Orchestra
$0B     Composer
$0C     Lyricist/text writer
$0D     Recording Location
$0E     During recording
$0F     During performance
$10     Movie/video screen capture
$11     A bright coloured fish
$12     Illustration
$13     Band/artist logotype
$14     Publisher/Studio logotype
Yes, you read that right, there's a tag for "A bright colored fish". So here's the rub: I'm finding that iTunes defaults album artowrk to the first position (00), which has a certain logic to it. But, I'm finding that this radio software, and some other pro level software looks for cover art in the third tag (Cover Art) be default. This makes a number of problems. It means that I'm having to find a serious ID3 tag editor to change the iTunes artowork tag from "00-Other" to "03-Cover Art" in order for it to be properly displayed.
NOW THE QUESTION: Does iTunes have any sort of method to select which "type" of cover atwork tag you want to apply to the added artwork? Or am I at the mercy of iTunes' default designation and that's that?

Apple have this help, which I guess you will have seen:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1468
There is a very comprehensive discussion of the issue in this post:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8180252#8180252

ID3 tags and song order

I recently got a new car with a hard drive to store music on. I've imported several gigs of music, but on some of the albums the tracks are listed in alphabetical order. I've gone in to make sure all the information is correct in the tags, including the track order. I've also made sure the actual filenames are in order, i.e. "01 - song 1", "02 - song 2" and so forth, but they still show up alphabetically. It seems to be random, but occurs more often on .m4a files. It happens on some of the music I've purchased from the iTunes store, but not all. Is there something I'm missing?

Ok, I think I found the problem. It's not with how either of the devices are sorting the music. On the albums that show up in alphabetical order, there are no actual ID3 tags. When I right click on any of the songs, there is no option to "Convert ID3 tags" like there is on the music that shows up in the correct order. This even includes music I purchased directly from iTunes. However, iTunes is still displaying the track order, album info, etc. How can I fix this?

Itunes id3 tags help

here is the question:
in itunes no matter how many times ive tried ID3 tag editing and software for editing id3 tags the songs never stay in one album the songs split up and thier is like 10 songs in their own album when they should be together what should i do ive tried id3 tag editing it wont work..
[email protected]
Message was edited by: giants29
Message was edited by: giants29

Apple have this help, which I guess you will have seen:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1468
There is a very comprehensive discussion of the issue in this post:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8180252#8180252

ITunes + ID3 tags..

Hey guys its my first post here
I don't really have a problem relating to connectivity or anything major. But I do have a question.
When I drag and drop songs into my playlists in iTunes 6.01, I later re-edit the artsists name and album to my liking and have it shown exactly how it is on my iPod Nano. But the problem is the ID3 tags on the actual MP3 is also changed at the same time. Is there anyway to have iTunes not touch the ID3 tags on the mp3 itself after editing it thru iTunes?
I currently like the way I have the artists and album names all sorted out, but I just found out, it also edited my actual mp3 files, and thats not really good for me because I have the mp3 files according to an sfv file which checks CRC's..
any help is appreciated guys.
Intel P4 Windows XP Pro

Is there anyway to have iTunes not touch the ID3 tags
on the mp3 itself after editing it thru iTunes?
No. When you edit the song info in iTunes, you are editing the file tags. That is a tag editor, not just a "iTunes Information" editor.
I currently like the way I have the artists and album
names all sorted out, but I just found out, it also
edited my actual mp3 files, and thats not really good
for me because I have the mp3 files according to an
sfv file which checks CRC's..
If you don't want to change the tags, then don't use the tag editor to change the tags.

Songs cut off. someting to do with id3 tags and how they are encoded?

Something very disconcerting is happening; tracks are being cut off before they should. Slowly more and more songs are being 'eaten'.
One correlation does seem to be that they are all encoded with iTunes v4.0.1 and have id3 tag: v2.2. Unfortunately I have no idea what, if anything, this means or what to do about it.
The 'time' display of the song is changed to the point where it cuts off rather than it's true length. I have tried changing the stop time (song info, options tab) but it does not allow me to make it longer.
Currently iTunes 9.0.2 (25) is being used. This problem spans over several updates.

Thanks Mike,
Usually I do get info on a whole album, but I found that doing this for individual songs allows you to view the sorting info, and it was this that was causing the problem - All the sorting info has to be exactly the same for each song within an album for it to sort properly on an ipod. It's weird that the sorting was fine within Itunes, but not on the ipod, but anyway this seemed to solve the problem.

HT204406 ID3 Tags and iMatch

How do I update ID3 tags for songs, such that they are listed correctly through iMatch and my linked computers?

Hi jcuticchia,
Here are instructions on editing song information depending on your OS:
iTunes 11 for Windows: Edit song and CD information
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH12360
iTunes 11 for Mac: Edit song and CD information
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH12160
Cheers!
- Ari

ITunes, ID3 Tags, and Metadata

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