ITunes is changing song titles and artists

Question

iTunes appears to be infrequently and randomly changing the artist and song title tags of music in my library.  I usually just put my music on random shuffle, so it can take me a long time to actually identify errors -- like when I listen to music from a particular artist, or when I happen to glance at iTunes when a song iTunes has mis-re-named is playing.  So far, the errors seem to confined within single albums at a time, but that might just be because of the circumstances of me identifying the errors.
In the first case I noticed a while back, an album with six songs had their titles all jumbled up.  Each song was titled with an incorrect song title from the same album.  The artist, album, and genre tags all remained correct.  In the most recent case, two songs from a compilation album had their artist and song title tags overwritten with the info from a third track on the same album (so I ended up with three songs with the same title and artist).
Any idea what might be causing this apart from a crappy coding?

Answer 1

ed2345 wrote:
If iTunes and WMP are referencing the same copy of the MP3, then a tag change in one will be reflected in the other. If that is not what you want, you will need separate copies of the song.
Being picky, iTunes will write it's changes to the tag immediately (unless the file is locked as read-only) whereas WMP may choose to do it at some later point in time unless you use an option to "Apply media information changes". WMP will generally notice automatically that another appliation has modified the tag and updates it's library accordingly whereas iTunes only spots the change if it accesses the tag for some reason.
If you want WMP & iTunes to play nicely together you are best off disabling the WMP options for "Rearrange music in the rip folder..." and "Automatic media information update..." (you can still do so manually). I also find it best to change the WMP rip folder to the same as the iTunes Music folder. Letting iTunes "Keep the music folder organised" is a matter of choice (I choose not) but at least WMP can cope if your files get shuffled around by iTunes whereas the reverse is not the case.
tt2