ITunes not reading ID3 tags correctly

I have an album of mp3s, all correctly ID3 tagged (WinAMP and Windows Media Player read them fine), and when I try to add it into my iTunes library, it only add it as the filename. It does not read the artist, album, or track name from the tag.
It is strange that it is able to read some of the id3 tags but not all.
iTunes 6.0.4 Windows XP Pro

Something else on your system is probably changing the tag outside of itunes. For instance, WMP is set to get album info from the internet.
iTunes isn't constantly scanning your library for any little tag change (a good thing, otherwise it would use 100% CPU all the time). When you go to play it or get Info, it DOES read the tag info.
Then again, I might not understand your itunes preferences settings. I have mine set for itunes not to organize my files and not add them to the itunes library.

Similar Messages

Itunes not reading id3 tags

For some reason, many of my songs that I imported using previous versions of itunes *specifically version 10.5* no longer are reading the ID3 tags correctly and now come up as unknown artists, unknown albums. Is there anyway to fix this without doing each song individually as they show up correctly in Windows Media Player. There were no issues on the original computer, however I transferred everything to my new computer and formatted the original one.

Leo: Yes, when I first imported my library, I found this case on several files.
In every instance, the ID3 tag itself was corrupted. What I later discovered was as follows:
-Corrupt ID3 tags are pretty commonplace
-Winamp is very lenient in its tag reading capabilities
-iTunes is not so lenient
There's a few ways to try to fix these files (since it is a problem with the file, technically).
-You can try to correct the tag using a good tagging program. I found Tag&Rename was capable of fixing most tags.
-You can erase the tag and retag the file entirely. TidyMP3 will remove the tag. Tag&Rename has nice Amazon.com lookup features for retagging whole albums at once (with art!).
But it is the tag at fault. Winamp is just incredibly forgiving, more so than any other program. And as such, it's not a good basis on which to judge the correctness of the file's tag.

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.

ITunes not recognizing ID3 tags

Hi, I installed iTunes last night on my PC and imported all my music into it. This seemed to work OK, but quite a few of the tracks are not showing the correct information in the list (e.g. just showing the track name, and not the artist, album etc).
I have checked and the ID3 tag info is present and correct on these MP3s - if I open it in Winamp and look at the file info I can see that the ID3v1 and ID3v2 information is all present and correct, but for some reason it is not being recognised by iTunes (on the Summary info screen for these files it says: "ID3 Tag: None").
Is there any way I can get iTunes to recognise these tracks? I don't want to have to do it manually as there are quite a few.
Any help would be much appreciated, thanks in advance, Leo.

Leo: Yes, when I first imported my library, I found this case on several files.
In every instance, the ID3 tag itself was corrupted. What I later discovered was as follows:
-Corrupt ID3 tags are pretty commonplace
-Winamp is very lenient in its tag reading capabilities
-iTunes is not so lenient
There's a few ways to try to fix these files (since it is a problem with the file, technically).
-You can try to correct the tag using a good tagging program. I found Tag&Rename was capable of fixing most tags.
-You can erase the tag and retag the file entirely. TidyMP3 will remove the tag. Tag&Rename has nice Amazon.com lookup features for retagging whole albums at once (with art!).
But it is the tag at fault. Winamp is just incredibly forgiving, more so than any other program. And as such, it's not a good basis on which to judge the correctness of the file's tag.

ITunes cannot read ID3 tags written by Perl module MP3::Tag?

Greetings,
Just trying to re-arrange ID3 information in a large set of MP3 files. Before I run the following Perl script, iTunes can read the ID3 tagging information. After writing ID3 inform ation to the MP3, iTunes no longer reads any tagging information from the MP3.
Does anyone have any information regarding this? There is some cryptic information in the MP3::Tag POD regarding setting the "id3v23_unsync" option but that doesn't seem to alter the impact on iTunes at all. Windows and other tag readers seem to be able to read the all ID 3v1 and ID3v2 tags just fine (including the altered fields) after running the following script.
Thanks for any suggestions/guidance anyone can provide.
Description: the following program takes an MP3 filename as input.
Action: It appends the value in the Album field to front of the TITLE Field. That's it! Easy!
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use MP3::Tag;
MP3::Tag-> config(id3v23_unsync=>FALSE);
my $filename = $ARGV[0];
$mp3 = MP3::Tag-> new($filename);
@info=$mp3-> autoinfo;
@albnum = split(/_/, $info[3]);
$frame = $mp3-> {ID3v2}->get_frame("TIT2");
print $frame;
$mp3-> {ID3v1}->title("$albnum[0] $info[0]");
$mp3-> {ID3v2}->change_frame("TIT2","$albnum[0] $info[0]");
$mp3-> {ID3v1}->write_tag();
$mp3-> {ID3v2}->write_tag();
@info=$mp3-> autoinfo;
print $info[0]; //print ID3v1 TITLE field
$frame = $mp3-> {ID3v2}->get_frame("TIT2");
print $frame; //print ID3v2 Title2 field
$mp3-> close();
Thanks!
GL
Windows XP

SOLVED
Changing the config entry (Line 3 in original listing) to:
MP3::Tag->config("id3v23_unsync",0);
fixed the problem with iTunes.
NOTE: This means that iTunes version 7.x still has the synchronization problem alluded to in the documentation (POD) for this Perl module. I just had the syntax wrong to set the workaround parameter.
That aside, iTunes 7.2 works quite nicely with the modified MP3. Artwork (even though this was a modified and obscure (and legal) Bible audio, it found additional information about the MP3 in the online database).
Kind Regards,
GL
Windows XP

Itunes cannot read id3 tags

Ok, so my itunes library file got corrupt and i lost over 5000 songs. So, i transferred all of them from my ipod to my computer and i got all of them. But 1% of the tags didnt get decoded. So i did the convert id tag thing but it didnt work. Is there a way to get it back to its normal file name or will it be called something like "PCQU" forever?

SOLVED
Changing the config entry (Line 3 in original listing) to:
MP3::Tag->config("id3v23_unsync",0);
fixed the problem with iTunes.
NOTE: This means that iTunes version 7.x still has the synchronization problem alluded to in the documentation (POD) for this Perl module. I just had the syntax wrong to set the workaround parameter.
That aside, iTunes 7.2 works quite nicely with the modified MP3. Artwork (even though this was a modified and obscure (and legal) Bible audio, it found additional information about the MP3 in the online database).
Kind Regards,
GL
Windows XP

ITunes won't read ID3 tags

So long story short, I lost my iTunes library and had to re-import all of my songs. Problem is, iTunes isn't reading the ID3 tags correctly, and most of my music has "unknown" under artist, album, etc. Normally, it wouldn't be a big deal to just go through my library and update the information for the tracks manually. But I have a LOT of music, and it would take forever to do so for my entire library. I use iTunes whenever I import CDs or purchase music, so the ID3 tags were all originally created by iTunes itself, which doesn't make any sense. All of the ID3 information (track names, artist, album, etc.) is showing up fine in Explorer and Windows Media Player, so I'm not sure why iTunes isn't recognizing it. Any ideas?

I suspect the tracks have multiple tags which iTunes doesn't cope with. Each mp3 file should have a single ID3v2.3 tag for best results with iTunes. Some software creates both ID3v1 and ID3v2.x tags when creating mp3s. If these are edited with iTunes it may update one tag, but then later read back unchanged data from the other. MediaMonkey has some useful tools for cleaning tags, assuming that is the problem, and you can determine which version needs clearing out. Test with small samples to make sure.
tt2

Itunes Library and ID3 tags

Hi,
So here's my problem :
I spent hours cleaning my MP3 collection and re-Writing ID3 tags in order to have a clean Itunes Library without "Blink 182" and "Blink-182" (for exemple) in the Explorer but just "Blink 182".
And importing my tied up music in the library, I noticed that there still was "Blink-182".
I checked my ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags : They're all the same : "Blink 182".
I don't understand where iTunes takes these artists name since they aren't in the tags.
Can you help me or these hours of cleaning where worthless ?
Thanks

If you open iTUnes, rightclick the song, hit "Get Info" and the artist field is "Blink 182" instead of "Blink-182" then all you need to do is play the song and iTunes should read the tag and correct the info.
If it does not do this one of the 2 is most likly happening, theres multiple tags on the song that needs to be stripped off using the program "TidyMP3" or windows media player is "Sneaking around" in the background and changing them back based on the info its getting off the net, in which case you will have to open WMP, goto tools>oPtions>Library tab and UNCHECK "Retrieve info off the internet"

ITunes Library and ID3 Tags cause confusion

Okay, so this is what happens. I play a song that has Garage as the genre, but right after I double click on it, the genre changes to Other, and the track name shortens. Now, this doesn't happen with every file, but it happens with enough files to get really annoying. And no matter how many times I change it, it will always revert when I play the song.
I have an idea of what's happening, but I don't know how to fix it. My hypothesis is that the data in the ID3 Tag and the iTunes library are different, and when I edit the song tags in iTunes, it is changing the library data, but not the ID3 tag on the song file. I would use an ID3 tag editor, but all of them I have seen do not give access to Grouping and some of the other fields. I also use Serato Scratch Live, which accesses my iTunes music, for DJing.
Is there anyway to tell iTunes that it needs to write tag data to the ID3 on the song? I have searched preferences, but there is nothing concerning this.

YES... this is seriously messed up. It was the same issue in 7.5 and is now obviously present in 7.6. I would guess that many people don't see it because they never do anything with their mp3s after they are in the library, or if they make tag changes they never have to reimport the files. Or they don't care.
I've spent a LOT of time over the past 6 months cleaning up tags, adding details, adding artwork and ripping CDs and now have about 500gigs of tunes in my library. The symptom is the same.. after I've changed or added tags they look fine. If I then bring them into itunes on another mac (this is a shared drive) the edited tags all disappear and revert to either what they were before my edits, or disappear completely. Interestingly (maybe a hint as to whats happening) if I embedded artwork in the file, IT stays, but other tags revert/disappear.
What is the deal here? I can't really see any pattern, some mp3s were downloaded, some were ripped by me, some are CBR others VBR. I have full read/write permissions. MOST of the time I can edit tags and it sticks. its about 10-15% of them that have problems. I've also tried changing the tag to NONE to remove it and then create a new one but that doesnt consistently fix things either. Its either a conflict between the iTunes database and the embedded tags as you suggest or perhaps a conflict between different ID3 versions.
I'd like to hear how other people have got around this... Looks like I've got about 15% of six months of on again off again work down the drain since the tags don't exist in the files (or they're corrupt now).

ITunes changes my ID3 tags... more info please.

Hello,
I'm in the process of setting up a podcast on iTunes for my church. Here is the feed. http://www.christcommunity.org.au/feed/?post_type=sermons
Now, when I subscribe to the feed in iTunes and download a file, I notice that two important ID3 tags have changed.
1. Album changes. In 'The Authority of Jesus.mp3', it is 'The Life of Jesus' on my web server but it is 'Christ Community Church » Sermons' when downloaded from iTunes.
2. Contributing Artists changes. In 'The Authority of Jesus.mp3', it is 'David Cunningham' on my web server bu it is 'Christ Community Church' when downloaded from iTunes.
Why do these ID3 tags change? Thanks.

Roger,
Thanks for your reply to my post. I am not concerned about what appears in iTunes as such, and I understand how that relates to the <iTunes:> tags in the feed. The Apple documentation is pretty clear on this.
However, in the feed, the file is specified by:
<enclosure url="http://media.blubrry.com/christcommunitychurch/www.christcommunity.org.au/ wp-sermons/20110306-ChristCommunity-Mark1.mp3" length="8640981" type="audio/mpeg" />
Now, when I download the file from that URL and look at the ID3 tags, the Album is set to 'The Life of Jesus' and the Contributing Artists is set to 'David Cunningham'. When I download the same podcast episode through iTunes, using the same feed, the ID3 tags change, as specified in my original post.
The feed is created by Blubrry/PowerPress but this process does not alter the ID3 tags.
So the question still remains, why is iTunes changing my ID3 tags? Thank you for your assistance.

Zen mx 16gb player not recognising id3 tags.

,zen mx 6gb player not recognising id3 tags.I recently bought a zen mx and so far can not get it to recognise over half of my mp3's id3 tags. All of the files are drm free. All of the unrecognised files will play but get stuck in the unknown artist unknown album catagory on the player. I have tried retagging the files in several diffrent tagging softwares and upgraded my player to the newest firmware and nothing seems to work. I had a creative vision m 30gb before I had this player and it never had this problem. I contacted customer support but they didnt seem to have any idea what an Id3 tag was and offered no relavent advice other then upgrade your firmware witch was upsetting to say the least. If anyone has any idea how to fix this that would be awesome. I feel like I just wasted almost 80 dollars.

0Re: zen mx 6gb player not recognising id3 tags. It's just aggravating because I used to talk the company up all the time. The older creative zen's where awesome. They played every file that I had with the exclusion of open source formats like ogg witch is understandable because I'm sure that there is not much demand for that.
I wouldn't be half as upset as I am if I felt like the support people where offering decent suggestions or even an explanation of what may be wrong. I mean are there certain id3 tags that are not recognised? At least try to explain why it may not work to me so that I can fix the problem without having to re-tag every cd that I have purchased since I was fourteen. I don't think I'm going to buy anything from them again until I see that the quality of there products is getting better. Maybe I should write a review on Amazon to warn people away, after all the majority of the music that its having problems with was downloaded from Amazon.com.
Btw if your haning the same problem as me kid3 is a program that will retag your files to this players satisfaction. Not that helps if you have a large volume of music but its at least something.

Can not edit id3 tags since upgrade to iTunes 8.1: permissions problem (?)

Hi all,
I am angry at myself for having upgraded to 8.1 before I knew that it's ok, and angry at Apple releasing this update with too many problems. Here is my list:
(1) I cannot change ID3 tags within iTunes for certain tracks. I usually click on one or several tracks, press Command+i for information, then change the desired tags (e.g. genre, album, etc.) and click ok. Only that iTunes won't let me write anything. I found that I have no longer write permission to exactly these tracks (my music is on an external LaCie Firewire800 HD). What I did so far:
- I tried to run "Repair permissions" on the internal HD.
- I clicked on the iTunes music folder on the external hard drive, opened the information window and changed under "Sharing & Permissions" the rights to read&write for my user account. I clicked on "Apply to enclosed items", which should set the permissions to all elements within the folder.
Any ideas? My system is freshly installed (~3weeks old), everything is updated.
(2) Probably related to (1): certain files and documents on my internal hard drive have wrong permissions. Firefox for example is locked as read only, and I cannot update it via the "Check for update" in the help menu. I know there is an update available, as I am using 3.0.6 and the newest is 3.0.8. Repair permissions did not help. See the screen shot for the grayed out "Check for updates" menu entry.
http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/6567/picture2rxl.png
(3) In iTunes, I have a smart playlist in which all songs rated with four or more stars are gathered. I found songs in this list that I did not rate yet, and they all have odd "empty" stars in comparison to the songs I rated myself. What's up with that? See screenshot, some of the songs of the album "I love Jazz" have these odd stars:
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/8702/picture1zkg.png

That's exactly what I did, it took ~20sec to complete the "apply to enclosed items" command (there was heavy disk access), but it does not improve. The permissions stay the same for the files/folders in question. It's very odd, have a look at the screenshot:
Some folders have correct permissions, others (to which I have no access through iTunes) show "admin" twice as the only user who is allowed to write. Repair permission does not help. I have hundreds of files/folders where permissions are wrong, only since the upgrade recently.
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/33/permission.png
Message was edited by: JJulian (added screenshot)

ITunes won't read ID3 tags that Windows sees

I recently switched my library over from a Mac laptop to a PC desktop. I have about 70 GB of perfectly organized music accumulated over years and years.
In the process, after I loaded some songs into iTunes (using the Keep My iTunes Folder Organized and all that stuff), I noticed that about 10 GB of music were without titles, artists, or album info, and just displayed the name of the MP3 file (so like instead of displaying 15 Step by Radiohead from In Rainbows, Track 1 it displayed "01 15 Step" in the Title column only).
The problem is that when I navigate to these songs in Windows Explorer, not only do I see all of the correct ID3 information, I see the extras like Album Art have loaded perfectly as well. I can play these songs in Windows Media Player and the ID3 info is perfect.
Does anyone know why iTunes won't read these ID3 tags or how to get iTunes to read them?

I am also having the same problem with about 200 of my MP3s. The tag info shows up perfectly using QuickLook on Leopard, but in iTunes I can't see any of the info. I have tried converting the ID3 tag version, revesing the unicode....nothing.
Have you had any luck?

MP3 song information not retained after iTunes 7.0 - ID3 tags at fault?

I'm having some strange problems with track information in iTunes. I first noticed it when I tried to copy some mp3's from my Mac to my mobile phone: certain tracks did not retain the song information, like artist, album etc., while others did.
A similar problem has been discussed in this post:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=3698498
However, my problem seems to be a little bit more specific.
If I look at the music in my library in iTunes, all the track information is there. However, for MP3's encoded after 16th October last year, the "Imported With" field, using Get Info, is shown as "Unknown". Before this date, it is shown as "iTunes v7.0". For all MP3's the ID3 version is v2.2.
I believe that I must have upgraded to iTunes 7.0.1 around this time, since I have a number of Apple Lossless audio files which have also been imported and don't show this problem.
The main problem is with the file ID3 tag information (I think). If I select one of the problem tracks, find the original file, open it up in Quicktime and "Get Info", no track/album/artist/composer information is displayed. This is NOT true for 1) MP3's encoded before 16th October 2006 and 2) Apple Lossless files encoded at any time.
In other words, the track information for songs encoded with iTunes 7.0.1 and later is either encoded in a way that no other application can read, OR is only being stored in the iTunes playlist, NOT the file itself. I can see all the track information for these problem files on my iPod, but NOT my mobile phone (where I have to manually copy them over), even if I drag and drop them directly from iTunes.
I have this problem with Quicktime, my mobile phone music player and RealPlayer, so I'm assuming it's "system wide". It even occurs if I copy a problem file out of my music folder and onto the the Desktop, then manually add the track to iTunes: all the song information has disappeared.
I have all my music stored on an external hard disk - 160GB Freecom ToughDrive formatted as HFS+. Previously it was stored on an external disk formatted as FAT32, but copying the files over to the new disk didn't change the problem.
I considered using the "convert ID3 tags" option to see if it would make a difference, but both the good and bad files are listed as using v2.2. I also don't understand enough about them to feel confident converting them to something different - perhaps to v2.3 or v2.4 - just to see if it makes a difference.
Any information on how to "recover" the missing information (for anything other than iTunes) would be greatly appreciated!
MacBook Pro 17" 2.16 GHz 2GB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.9) iTunes 7.1.1

Okay, some more information as I try and track down the source of the problem.
By using an id3 tag editing program - ID3 Editor - I was able to view the song information for each track, even though all the other music players I had tried would not show it. If I then chose to modify and update the ID3 information, this would somehow modify the tags in such a way that they become readable in all other programs.
I tried using the "Convert ID3" tags option in iTunes, just on a whim, but without any success. Saving the song information in ID3 Editor doesn't change the version of the ID3 tag - it's still listed as v2.2 in iTunes - but it DOES make it readable in other programs. I also tried the various text conversion options, again without any success.
This looks to me like a bug in iTunes. While its possible for me to get around it, in an extremely long winded way, I still can't understand why iTunes would be writing ID3 information that other Apple programs cannot read.
Any suggestions? Should I be posting this question in a different forum perhaps?

ITunes doesn't read ID3 tags properly on import

hi all,
today I've added ID3 tags to all my mp3 files, so that they will look better in iTunes and my iPod. I have added information for "title", "artist", "album" and "track #" in ID3v1 and ID3v2.3.
Now, when I import these files to iTunes, the ID3 information is read only partly or not at all. This means, some tracks show all information, some only show title and artist, some do not show anything at all.
I edited all the ID3 tags with the same software, which makes it even more mysterious. The software was implemented by myself in C#. To edit the ID3 tags, I used the library UltraID3Lib. I don't think that something is wrong with my software because the ID3 tags are displayed properly in Winamp without any problems.
I have also already tried the option in iTunes to convert the ID3 tags, but this also only yields strange results: If I select "none" as ID3 version, iTunes obviously imports the information from the ID3v1 tags, but it deletes the ID3v2 tag at the same time, so that titles and albums are cut down to 30 characters. If I choose other options, nothing changes.
Does anybody have an idea how to solve this problem? Or can someone maybe explain this "convert ID3 tag" option? It doesn't really make sense to me...
Many thanks in advance!
gehho.

As far as I know (and it may not be very far), iTunes does use standard ID3 tags for most things. The XML file stores info on ratings, playlists, playcounts and other iTunes specific information for use by other applicaitons. iTunes itself doesn't use the XML file but rather the iTunes Library.itl file.
It's possilble to do multiple file tag editing in iTunes for things like artist, album, year, etc. I would say, go with whatever works for you. It just seemed as if what you were doing wasn't working. Perhaps the other suggestion will solve you're problem.
Best of luck.

ITunes not reading ID3 tags correctly

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