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

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