Locked ID3 Tags

I recently added songs to my library and when I tried rewriting the song info on the ID3 Tag, I couldn't because the songs are locked or encoded. Some are encoded with iTunes v 7.5, others withe LAME3.97.
I just want to organize and rewrite their tags for these newly added songs.
What can I do? PLEASE HELP, I'm desperate!!!!!

My suggestion to you would be to download Media Rage (shareware with a 2 week unlimited free trial) from Chaotic Software ( http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ ) and use its QuickEdit function to completely remove the tags from your MP3s and then re-tag them. It's not a quick fix, sadly, but it's the only thing I've found which will force misbehaving MP3s to sit up straight.
Open Media Rage and then hit Command-Shift N to bring up the QuickEdit box. Then drag your MP3s into the File List. Look for the ID3v2 and ID3v1 options in the right half of the window. Set them both to "None" and click the little pin buttons next to the popups. This will ensure the setting is applied to every track. Select the first song and then click the "Save & Next" button in the lower right corner. Continue until you've reached the last song.
Now you should set the ID3 popups to at least 2.3 and 1.1, respectively. Fill in your artist and album information and click the pins. Then go through track by track to fill in the name and track number. As I said, it's not a quick fix, but it does work.
Hope it helps!
ETA: I don't work for Chaotic, I'm just a very satisfied customer.
Message was edited by: Bruce Anderson

Similar Messages

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)

Car Menu Music Player - ID3 Tags

Hello,
I am using the car menu v2.6 on my E51. I am wondering which ID3-Tag version is supported. Does anybody know that?
What about v2.8 beta, which versions are supported here?
Thanks,
Jones

Hi Diavonex. Yes I was aware of this option.
Subsequently I have done a litle research and downloaded a music app called "Track 8" which has a much clearer interface (larger type) and the abillity to change the background colour to dark or light.
This is much more readable in the car in bright light, and much better at night too.
You can also turn off auto-lock within the application, which is great, as it doesn't affect other apps.
Although this app is really only an interface sitting on top of the music app, it offers a much better experience
in my opinion that the stock player which seems to have devolved rather than evolved.

Preventing iTunes from changing ID3 tags

When you highlight a song's name in iTunes and then click it again you can rename it. That's something that bothers me because I often misclick and accidentally rename songs I don't want to from the first place – I suppose I'm kind of careless – and I'm looking for a way to prevent me from further editing a song's ID3 tag even when click again its tag. Now I guess, what could help me is pretty much something like the lock that you can find on System Preferences so I can lock the iTunes interface and then unlock it when I actually want to rename a song's ID3 tag – something generally preventing changes also works with me as long as I can still use "Get Info" (cmd-I).
I don't know if there's a simple setting which gets toggled on and off that simply, but if there isn't I guess someone could recommend a reliable plug-in which can help me in what I'm looking for. I googled it but couldn't find anything related to this subject.
I'm using 10.5.8 and 10.7 iTunes.
Thank you.

I know it's not there in my older iTunes version and I've not heard mention of it in any other version.
If you find you have accidentally edited a field and you haven't left it yet, press the escape key to undo it.
Make sure your file names contain the basics. I format mine to: Artist - Album - TrackNumber TrackName.[extension] If I lose a tag I can at least get the basic information from the file name and the rest off a web site (and some tags cannot be so easily edited).
It sounds like a lot of trouble but I imagine if you did as you mention and actually lock the file in Finder that would stop it from being edited.

ID3 Tag Coversion

I am trying to convert some of my songs from my itunes library into english. Some of my songs are from anime soundtracks in which some of the tracks are in japanese. I went into advanced, convert Id3 tags, but it wont let me convert the tracks. Is it because that the company who created the cd put a lock on converting these to english or is it something with itunes. If someone could help me with this problem I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks for the help.
Podcast Junkie 06

Converting the tags won't translate them into English; iTunes is not quite that sophisticated.
Have you tried just selecting the track, right (or control depending on your OS) click, Get Info and then typing in the new tag info?

Can't change ID3 tags in iTunes 10?

Ever since the update to 9.2, iTunes seems to have lost the ability to convert ID3 tags.
Prior to 9.2 (and obviously, 10.x) I would be able to add mp3s to my library, select all of the newly added tracks, then Control click and change all of my ID3 tags to NONE to strip it of any extraneous info, wait for iTunes to rescan everything, and then I'd re-convert my ID3 tags to 2.3.
Since the update(s), it'll allow you to go through the motions, but the tracks don't actually rescan. I'll try to convert to NONE and nothing happens.
This is an important function for me because I use iTunes in conjunction with Serato for DJing and sometimes Serato has trouble reading a track if the ID3 tag is an older version.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Is this merely an oversight by Apple's iTunes team or is there a known reason why this function was removed?
p.s. -- I have always been under the impression that you cannot change an ID3 tag from say, 2.1 to 2.3, without first converting the ID3 tag to NONE first. If this is no longer the case, can someone please enlighten me?

A rare but maddening problem, probably limited to older MP3 files,
Mac/Windows MP3 files that do not play in iTunes but play in QuickTime
There is a problem with some mp3 files not playing in iTunes
because of the ID3 tag headers in the files. For Mac OS you
can fix these files by processing them with XLD (X Lossless Decoder),
a free download.
1. Select the Input MP3 files
2. Set the output format to MP3 Lame in the XLD preferences.
3. Unless you select a directory for output different from input,
the output file names will have a number added to the name.
The selected files are processed on my machine at about 30x or
about 2 minutes per hour of play time. I was unable to fix these
files using right click->Get Info in iTunes.
On my MacBook Pro , trying to run on of these problem MP3
files, locked up iTunes. Force Quit on iTunes was not enough
to get iTunes 10.1 to run again. I had to restart the machine.
I think this is the first time I have ever had to restart my
machine for a problem with an App. From my reading on the web,
I can see this problem has existed at least since iTunes 7.x
On Windows, you may be able to fix this problem using
MP3TagValidator.
No need to throw away those bad MP3 files!

Problems w/ artwork & ID3 tags

What up?
I have some albums that just won't allow me to add artwork for them. I did some research and apparently it's to do with my ID3 tags. I selected the songs went to the advanced menu or right clicked but the option 'convert ID3 tags' was not there, it simply didn't exist in the menu. Why would that be?
Another sympton my iTunes has been having is (with this same album) if I single click the song it will add to the song title, a 1-04 (the latter number depends on the track number I click.) Now why would all this be happening?

I selected the songs went to the advanced menu or right clicked but the option 'convert ID3 tags' was not there, it simply didn't exist in the menu. >Why would that be?
They are not MP3 files.
I have some albums that just won't allow me to add artwork for them
Likely they are WAV files. Also, teh files may be locked/Read Only or you do not have Read/Write perminssions to them.

Cannot edit ID3 tags for newly added tracks

I want to stress: this is for iTunes 10.5 b2 but I want to make sure this gets out there so this issue can be resolved sooner rather than later since it's somewhat ESSENTIAL for iTunes to actually function properly.
But I upgraded to b2 from b1 today and now anytime I add any new mp3 files I cannot edit the ID3 tags - in fact I go to edit them and all the options are greyed out...
Anything added PRIOR to the upgrade is editable it's just anything I add since the upgrade. I've tried restarting the app and it still is locked.
Anyone have any suggestions? Has anyone else seen this?

Since iTunes 10.5 is development release only and you as a developer agreed to not discuss it in accordance with your non-disclosure agreement, you should post the question over here -> http://www.developer.apple.com

Creative Mediasource ID3 Tags - Edit more than one year at a ti

I use a 60gb Zen Xtra with Mediasource. I take pride in the ID3 tags of all my files especially those of my Jazz collection and my player is well organised. The only thing I have to ask is - is there any way of editing the year of, say, an entire album that was recorded in 959 for example all at the same time. It lets me do this for Artist, Album and Genre but not year. Is there any upgrade in software I can get or am I just missing something here?
Thanks in advance for your input,Matt

Shucks, I tried and you can't seem to do it. A curious oversight.
You can either use another copying program like which will let you do it, or simply get a mass tagger (but you will need to edit the tracks on the PC first, then copy). For some mass tagger recommendations look here in the Zen FAQ at Nomadness.net.

Archiving cds and why do i need id3 tags

here comes another one of those questions looking at which codec to use to store music.....i also have tag questions.....
i'm about to (re-)rip my cd collection and looking at some info re codecs and id3 tags
now.....i believe i understand the benefits of alac (lower file sizes, keeping id3 tags, lossless compression) v wav(no compression)
however (and for some out there) if we just entertain the fact that wav may have some minute benefit for me depending on my questions and answers given.....and yes i know wav and alac will sound the same to the human ear - i accept that as a given of lossless compression ......
points i'd like to outline:
i am looking to rip my cds, firstly and mostly, for an archiving purpose!! purpose numero uno!!
i could well want to re-create cds with these archived records in the future
size of files is of no concern to me at all
i'm using a mac nowadays
i will convert most of these files, where needed, to use with a portable music player (i'm not bothered with having, say a wav file and then also converting and having an alac file, as crazy as that sounds)
this is where i ask for info re the benefits of embedded tags that are found in alac:
are these tags that important?
where do they come into play in ripping and later converting music?
are these uses just bells and whistles that have no benefit to my needs?
if i rip cds to wav (or aiff), say, using itunes, will cd info and track listings be available on the downloading database (eg itunes) to name these wav files?
if i then ensure these song files are kept under the album's folder, have i just done what tags do? surely not. that is all i have needed in the past.
this is where i feel i may be really missing what id tags (can) do
are tags more than just managing song files and where they belong and where they have come from?
is it just a convenience of not personally managing your song files (as per previous paragraph)?
(in the past i had ripped cds to mp3 codec. i think i used "cd rip" or something like that on my pc.
my mp3 files were individually named and sorted and kept under album folders under artist name folders.
apart form the very odd occasion all track and album info i needed was found on a database that was attached to the ripping software.
i never had a problem managing/maintaining these files and folders.)
i welcome some enlightenment on some of my questions above and other info that may be relevant
and yes, i understand that music will sound the same as a wav file or alac file - but humour me re using wav and tell me why i need id3 tags
i guess the crux of it is:
why do i need id3 tags?
does my managing of my song file in the album folder do what tags do?
what problems/shortcomings/headaches may i encounter by not having those tags if i use wav as opposed to alac?
what do i not know about these little buggers?
what codec is best for my purpose of archiving and re creating of cds (for playing in cd players)
thanks in advance for your input and any clarity that i may experience through this
peter t
excuse my long windedness (i have spent some time editing this entry)

Crows2012 wrote:
as mentioned earlier if i just have songs (wav) in album folders, when i import these albums into itunes, do you know if these will come up under AN album with their file names purely using my filename setup (but with no artwork)?
Yes, iTunes will read the filename, such as "Track 1" or something else and display it. But nothing else. No Album or Artist.
so the tracks will remain grouped as an album based on their initial folder and the albums and tracks as per file name?
Crows2012 wrote:
also, does aiff have limitations (apart from the full size of the file)?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. For all practical purposes AIFF and WAV are exactly the same thing. They're just file containers.
i thought that i had read somewhere that aiff tags could run into some issues with its tags - ie may not always be transferred 100% accurately with certain players (or hardware maybe)
Crows2012 wrote:
and how do these codecs work re-creating an album for the purposes of playing in a cd player? - this is a crucial question for the purpose of my archiving/backup of CDs THEMSELVES
That's actually going to depend on what burning software you use. Once you rip the tracks to whatever file container you choose (WAV/AIFF/ALAC) you'll never really exactly re-create the album. But for archiving purposes all three file containers will do what you want, which is to create a lossless archive. AIFF has the advantage of supporting embedded ID3, which ALAC has the additional advantage of the files also being about half the size of AIFF/WAV files.
i was thinking that maybe wav was able to recreate an album (in effect duplicate one) if my cd was lost or damaged in the future. i was thinking this IF when ripping to wav everything is unchanged (unless there is other data on the original cd). and maybe only possible with wav. the purpose for this would be to play recreated cds on my cd player
any idea on this one?
(i havent looked too thoroughly on this angle but i'll keep googling on this one)
much appreciate all info thus far
peter t

My iTunes library and metadata/ID3 tags issue

Since 2010, iTunes is the only media player I use to play music. My library consists of music purchased from the iTunes Store, CD rips and stuff many artists these days release as freebies on the internet to promote a new album. Also, M4A and MP3 are the only formats I use so far.
Since iTunes, I really got into editing my library's metadata tags by hand, in order to create a custom archive which serves my preferences best. I should mention that besides iTunes being the only software I use to play my music library, it's also the only software I use to edit their metadata. Also, before iTunes – when my library was on different media players – I never bothered with editing them.
A few days ago, I found how a lot of people in forums complain about the way iTunes edits and stores metadata. So, I experimented and moved a few of my songs to other media players after editing their tags within iTunes. And indeed the tags and/or artwork were often displayed messed up and/or incorrect, some times partially and some times completely.
Some people were referring to the version of the ID3 tags being the issue, while others suggested using the "convert ID3 tags" feature. I myself am a little bit confused. "Converting the ID3 tags" wasn't available for my M4A files and once I performed it for my MP3's I didn't know which setting I should apply or what version to choose. I chose one version randomly but I'm not sure what happened.
My goal is to make my music library able to play and display my custom metadata on the majority of the popular media players. I hope that firstly this is possible and that secondly it won't be a solution which requires me going through every single song individually.
I really hope that all those years work on my library wasn't for nothing.
I'm using a MacBook running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and my iTunes version is 10.7
While my music library is more important that my iTunes version, I do like iTunes 10 more than 11.
I apologize for any grammar mistakes, since English is not my first language. Thank you all for your time and any suggestion is welcome.

itsjamesd wrote:
Hello turingtest2 and thank you for your reply.
In response to "a possible cause of problems is multiple embedded tags", what exactly does that mean and how can I avoid doing it in the future?
Anything ripped with iTunes should get a single tag. If multiple tags in some of your older mp3 rips are the cause of the problems when you try to access the files elsewhere then you should apply the suggested remedy selectively, not to the whole library indiscriminately. Once fixed you shouldn't have the problem again unless you use different ripping software. If so check the options to ensure you generate a single ID3v2.3 tag. Downloads from elsewhere are pot luck.
If I use Convert ID3 Tags>None before converting to v2.3 as you suggested, how many times is "several times" and why do I have to do it more than once? Also, what are your thoughts on 'v2.3 vs. v2.4'?
Several is at least two, but more could be needed if a file has both v1 and v2 tags in multiple languages. If there are two tags, the first conversion to none should remove the first one, and the second conversion the second. Experiment, And stick to v2.3.
In response to "the process removes any embedded art but otherwise preserves the data that iTunes knows". All fields excluding cover art remain the same? Does that mean that I will have to start from scratch and apply new cover art individually for each album? That would be too time consuming given the fact that I embed custom art.
Yes, everything but artwork is held in the iTunes database and is restored with the final Convert ID3 Tags... v2.3. Use Doug's scripts SaveAlbumArtJpeg before you start and RestoreArtworkFromAlbumFolder afterwards to save and the restore your existing artwork.
Also, what happens with my M4A files' metadata? ID3 tags are only used for MP3's, right?
Yes, m4a/aac files have a different tag mechanism. Multiple ID3 tags is just one possible issue that you might have. You said:
So, I experimented and moved a few of my songs to other media players after editing their tags within iTunes. And indeed the tags and/or artwork were often displayed messed up and/or incorrect, some times partially and some times completely.
It might be worth going into some more detail about exactly what differences you noticed. iTunes can automatically associate (instead of embedding) artwork when it can match the album in the store which could be why some tracks didn't get artwork.
tt2

Bad bug with ID3 tags of different case for same artist

My itunes files and music library are on a different drive than my boot drive. It is an internal drive (always on) in my Mac Pro at /Volumes/Media1/iTunes with music library at /Volumes/Media1/iTunes/iTunes Music. iTunes is setup to automatically keep it organized and copy files to the media folder when adding. It has been this way for years, never a problem.
Just recently, and I think this may have coincided (but I'm not sure) with a 10.6.5 Snow Leopard update, my music started disappearing! The entries were still in the library, but with the missing exclamation mark in itunes with it reporting that it couldn't find the files. But only certain artists. After searching my computer, I found the missing files it at the same path, but on my boot drive, at /Media1/iTunes/iTunes Music/<missing artist>!
Trying to add these files back to my library would work briefly, but then they would magically disappear out of /Volumes/Media1/iTunes/iTunes Music and go back to /Media1/iTunes/iTunes Music/
I figured out the one thing the different artists that had this behavior had in common - some of the ID3 tags for the same artist, which are the basis for organization, were in different cases. I think there is a weird case sensitivity bug that is breaking things. When I add back only those songs for an artist with ID3 tags for the artist of the same case, the behaviour stops.
I'm posting less looking for an answer and more to raise visibility and hope this gets a fix.
Example entries from my iTunes Library.xml, notice how the 'k' in OutKast is a different case in the entries.
<key>Artist</key><string>OutKast</string>
<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/Volumes/Media1/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/OutKast/Speakerboxxx,%20Th e%20Love%20Below%20(Disc%202)/13%20Pink%20&%20Blue.mp3</string>
<key>Artist</key><string>Outkast</string>
<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/Volumes/Media1/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/Outkast/Aquemini/12%20Spot tieOttieDopaliscious.mp3</string>

I'd like to note that I'm experiencing the exact same issue. I'd add to this but petegas4life has it spot on. I'm just replying in hopes this thread gets noticed so the engineers at apple can look into this and hopefully fix it in the next release.
Reproducing the problem is pretty simple too. Just take one song from an album and change the case of the artist name. You'll see the music move to the boot drive and all of the songs from that artist won't work in itunes anymore. And if you're relying on iTunes to edit the tags, fixing the files is a PAIN because they keep disappearing on you.

ITunes 11 Changing ID3 Tags

Ok, I've been using iTunes for years and like many I've found the new version, 11, to be frustrating.
The main thing is ID3 Tags.
These have always been customiseable. For someone OCD like me, being able to edit and customise ID3 tags is very important in keeping my iTunes "tidy". I don't want one album saying "Florence + The Machine" and another saying "Florence & The Machine". I want them both the same.
But what I really want, more than anything else, is 100% control over what the ID3 tags say. On all the old versions of iTunes, I had this. Now, I don't.
I've just listened to two albums by Dead Prez. They're stylised thus: 'dead prez'. So, it is that version which I've always had on my iTunes. However, after listening to one of the albums, iTunes decided to change the name back to 'Dead Prez'. This was nothing to do with me. Why has it changed?
Worse, I've just listened to a song by David Gray, and I've now found it stored under U - for Unknown. It's not 'Unknown', because I've known for all the years that I've owned that file that the song was by David Gray. I haven't had to edit the information for years.
Is this a bug?
Is this a new feature of iTunes? Can I turn it off? If not, can Apple/ someone provide me with an explanation as to WHY this has changed?
Cheers,
Guy

In iTunes go to Edit > Preferences > Store and turn off
Show iTunes in the Cloud purchases
Share details about your library with Apple
On any iOS device go to Settings > Music and turn off
Show All Music
Close and reopen iTunes and/or reset the device and you should see your version of the metadata for each track rather than the original store data.
tt2

Question about id3 tags

i had all of the fields of all my songs just how i liked them. i thought itunes had written everything i had edited into the id3 tags of all the songs. apparently, it didn't work.
i am using another software called serato. i took the mp3's whose tags i edited in itunes and imported them into serato. i know this program is able to read all versions of tags, so i found a suggestion someone made to strip the id3 tags. this process called for selecting all the songs, converting the id3 tags to "none", then changing them back to a certain version (v2.3 or v2.4).
after doing this, i take a look at my itunes library and about 80% of all my songs have their tags messed up. either the genre is back to what it was before i changed it a while ago, or (more annoyingly) the song titles are all truncated to a certain length.
1. is there any way to undo this? or am i going to have to manually go back and re-edit all the fields?
2. is there a better way of ensuring itunes is correctly changing the id3 tag fields? for example. if i edit the id3 tags on itunes on one profile on my mac, then take the same mp3 file and import it into itunes on another profile, the id3 tags seem to not have been changed at all.
help anyone? this whole thing has got me really frustrated. thanks in advance.

In Serato setup, check box Read iTunes Library. However this doesn't solve the problem, only creates yet another location for cleaning up....
Having somewhat same issue: Converted all id3 from iTunes succesfully, but couldn't import files correct on other macbook in iTunes (same version)?!?!? Doesn't read id3...

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.

Locked ID3 Tags

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