I am using MP3tag to clean up some files on my Windows 7 computer. Here's the issue: I cleaned up one MP3 file, and the cleanup included changing the artist name. When I look at the file in MP3tag, everything looks just like it should. However, when I use Windows Explorer, I see a column entitled 'Contributing Artist', which I don't see in MP3tag, but it is possibly the Artist field? Also, the data that shows in Windows Explorer is the artist name before I changed it and I do not see the old artists name with MP3tag.
Out of curiosity, I opened the file using a text editor and found the old artist name, which I thought I had changed, in the last line in the file.
My thought is that I need to enable seeing more fields in MP3tag and change the artist name in a hidden field, but no idea if this is correct. Any suggestions?
Thanks for the replies. Based on that which was written, I did a little for searching and found the MP3tag View->Extended tags. Here, I saw ‘Contributing Artist’, was able to edit it, and the info showed up properly in Windows Explorer.
However, I am wondering if there is a ‘bug’ in Windows or MP3tags. Why? The field that appears as simply ‘Artist’ in MP3tag seems to be the field that Windows Explorer shows as ‘Contributing Artist’. I also suspect that the mp3 files in question may have be damaged or corrupted, in some sense, because of some other strangeness.
Windows Explorer isn't really built around metadata for music files. But you will find that many different music library managers, players, and even mp3tag have slightly different "friendly" naming conventions for the tag fields - but they are all mapped to the same field. So this isn't a bug in Windows or mp3tag, just a matter of the description of the tags. Often these can be found the way you did, using the Extended tags view.