How to copy MP3 metadata/tags created in iTunes?

[pomozki]

As I am the only one who said something about automatic updates, I honestly did not want that to appear as derogative.

haha, don't worry, I'm just hyper-sensitive in a forum full of clever people

iTUnes does update the database when you force iTunes to show the information. But that is not quite my idea of "automatic" but looks to me like "manual".

yes OK, you're right (but it's way easier than having to re-import all the songs again!)

if anyone finds out why Windows cannot handle the comments field and if Apple IS
able to do it, I'd love to know
thanks

[pomozki]

Aargh! some time ago I had to move everything from my "comments" field after discovering that the text was often not copied out of iTunes into Windows tags
I've now discovered that many other fields are also sometimes not copied along with the file - for instance, genre, album, year - and I now have many hundreds of songs to manually edit to copy them back in
if I only knew why this happened I could so something about it!

does anyone have any ideas? strangely, I have a program (CopyTrans) that faithfully copies everything (files, all tags and all playlists) from one iTunes library to another - but Windows/MP3Tag and Media Monkey are all missing tag details

thanks Alan

[ohrenkino]

...
does anyone have any ideas? strangely, I have a program (CopyTrans) that faithfully copies everything (files, all tags and all playlists) from one iTunes library to another - but Windows/MP3Tag and Media Monkey are all missing tag details

thanks Alan

Could you first of all check what kind of files lack information? are these flac, mp4?
What kind of tags do you read? V1? V2.3? APE?
Then, if they are mp3s, check what kind of tag versions the contain: only mp3 V1 and V2.3 or also APE?
Then I think iTunes has a feature to export playlists to a text format or parts of the library to xml-files or CSV files. You could try that to reimport that data into mp3tag.

[pomozki]

thanks for the reply

Could you first of all check what kind of files lack information? are these flac, mp4?

I don't have any FLAC or MP4 in my library - I just checked and all are MP3

What kind of tags do you read? V1? V2.3? APE?
Then, if they are mp3s, check what kind of tag versions the contain: only mp3 V1 and V2.3 or also APE?

I just checked in MP3Tag and I can see lots of ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 ID3 v 2.3) - not sure if there are any other kinds

Then I think iTunes has a feature to export playlists to a text format or parts of the library to xml-files or CSV files. You could try that to reimport that data

yes I often export my playlists as txt files, don't know how to use it to solve this problem
have you ever experienced this problem? any idea why it happens? I know the comments tag sometimes gets hidden by other "rogue" comments tags which MP3tag helpfully deletes for me - but all these other tags too?

[ohrenkino]

I just checked in MP3Tag and I can see lots of ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 ID3 v 2.3) - not sure if there are any other kinds

you could apply a filter like
%_tag% HAS APE
to see only those files. You then don't have to scroll through the files manually.

have you ever experienced this problem?

The only problem I have exprienced was that iTunes did not update the files. So I modified my workflow and leave the tagging to dedicated tagging programs like mp3tag. Which does not solve iTunes rather individual handling of data as it now ignores any changes in the files unless you force iTUnes to re-read the files.

Then, AFAIK (in former versions) you could export the whole library to a CSV file which then could be edited e.g. with Excel. You could then extract the data for the incomplete files, create another CSV files and import the data into MP3tag using the converter Textfile-Tag.

Another note on COMMENT: iTunes expects a comment to be labelled "English" to recognize it as comment. If you look at the very same comment with a Microsoft program (like WMP or explorer) then this program expects the comment to be labelled in the language of the operating system. THis could lead to the impression that there is no comment - but is only labelled for a different language.