Hello!
Here's my problem: I have an album, whose ID3 tags are fully recognized by foobar2000. But when I open this very album in Mp3tag, a few tracks (in this case 3 of 16) are just not there. When I try to open the missing tracks separately, kind of nothing happens. What could be the reason for that? (I have already tried to fix the MP3 header in foobar but with no luck.)
Thanks in advance for your help.
"Kind of nothing"?? Seriously? What does that mean?
Do the files load into Mp3tag, but show no data within the tagging fields, or do the files fail to load at all?
The files fail to load.
Download MP3 Diags and scan the files to see if any problems show up.
The program will also fix any problems it finds.
The Mp3 Diags was not the answer, but foobar2000 was: if you hit on "Auto track number" for each album, the Mp3tag recognizes the missing tracks too. Thanks for the tip anyway.
This is very odd, I've never seen a missing tag field cause a file to fail to load into mp3tag. Nothing about the track number field should cause a file not to load into mp3tag active window.
I suspect there is a misunderstanding of the language here. "fail to load" means that mp3tag doesn't even show that there is a file at all (as opposed to showing the file, but showing certain tag fields blank).
edit: Maybe you had some sort of filter turned on in mp3tag related to album (and maybe the missing tracks were not considered part of album until you fixed the tags in foobar). People often get confused when they've accidentally turned on filtering in mp3tag and only see certain files as a result. So check that as well.
My issue is similar but not quite the same.
Files where the tag "Type" contains "M4A Audio File (VLC)" and an entry in the "Contributing Artists" field will import when dragged into the Mp3Tag window. However, files with the same "Type" but where the tag "Contributing Artists" is blank do not appear at all.
(All my mp3's have an artist shown already so I can't test if this happens for the .mp3 format)
Please check the status bar: how many files have you loaded and how many are displayed.
If those numbers differ then press F3 to toggle the filter and see if more files are displayed.
Filtering is off. F3 has no effect. I hope I am describing my issue adequately. If I try to drag/drop 4 files, all "M4A Audio File (VLC)", 2 having a "Contributing Artists" entry and 2 not, only the 2 with that field filled will appear in the app.
If you try to load this files with
File -> Add directory
(browse to the folder which contains these files)
do you see the files then in Mp3tag?
What does the status bar show: how many files have been loaded?
And if all this does not lead anywhere:
could you supply a working and an ignored file?
See also this thread:
I get this error when trying to load an m4a. by drag/drop.
Sorry, the file you are trying to upload is not authorized (authorized extensions: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, src, mte, mta, log, dmp, zip, rar, pdf, txt, rtf, mov, mp4).
No files appear when using the app File>add directory method.
Is converting .m4a to .mp4 an option? (still would not explain why some .m4a's will load, though)
You could rename the file to txt or something allowed.
It could be that the mp4 format is not as expected, see the linked thread.
If you can not upload it to a 3rd party file hoster and tell us the download link, you could try to download the FFMPEG-Essential-Tools from here:
https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/ffmpeg-release-essentials.7z
or the ZIP file if you prefer:
https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/ffmpeg-release-essentials.zip
Extract it and then copy the 2 "problematic" files to the \bin directory where you can find ffprobe.exe
In a CMD-Line window execute
ffprobe "problematic_filename.m4a"
Please upload a screenshot from this result.
From the last line I would say that your M4A does not contain one of the listed music formats (mov, mp4, m4a, 3gp, mj2).
It is highly possible that your "M4A" is something else, but not M4A. That could be the reason why Mp3tag does not load it, because this file can not be modified without recognizing the correct music format.
You could compare it with one of the working songs. FFProbe.exe should tell you about M4A and some technical details for those.
What was the source for these files that won't behave in mp3tag? Perhaps from YouTube using an online converter?
Are you saying I need to run my own comparative diagnostic on two separate diagnostic outputs from a program I am totally unfamiliar with? Sorry, I'm really not ready to take that on. If Mp3Tag cannot allow me to add a blank tag to these I will have to try and find a utility that will. Here is a screen shot of my attempt to add 4 files. Thanks for the input, everyone.
I just try to describe why Mp3tag is not loading a possibly malformed music file, which pretends to be a M4A. Mp3tag can not "heal" a corrupted file and does not try to harm such a file even more.
If you can not share such a problematic file, the only way to find the reason is to try it by yourself.
If you like, you could try to find the used codec in your "problematic M4A" with this 1-line-command:
ffprobe -v error -select_streams a:0 -show_entries stream=codec_name,codec_long_name "problematic_filename.m4a"
For a working M4A it should ouptut something like this:
[STREAM]
codec_name=aac
codec_long_name=AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)
[/STREAM]
Would be interesting, what your "problematic M4A" shows.
Otherwise you would have to upload your files to a file sharing host and share the link to such a file with us. Then we can try to analyze it further.
AFAI can see - the files that loaded OK in MP3tag are the only ones in the explorer that show a bitrate ...
So apparently, the explorer also does not really know what to do with these files.