# MP3TAG erases tags while doing group tag editing
**URL:** https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [September 16, 2024, 8:36am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949 "2024-09-16T08:36:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@MarcB](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/MarcB)
#### Post date: [September 16, 2024, 8:36am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949/1 "2024-09-16T08:36:11Z")
Hi,
I have a large (26 000 songs) music library stored on my BlueSound Vault device.
Many files miss the ALBUMARTIST tag and thus do not appear when I make a search with the BlueOS interface. I want to fill the missing ALBUMARTIST using the ARTIST tag.
I use MP3TAG on a Windows PC where the music library is accessible as a mounted drive (R:\Music on the file manager). My LAN uses WiFi.
With MP3TAG is set a filter to view only the files with empty ALBUMARTIST tag (albumartist MISSING AND artist PRESENT). This gives a list of 13 000 songs.
I then use the Conversion/Tag-Tag menu option to load the albumartist field with the content of the artist field.
I tried with 1 file, with a set of 10, then 20. But when I selected 30 files at some point MP3TAG freezes and starts erasing tags in the files. The title and artist tags were removed in some file, one file was so corrupted that I couldn’t edit it with another tag editor and had to make a copy and recreate the tag set. This problem occurred twice.
Can you help diagnose the problem and find a sage solution for bulk tag editing ?
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### Author:  [@LyricsLover](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/LyricsLover)
#### Post date: [September 16, 2024, 8:45am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949/2 "2024-09-16T08:45:04Z")
> [@MarcB](#):
>
> and find a sage solution for bulk tag editing
I would suggest to copy the songs you need to tag to a local SSD.
Then tag them as you already did it, but with the local files.
The last step would be to move the tagged files from your local SSD back to your R:
Hint:
Tagging over WLAN and for big files like FLAC or WAV needs a lot of time to rewrite the entire files.
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### Author:  [@ohrenkino](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/ohrenkino)
#### Post date: [September 16, 2024, 8:46am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949/3 "2024-09-16T08:46:44Z")
> [@MarcB](#):
>
> one file was so corrupted
Did you check that prior to editing?
As you found such files in your collection, I would run a check first.
Here are some links to diagnostic tools:
> [@How to check files for errors?](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/how-to-check-files-for-errors/44633):
>
> It’s required and often helps to reduce support cycles to check files for errors before filing a bug report. Symptoms of erroneous files are often missing or wrong bitrate or length audible blips or skips tags seem to be sticky and cannot be removed There are some really good tools to check the files for errors, namely MP3 Diags — identifies many different issues in MP3 files Website: [http://mp3diags.sourceforge.net](http://mp3diags.sourceforge.net) Download: [MP3 Diags - Getting MP3 Diags](http://mp3diags.sourceforge.net/010_getting_the_program.html#binWindows) If the font size in MP3 Diags is …
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### Author:  [@ohrenkino](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/ohrenkino)
#### Post date: [September 16, 2024, 8:48am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949/4 "2024-09-16T08:48:46Z")
> [@MarcB](#):
>
> my BlueSound Vault
You would have to make sure that no other program accesses the files while you edit them, esp. with a bulk function.
This includes indexing programs on a NAS:
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### Author:  [@MarcB](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/MarcB)
#### Post date: [September 16, 2024, 9:26am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949/5 "2024-09-16T09:26:57Z")
Will the mp3diags tool work on FLAC, WAV and other uncompressed files ?
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### Author:  [@ohrenkino](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/ohrenkino)
#### Post date: [September 16, 2024, 9:48am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949/6 "2024-09-16T09:48:34Z")
as the program name says and the headline tells you
### MP3 Diags — identifies many different issues in MP3 files
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### Author:  [@lkantrov](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/lkantrov)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2024, 4:32am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949/7 "2024-09-17T04:32:41Z")
@MarcB
I can't speak to the NAS/corruption issues, but I will just promote that you can create a very simple Action Group with an action to copy the %artist% field value into the albumartist field. The benefit is you can add a hotkey (add an ampersand & in the action group name).
The Convert Tag-Tag feature is something I haven't used much (yet), but I generally prefer Action Groups for things I need to do often (as my collection changes) or a lot at once (13,000 tracks). The keyboard shortcuts really make it go a lot faster without trying to do all files at once. I like to make sure what's going on makes sense.
Recently I had some albums with similar issues (no AlbumArtist), and wanted to copy the Artist field over. Some of the tracks had Artist values of something like Main Artist featuring Featured Artist. If I were doing thousands of files at once I wouldn't have spotted those and would have had issues with how those albums were listed in my player (listed by Album Artist --\> Album).
Best of luck!
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### Author:  [@lkantrov](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/lkantrov)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2024, 4:33am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949/8 "2024-09-17T04:33:46Z")
Here's a screenshot of that simple action group:
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### Author:  [@ohrenkino](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/ohrenkino)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2024, 5:15am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949/9 "2024-09-17T05:15:30Z")
Which is also part of the descriptions in the FAQs and HowTos ...
> [@Actions and batch-operations](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/actions-and-batch-operations/967/15):
>
> How to copy one field value to another field? Example how to copy the content of the ARTIST field to the ALBUMARTIST field: Create a [new action](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/actions/967/2) in an existing action group or make a new action group. Action type: Format value Field: ALBUMARTIST Format string: %artist% Note: If you want to copy all possible values of a field (in case you have multiple artist fields), the internal scripting function [$meta\_sep](https://docs.mp3tag.de/scripting) can be used in the format string, e.g., $meta\_sep(artist,\\\\)
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### Author:  [@MarcB](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/MarcB)
#### Post date: [September 23, 2024, 1:43pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949/10 "2024-09-23T13:43:49Z")
The combination of a local copy of all my files on a USB drive and the use of Actions instead worked flawlessly. Editing so many files over a WiFi network was not a good idea. Thank you for the support.
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### Author:  [@system](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/system)
#### Post date: [October 23, 2024, 1:44pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/mp3tag-erases-tags-while-doing-group-tag-editing/65949/11 "2024-10-23T13:44:23Z")
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