Save tag kills ability of some programs to view tags

General Discussion
#1

Recently I had an issue where simply saving a tag from Mp3Tag caused major headaches with my MP3 player and Windows.

For whatever reason this only happened to certain Mp3 files - not all (in my case 100 of 400 Mp3's). The affected Mp3 files lost the ability to view or edit the tags from Windows Explorer (not really important to me), but it also caused my Mp3 player not to be able to show some tags, especially the album artwork (VERY important to me - actually the only reason I use Mp3Tag is to batch import the album artwork).

What was frustrating about this was the tags would show correctly from Mp3Tag, VLC, iTunes, and WMP. In fact, after Mp3Tag killed the ability to view the tags from Windows exlorer, if I resaved the tags from VLC it would "fix" the problem. Aside from tha tags issue the affected Mp3 files would play just fine.

The solution was to check the ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 box under the Mpeg Tags Write Options.

So I hope anyone else experiencing this problem can avoid the hours I spent finding this magic option.

I suggest adding a FAQ entry.

#2

What ID3v2 version caused the trouble?
Usually only v2.4 is difficult with other programs

#3

v2.2 - All the Mp3s are created with iTunes.

The way iTunes embeds album artwork doesn't seem standard - my non-Apple Mp3 player won't display it - so I remove the embedded iTunes artwork and use Mp3Tag to "add" it back.

Now this all used to work without problems - same iTunes and Mp3Tag version - the only difference is I recently upgraded my hard drive and converted it from FAT32 to NTFS. Any issue here??

Anyway, before I found the solution, I messed with the "convert ID3 tags" option in iTunes. When changed to v1.1 suddenly I had no problems with Mp3Tag messing up when it saved the tags - but v1.1 apparently has some limitations (it seemed tags like title/artist/album got truncated over a certain length so that solution was worthless as some album artwork wouldn't match %album% etc).

#4

yes. 1.1 is limited to 30 characters I believe. In itunes, convert to ID3v2.3 instead. I've had no problem with embedded art from itunes showing up in mp3tag. But all tags from itunes were originally converted to 2.3