The Ultimate Tag Thread

[kai_desu 340]

Surprised there isn't a thread for this already, especially since I know we have a lot of anal taggers here on the forum, mysql (I've been coding too long .. myself included.

 

So I'm in a bit of a dilemma. Since 2006, I have always used iTunes to listen and manage my music as I had an iPod video → iPhone. I've upgraded to an Android phone this year and finally ridding myself of iTunes and switching to foobar2000. Needless to say, there is a bit of a learning curve to fb2k - which I have a lot to do (I kinda have the basics of ColumnUI installed).

 

I had all my music loaded into fb2k only to find that my once beautiful and coherent tags were fucked up. And I mean... half of the songs that were in Japanese were now displaying gibberish (I know this is an encoding issue based on what encoding your computer is set to). Not only that, but tags that I had altered and changed/fixed using mp3tag magically reverted back to their original horrible state.

 

So. Everything is a mess. Uploading my music to Google Music was practically pointless because the same thing happened with that.

 

I'm in the bind where I absolutely need to fix all my tags - but I want to do it correctly from the start where this won't happen again in the future. So can anyone (anally) bestow upon me their tagging knowledge and how to fix this.

 

For reference, I prefer tags to be in their original state - so that means I don't translate anything or write anything in romaji. I usually do a copy/paste job straight from the bands website.

[nick 10212]

For me, I remove ID3v1 and use ID3v2.3 UTF-16 instead, and everything will be in Unicode on every computer that supports it (Windows XP and newer).

fb2k reads ID3v1 (which doesn't support Unicode) before ID3v2, so this is why I should remove it.

 

In addition, I use the field "ALBUMARTIST" for v.a. albums to tag something like オムニバス so that fb2k can group all the tracks together.

And iPod users should set the field "COMPILATION" to 1 if the field "ALBUM ARTIST" exists.

 

You can try these settings, and test on a messed up album just by clicking on the "Remove Tag" button. It will remove ID3v1 and APE if they exist while ID3v2 still remains.

 

[kai_desu 340]

Thanks for the reply Nostalgia~ I'll give those settings a spin.

This is going to suck though ;-; I have over 7000 songs to go through.

[nick 10212]

No prob! If that works fine, you can put those 7,000 songs into the same folder, and then right click on the folder to edit with mp3tag from the context menu to remove ID3v1 at once.

 

If you're not sure if ID3v2 tags are written in your files already, try those settings and select all the files and click on the "Save" button to save them all without editing anything. It will create ID3v2 tags. Now you will have ID3v1 and 2 together, you can simply remove the ID3v1 tags just by clicking on the "Remove Tag" button. However, be careful while doing this and CTRL+Z is your best friend as long as you don't close the program.

 

The reason why you should use ID3v2.3 UTF-16 not 2.4 UTF-8 is because it's universally supported by most devices/applications while the latter can't be read by some programs (it will be something like "blank or untagged" files.)

[Zeus 7997]

One thing I just want to clarify for you kai: your tags didn't get "messed up". Well they did, but not in the traditional sense. If you import the messed up tracks right back into iTunes the ones you didn't touch should remain exactly the same. iTunes uses their own internal set of ID3 tags to store song information. If you tag outside of iTunes and import, you should be just fine because iTunes will use the given ID3 tags. If you tag in iTunes and import elsewhere, it may or may not translate well.

I'm pretty sure they do this to lock you into iTunes because anyone with over 500 songs isn't going to want to retag them all. Doubly so if it's in Japanese or Korean or something.

[kai_desu 340]

One thing I just want to clarify for you kai: your tags didn't get "messed up". Well they did, but not in the traditional sense. If you import the messed up tracks right back into iTunes the ones you didn't touch should remain exactly the same. iTunes uses their own internal set of ID3 tags to store song information. If you tag outside of iTunes and import, you should be just fine because iTunes will use the given ID3 tags. If you tag in iTunes and import elsewhere, it may or may not translate well.

I'm pretty sure they do this to lock you into iTunes because anyone with over 500 songs isn't going to want to retag them all. Doubly so if it's in Japanese or Korean or something.

 

I knew this much about iTunes - why I use mp3tag to tag music. Same thing happened when importing back into iTunes - tags got reverted and/or were just displaying all fucked up.

[kai_desu 340]

Just wanted to reply to say that what you suggested  is working beautifully! Thank you

[nick 10212]

Welcome! I'm glad to help.

[Ito 2438]

I will have to keep this is mind if/when I switch off of iTunes, cause I will likely have the same problem -___-