WMP12 mp3 tag writing woes

[rhouck]

Having an absolute nightmare of a time trying to get WMP to write my mp3 tags correctly.

All of my music is stored on my file server (running Windows Home Server). Access to the files is done on the Guest account with full read/write access.

The computer accessing the music runs Windows 7 with WMP12. I have disabled automatic information fetching. I have been updating the albums and then, once I've made changes, clicked "Apply Media Information Changes" and let that run. Supposedly that means it should be applying all of the changes to the WMP library to the mp3 tags.

Unfortunately, it does not do it to ALL of them.... some albums it will update perfectly, some it will leave a single file unchanged, some half the songs are wrong. Now I have already "fixed" the majority of my music in Tag&Rename, this is just to get it cleaned up for Media Center and to get album art in all of it, etc.

None of the files are write-protected (as evidenced by the fact that I can change them with Tag&Rename).

Ideas as to why this could be happening? It is pissing me off because it looks like the files are fine (because they look fine in the WMP library) but when I try to access the files from a different device, some of them are a complete mess!

My only thought is an issue with writing to files over a network share... but I don't know why Tag&Rename can do it over wireless without issue and WMP can't do it over ethernet.... I'd like to refrain from installing WMP on my server just to test this theory though.

I'm hoping I'm just missing something stupidly obvious and someone can point it out

 

[arkamw]

This is kind of something that I have dealt with as well and I ended up having the same problem (and same solution) that you did. I use WMP as my main player as I like it and it does what I want it to with little fuss as long as you know how to set your files up.

The following info is to be taken with a grain of salt (note all of the mights in here) as information on WMP varies. I read around a little to try to find an answer and the only real thing that I could come up with is that WMP isn't necessarily writing ID3 tags but updating metainfo in its own separate database. This database could be populating itself by pulling info from the file or from online (though you've turned that off). Once the info is pulled, any further info that you write is stored locally (i.e. unique to a particular machine) or it might just go ahead and write it off to the file where it may, or may not, follow standard ID3 structure. I had high hopes that WMP12 was going to go with standards, but it doesn't sound like it did.

edit: I had WMP installed on both machines and while the info might be updated on one machine, it might not have been on the other, even after rescanning the library.

The several things that you can try. One is to update the info through WMP, let it write everything (it's possible that, if you close WMP before the writes are complete, it'll lose all the info), then delete the file from the library, then re-add the file. If it gets too bad, you can always nuke the entire library (Google is your friend here) and let it rescan everything to see if the file info is back to what you want it to be.

The best way that I've found is the one that you've already done. Don't let WMP write tags... do them yourself with your own program (Tag & Rename is awesome). That way you know what was written and that it follows the correct structure. I do all my editing of info on the local machine before I transfer it to the HTPC (unless it's a ton of files all at once - like an audio book or something). If I need to update a file, I use the ID3 tagger (I'm using mp3tag for the moment) to update the file then let WMP pick it up normally as it scans the library. This will occasionally mean that, when I play a file that hasn't yet updated, it'll have to update the info before it plays but that's not too big a deal to me.

Like I said, info on this is kind of spotty and I'm guessing there are several here that'll know more (i.e. criccio or Joe). But, in the end, don't let WMP do the tagging work and your life will be easier, albeit with a few more steps.

 

[rhouck]

Thanks for the feedback. I've tried the reloading the library thing a couple times without success

I should clarify what I've done:
1. I went through my entire collection with Tag&Rename and got titles, albums, and artists all fixed. i didn't bother with years, genres, etc.
2. Loaded it all into WMP. I went through them all and did "find album info" and got it set for every album.
3. Then i did "apply media info changes". Theoretically it should change all the tag info (or none and only do it locally)... but it seems to randomly decide which to update and which to not.

The big problem is sometimes it's a change of capitalization or something equally minor where it's now enough to fuck up any program as recognizing them as the same album

The big reason I was letting WMP do it was I figured that way I was guaranteed to get them to show up in Media Center correctly (the problem was, when I used T&R, I didn;'t use the album artist field... and that's what Media Center appears to use to populate "artists"). I also was using it as an easy way to get genre, years, and art.

I just can't figure out any rhyme or reason as to which files it decides to update and which it doesn't, when they all look identical (at least as far as I can tell...) prior to loading them into WMP. It does sound like I may just have to tackle it all over again in T&R and just never let WMP write tags...

 

[arkamw]

I've never actually done the Apply Media Info Changes thing, I've always just let WMP write and scan as it goes. But you've hit it right on, it's fairly random about when it writes tags back to the file.

I don't know how WMP12 does it, but you're correct that you have to populate the Artists and the Album Artist field to make sure they all show up correctly. To make it more confusing, in WMP11, the Album Artist field is the field that all albums are sorted by and the Artist field is helpfully named Contributing Artist in the library view. On the one hand, that's really annoying but, on the other hand, it allows you to establish Various Artist albums (soundtracks, electronic, etc). Also, if you are into it, you can have multiple entries per field (i.e. Video Game; Electronic for genre or AR Rahman; MIA if you want multiple artists). The plus side is that if you do a search by genre, any album that's got multiple listings (up to three I think, but never tested the upper limit) will show up under each genre you might have and likewise with artist. The downside is that programs that don't have a similar database will have all sorts of strange looking artists and genres, etc.

Since you were only letting WMP get certain info, I'm wondering if there were a few incomplete fields from whatever service WMP uses or there was a timeout issue pulling data down and it simply carried on leaving those fields corrupted or untouched. I guess that would account for the randomness but it's really speculation.

Tell WMP to not retrieve info from the 'net and do it yourself. It's really the only way to be sure the tags are set the way you want as opposed to letting someone else decide. It takes a while, I absolutely sympathize, but the end results are worth it.

 

[rhouck]

I've never actually done the Apply Media Info Changes thing, I've always just let WMP write and scan as it goes. But you've hit it right on, it's fairly random about when it writes tags back to the file.

That's how I initially did it but I found that while it said it writing to file, it never seemed to actually be doing so... hitting that button is supposed to "force" it to write the current library info onto the files. And it does that... just not to all the files

Since you were only letting WMP get certain info, I'm wondering if there were a few incomplete fields from whatever service WMP uses or there was a timeout issue pulling data down and it simply carried on leaving those fields corrupted or untouched. I guess that would account for the randomness but it's really speculation.

Tell WMP to not retrieve info from the 'net and do it yourself. It's really the only way to be sure the tags are set the way you want as opposed to letting someone else decide. It takes a while, I absolutely sympathize, but the end results are worth it.

Oh I've turned off the automatic retrieval from the net. I had tried it before with both "only missing" and "replace all" and both ways it just made a mess. I have since turned it off and just manually done "find info" and apply for every album.

The frustrating part just seems to be I could manually enter every tag field inside WMP, but it doesn't make a difference if it won't write them to the files

I still wonder if it might be connected to the files being on a network share (even though that shouldn't matter). I think I'll try installing WMP on my WHS and see if applying the changes there directly creates a different result.

 

[arkamw]

Let me know how it turns out.

WMP is on my HTPC where all the media files are located and I just stream them to WMP on the laptop. For a while, I was tagging things through WMP on the HTPC but, if those music files were already present in WMP on the laptop, those tags that I changed wouldn't carry over to WMP unless I deleted them and rescanned (sometimes not even then).

You're probably on to something with the network files even though, as you said, it shouldn't matter or that using copies of WMP in different locations confuses things.

I'd be interested to know if it works.