I've got a large FLAC archive with 250+ albums. I originally ripped them all to ID3v1 with Easy CDDA Extractor. Recently I noticed that the data for half my Police albums was wrong, with some labeled "The Police" and others "Police".

In an effort to standardize I installed Tag&Rename and trie to edit them. I had previously used dbPowerAmps power pack for the job (worked great) but figured I'd give one of these ore powerful programs a spin this time. The result was a catastrophe.

First off none of my edits were apparently applied to the files. WhenI tried to reedit the edited files with The Godfather I got errors when I went to actually apply the edits to the files. Further investigation revealed that I think all my edist were being applied to ID3v2 fields, while the originalID3v1 fields remained unchanged.

So when I look at a files ID data with dbPoweramp now I see thenormal ID data, then I see ID3v2 data (user defined text or something it says in some instances), and then i see FLAC data at the bottom. Three instances of the same data?!?

First off, do ID3 v1 and v2 use wholly separate fields? Even when the data is identical? Seems very stupid... Second, how can I easily strip out these annoying and unnecessary ID3v2 tags from my files? None of my software or hardware players support v2 as far as I can tell, and its causing some annoying issues with regards to editing and loading ID data. Do I have to go into metaflac and manually rip out all this stuff or is there an easy way with The Godfather? And why do I get "error flac file invalid" type stuff in The Godfather when I try to edit the files?

Any insight is appreciated.

Thanks,
rt

id3v1 tags get tacked on to the end of a file. id3v2 tags get tacked on to the beginning. you can have both kinds on a file.

metaflac won't be able to do anything with the id3 tags. you'll have to use some other program to get rid of them. it's recommended to use flac tags only unless you are using them with something that only understands id3 like the phatbox.

Josh

Gotcha... ugh. So annoying, I still can't figure out WHY T&R or TG tacked this goop onto my flac files. I have the ID3v1 tags on just to provide compatability across a range of devices, etc. (Karma uses ID3v1).

I didn't realize that ID3v2 wasn't "appended" to ID3v1. That seems like a really stupid approach to the versioning of ID3... I've never heard of a program making dupe entries with a new version.

I'll have to figure out how to use TG to strip the ID3v2 tags off. Hell, its only four albums so maybe I'll just bag it and rerip the lot of them.

Thanks again for the 411.

Best,
rt

Try using TAG to remove all tags and then start over...

use tag.exe to write FLAC tags to all the files and to delete de ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags.