Hello. I'm hoping someone here can help me. I am building playlists from my mp3 collection. Some of the mp3 files display artist and title information correctly, and some do not (just get a question mark or whatever). At first I thought it was ID3 tag related, but I checked some of the files that display wrong and they have both V1 and V2 tags set correctly. Then I noticed that the ones that display wrong do not have any metadata when I look in Properties. So I guess my question is:

Where does the metadata come from if not from ID3 tags? Is there an easy way to fill it in for all of my umpteen thousand mp3 files from their ID3 tags?

Any help is appreciated.

One thing you can try is get that ID3v2 tag reader. I have no idea if that will solve your problem, but it might be a work around.

Try that component and see if it works. If so, then just post up here that it does so other's can have it for future reference.

APE tags?

SlippvC: I have foo_id3v2.dll if that is what you mean. Is it supposed to help with this problem somehow?

linus: Are you saying that metadata comes from a different kind of tag? What is an APE tag?

Once again, I have lots of mp3s that have complete ID3 v1 and v2 tags, yet they still do not show metadata in foobar, and thus do not display properly in the ui columns. I can't believe that I have to enter metadata fields for all of these by hand. Isn't there some way to populate this metadata from the id3 tags?

Hmm, it looks like I can use the Masstagger feature to set the metadata. I see a choice for letting it guess from the filename, and that's ok I suppose. But I'd rather make it guess from the ID3V1 tag if I could. I couldn't find an option for this, does anyone know if it's possible?

Have you scanned them with mp3gain or something?

Depending on what tags you do have in your file, you could try using Case's Tag. i don't know if it will help you, but you can try running it with something like

Tag --force ape2 --force id3 --recursive *.mp3

Maybe you'd want to run Tag on just some files that don't show up with any tags in foobar to find out what tags they do have.

I found these old posts which may help you w/ tag. Or maybe they are just irrelevant. Meh.

Na, it was more less just a toss up. If I remember right the lite version of foobar didn't have it, you had to get it seperate(which I could be wrong on that). Anyway, just something I thought of that might have worked(if ya didn't have that component).