Hi, I've been searching the forums for a way to remove all the tags that gets written into the "Other meta fields" box in the "Show file info (special)". Although I came up with no results, or I was too stupid to understand them. I noticed that my foobar is writing stuff here, for eg. my ratings, how many times the file has been played , when the file was last played and the play time.

Something like this:


I'm not really fond of foobar writing excess meta fields in my mp3s as that messes up my SFV checksums that I had written before I played them in foobar.
I tried using the Masstagers "Format value from other fields..." and "Remove field..." functions but couldn't really figure out how to point it to only remove the "Other meta fields".

Any help is appriciated.

/morph

EDIT: And I was also wondering if there is a way to make my foobar write these excess meta tags to the DB instead of the ID3. This would of course solve my issue and I could still have the benefits of these tags.

first, you would want to disable (or delete) those plugins that are adding those, otherwise you will just have them again.
As for removing the fields, use the masstagger, 'Remove Field ...' action putting in the tag you want to remove, you would have to add that for each tag, or I suppose you could just select all your files, and delete those tags through the special file info box
You could also do "Remove all except for ..." in the masstagger and put all the fields you want to keep, semicolon separated

As for writing to the DB, the only way I know of is blocking tag updates, which disables any tag writing until you turn that feature off. Which may be undisirable to you, I would love to see a way to prevent certain tags from being written to files or certain tags allowed to be written.

Alright, thanks a bunch. And yes, it would be awsome to see a way to prevent tags to be written to the ID3 and be written to the DB instead, and the plugins that writes these tags would "think" that they were writing and reading info from the ID3 but acctually were beeing redirected to the DB to get the info.

I have a related question. I've ripped most of my collection of CDs now. I think that there were a few where I didn't use ReplayGain so those files won't have tags such as:

replaygain_album_gain = -2.62 dB
replaygain_album_peak = 0.97290
replaygain_track_gain = -2.98 dB
replaygain_track_peak = 0.97290

in them. What would you (or somebody else ;-) recommend using to find all .wv and .mp3 files in a nested directory structure that are missing one or more of these tags?

I'm using REACT and EAC, creating lossless WavPack and lossy LAME (-V2 --vbr-new) MP3 files. Using mp3gain, wavegain, and tag with "--force id3v1 --force ape2" to assemble all the tags onto separate files for each CD track.

Also, how do you folks keep track of which files' tags you've fixed and which you haven't? For example, I'm tweaking lots of tags. Suppose I add new CDs but forget to make a note of them. I'd like to be able to look for files whose tags I haven't fixed yet. If there's a tool that let's me select all files with (or without) a certain tag, then I could just add a tag such as bill_has_adjusted_this_files_tags_to_his_liking, then it'll be easy to find new files, fix them, and mark them.

Thanks very much -- if not more,
Bill

Add all files to a single playlist, and sort it by a custom string:
$if(%__replaygain_track_gain%,$if(%__replaygain_album_gain%,Z,A),A)

Perfect! Thanks!

Bill