Is there an incompatibility between Foobar's tagging and iTunes' tag reading?

I have a number of .m4a files encoded to AAC by iTunes and tagged by Foobar (b10 and earlier versions). I just tried importing these and many other files to iTunes 6 and it couldn't read the tags on many of the .m4a files.

Is this a known issue? If not, any suggestions or other info I might provide?

Seeing the same issue with beta 12. ALBUM, DISCNUMBER, TRACKNUMBER all not read by itunes. Actually, weirder. ALBUM is read but cannot be changed.

+Reardon

I have iTunes installed and I can confirm this. All of my files were ripped with iTunes, then the tags were modified by foobar. I just emptied out iTunes music library and reloaded all the files and 14 albums out of a collection of 280 don't show tags.

I don't think this is a foobar issue. I suspect it's probably some annoying proprietary Apple thing we haven't learned about yet. I use foobar for playback and only use iTune to rip, so it doesn't really affect me, but I'm curious to figure this out.

First off I'm using foobar 0.8.3. All song tags were modified by foobar after being ripped by iTunes. The affected files still read as having tags in foobar. I checked by using the Database --> Reload info from files feature. It's always whole albums that have unreadable tags. All the affected files were ones recently added to my collection with the exception of several albums that were listed as "Compilations" (iTunes does something weird to these files). All the ones formerly with the "Compilation" tag come up empty in iTunes. Of note may be that for foobar's sake I added an Album Artist = Various Artists tag to these files.

I also tried removing tags in iTunes and when using Database --> Reload info from files, foobar still reads all the old tags' fields.



edit: I just installed MP3Tag and it reads proper tags on the offending files. Apple just sucks sometimes. :/


edit 2: Somehow loading the files into MP3Tag and editing them with no actual changes solves the problem. My only concern was syncing with my iPod so this is a fix for those who posted above if you need iTunes to read your tags.

After reading Sandman2012's post, I installed MP3Tag.

First file I tried: Foobar showed tags, but neither iTunes nor MP3Tag could read them. I edited in MP3Tag and both iTunes and Foobar could read the tags.

I haven't been able to find any other files for which Foobar shows tags, but MP3Tag does not show tags.

I thought you had to use the optimize functionality in foobar to make it move the tags to the front of the file. Have you tried that?

Optimize functionality?

The only tag settings I can find in beta 10 are to (1) delay writing (not recommended) and (2) relate to mp3 files rather than other formats. None of these seem applicable.

Am I missing something?

I'm not 100% sure, as I don't use foobar a lot, but right click on the M4A in foobar and there's something like "Optimize" or something to that effect. It's not a setting somewhere, it's a command you run on a file.

There's a fix mp3 header command, but I don't believe there's anything for m4a.

AFAIK the optimize command is only available in version 0.8.3 with foo_mpeg4u.dll
You get a context menu called MP4 utilities

But from my experience, it won't make iTunes read the tags if they were tagged with 0.9 beta

It's one of the plugins of 0.8.3; it's not in the newest 0.9 betas. And, on that note, I've found that the newest Nero AAC encoder creates files that the MP4 optimizer component produces an error on and will not optimize. Hmm....

Anyone else notice that behavior? It makes it highly annoying to import to iTunes, as I have to manually play each song in iTunes for a second or so to get the songs to work when I transfer them to my iPod...

I could confirm this.

ITunes seems to be able to read my tags perfectly.

However, Foobar can't seem to read my winamp tagged files, very very strange.

Hopefully this is related.

I tagged a bunch of .m4a files with Foobar2000 0.9 beta12. I took them into work, where I still have 0.8.3 installed and some of the tags were 'gone'.

The missing tags were TRACKNUMBER and DATE, and the replaygain info.
The TITLE, ARTIST, ALBUM tags were 'retained'.

I encoded with aacenc32 (and Nero 6.6.016), and then tagged and replaygain'd with FB.

It seems there's some incompatibility issues with M4A tags. Given that Peter is very conscientious about standards I would hazard a guess that foobar's tagging is most proper, but unfortunately this does not always mean they will work with other apps. Apple and other big corps have a bad habit of breaking standards when they have a little pull, and then other developers will use the proprietary way of doing it rather than the standard way, like web pages that are designed for IE, but don't comply with the W3C.

Of course all this is speculation on my part. It would explain why iTunes can't read the foobar-made tags but can read the ones MP3Tag makes, if MP3Tag uses the Apple standard. But it doesn't explain why only some can't be read. It also doesn't explain why tags don't read properly between differing versions of foobar. I guess Peter changed something, but since I don't use the beta I have no first hand experience.

@bigdave: are you talking about M4A files or other files types? We're specifically dealing with mpg-4 aac files in this thread so far. Yours might be a different problem.

Same problem here: most tags are not readable for fb2k 0.8.3 and itunes when the file has been tagged by v0.9. Some fields are not affected: %artist%, %title% and %tracknumber%. Other fields, including RG are lost.

happens only with .m4a files, -flac; mp3; mpc etc. are doing fine

Possibly indirectly related:

There're a couple of things I like about iTunes but it really pisses me off sometimes. I recently decided to clean up my library by deleting the files and re-adding them. It stripped all the replay gain tags from all my files. Had to set up foobar to re-replaygain 3500 files over night.

In my experience, the answer to this question is yes. I am having major problems with my tagging as well. If I tag in Foobar Itunes does not read some or all of the fields of the file tagged in Foobar. If I tag in ITunes, Foobar doesn't recognize the tags. Are they not using the same standard ID3 tags? Why is there a discrepency here?

Lastly, I have heard that Foobar has a tagging feature where it can tag both ID3V2 tags and ID3V1 tags. My 0.83 version of Foobar does not give this option, so I'm wondering if there is a plugin for this.

It should be in the preferences, Playback->Input->Standard inputs, MP3 tag writing->Tag type to write (drop down) and chose ID3v2 and ID3v1

Only if you have ther ID3v2 plugin:

http://kode54.foobar2000.org/

Is there a way to automatically do this for a large number of files?

Well you just need to load all files into Mp3tag, select them all and press Ctrl+S

Excellent! Now files work in both foobar and itunes.