i remember thinking several years ago that itunes' method of tracking play stats and ratings by inserting a bunch of nonsense into the comment field was absurd because it then renders the comment field useless for other programs

i thought they had fixed this by implementing a special database, which is the only reason i started using it, but lo and behold, my comment fields are still getting borked.

is there any way to stop itunes from doing this?

I haven't tried this, but if I wanted to keep a program from making changes to a file I would just make the file read-only.

The above is from a file encoded with iTunesEncode it displays a 5 star rating, play count & last played in iTunes but no "bunch of nonsense" in the comment field.

ITUNNORM looks like the letter/number strings I'm talking about here. I have LAME encodes tagged externally and then imported to the library. iTunes is smart enough to not display the gibberish in the comment field, but when you open the file using another id3-capable program, it shows up.

that's no good, because it would prevent tag editing

As I suspected ITUNNORM is the SoundCheck info field. You should be able to set iTunes preferences not to add this data to the file if you want.

Turn off SoundCheck in the iTunes preferences. Also turn off the "Use SoundCheck for burning" in the burning prefs. Then when you add files, it won't add that field.

BTW, this is SoundCheck specific information only, it doesn't change with playcount/rating/anything else. Nor will iTunes add it later, unless you turn on SoundCheck.

It does not take over the comment field, rather it places values into the comment field with specific frame titles, your ID3v2 software must not be extracting that title and just labeling everything as comment (there are ItuneNORM and ITuneCDDB).

As others said, but not so explicitly, iTunes doesn't store playcounts and ratings in the actual mp3 files themselves. It stores that data in its central Library file.

in other words, it's sound check that's screwing things up? rats, i rather liked it.

guess i'll look into replaygain a bit more

so i looked into this a bit more and it turns out that itunes is behaving properly and it's actually winamp that's screwing up with the tags. (imagine that.)

thanks for the help, everyone.

Hmm, is there no way to prevent iTunes from adding the sound check info to the tag if you want to use the feature? I normally use WinAmp for album-based listening but I am planning to use iTunes in addition because of its "smart playlist" function, which means I'd probably want to use soundcheck. I really want to avoid that iTunes messes with my tags, I've spent ages going through my collection to have it all tagged perfectly. What if I set all my MP3s as "read-only"? Or will iTunes ignore this?

sTisTi, Veej007, et al.

I've been negotiating this very sort of thing for a while now since I use Foobar (for tagging and playback) and iTunes (for transferring to and managing music on the ipod).

AFAIK, the only "tag writing" iTunes does when importing mp3s is inserting ITUNNORM (i.e., Soundcheck) info in the Comment field. Note that this only applies if you chose to use soundcheck. If your mp3 files already have data in the Comment field, iTunes will not overwrite it but rather it will append the ITUNNORM info after it.

All other metadata is stored in iTunes database. When you first import mp3s into iTunes, it will use the ID3 tags to write the metadata to its database. After you've imported, editing the song metadata in iTunes will not modify the mp3 tags, only the database. Likewise, editing the ID3 tags will not update the metadata in the iTunes database (unless you re-import afterwards). Ugh.

I imagine that the MP3 Comment field is used to store soundcheck info because of ID3v1 compatability. What I don't understand is why this info needs to be stored within the mp3 and not the iTunes/iPod databases.

Personally, I like having the soundcheck info for normalizing playback on my ipod. The price is letting iTunes write ITUNNORM to the mp3 comment field, which I'm willing to live with.

That is incorrect. If I change metadata for MP3 files in iTunes, it immediately writes the changes to the MP3 files themselves. If I update the files outside of iTunes, it normally sees the change (and updates the local database) when I play the changed file content. No need to "re-import."

I stand corrected. I ran some quick tests in which I edited tag info. in iTunes 6 (i.e., appending gibberish to the song name), then closed iTunes and opened the file in Foobar. For files w/ ID3v2, iTunes did in fact update the metadata. However if the mp3 only had ID3v1, the metadata would not get updated, though iTunes would show the updated song name. I don't remember iTunes updating mp3 metadata in the past (maybe I just imagined this), perhaps this is something that was added to newer versions (I did notice that the "right click > get info" dialog has more functionality than I remember). I see there's a more recent thread about iTunes and its tagging scheme, so my apologies if I pulled this a little off topic.

I have not tried it, but setting the files to Read Only before adding them to iTunes *should* prevent iTunes from adding the tag while still scanning for volume info and adding that info to its database. And it should not write the tag later.

It's worth a try, anyway.

It is my understanding that this is exactly what the PRIV frame is intended to handle. *shrug* Microsoft got it right. WMP puts its "replaygain" related data in this frame.