So I messed up. I have a large collection of music (about 8,000 tracks) all of which I happily keep and listen to in FLAC. Recently I converted the whole thing to MP3 for use on a portable player, a process which took a few days using foobar2000. All went relatively smoothly except that (due to some error of mine, I'm sure) the tags are badly truncated. So, two questions:

1. Is there a way to copy the tags from one file (named <filename>.flac) to another (named <filename>.mp3) where <filename> will always be identical but for the extension (flac -> mp3) without re-encoding the entire mess?

2. Is there a way to put the album art (which is now stored inside each album's folder as "folder.jpg" into the MP3 tag while I do that? I know tag&rename and bonkenc both support art, and tag&rename even says it will deal with "folder.jpg", but it doesn't seem to be able to read tags from one file and copy them to another -- at least not as far as I can tell.

Any help will be much appreciated. Also -- any idea why foobar2000 truncated my tags in the first place? I mean some of the tags are pretty long (classical music, you know) but they are all well under 250 characters . . .

Thanks!

I've copied all tag info from one file to another very easily in fb2k. For example, open a playlist in fb2k, and add the FLAC files from an album to the playlist (these are the files with correct tag info). Then below these files add the same mp3 files (in same order). You must have the source and target files in exactly the same order (and there must be an exact duplicate...if there are 5000 source files there must be 5000 target files in the same order). Once both sets of files are in the playlist order, select all the files in the window, the right click, select "tagging", then select "copy info between files". On the window that opens you'll probably want to select remove old fields, so you'll only have all the new correct info from the FLAC files.

Before doing all this, you'll want to go into File/Preferences/Advanced and select the tagging options you want for the files. I use "force preferred tag writing scheme" and select "ID3v2 + ID3v1" and "ID3v2 Writer Compatibility Mode" in order to create both v2 and v2 tags and the v2 tags are v2.3 tags that work with itunes. [edit: perhaps your settings in fb2k were set to create ID3v1 tags only, which would explain the truncation]

you don't have to do this album by album. As long as source files and target files are all there and in the right order, you can have 50,000 files in the window and copy from the first 25,000 to the second 25,000 files. Obviously, you should play with this a little with some sample files until you're comfortable with what your doing.

Perfect! Many thanks -- I'll do this when I get home tonight!

Are you using ID3v1 tags? They are limited to 30 characters.

I think that was the problem, yeah. Redoing it with the ID3v2 (compatible) set seems to have fixed the problem.