Many years ago in the days of ID3v1 and winamp i used to tag my mp3s with the Artist AND Album in the "Artist" entry. Dumb i know. When i switched to Itunes i undid this mess and wrote proper ID3v2 tags to my whole library. To re-write the tags i mainly used MediaMonkey, with a little bit of Itunes.

My problem is now that years later, i am trying to switch to Foobar2000 and it seems to be reading the tags for these old files incorrectly. Not only does it pull up the old Artist AND Album in the "Artist" entry, but it shortens the song titles, presumably under the limitations of ID3v1.

I don't think this problem is with the file tags themselves, because Itunes, Winamp and MediaMonkey all display the proper, clean tags.
Im reluctant to re-tag them all within Foobar, partially because i dont want Foobar messing up the tags for other programs, partially because they are on my ipod and Foobar seems unequipped to properly write to an ipod, and partially because the tags themselves don't seem to be the source of the problem.

Here are some screenshots to illustrate my issue:







Moderation: Please do not inline images larger than roughly 800x600 and 80KB. Please use thumbnails and/or links for large pictures instead.

When finding metadata in both id3v1 and id3v2.x tags that are not Identical, foobar shows the tag which is longer.

However, the solution (removing the old ID3v1 tags) is easy. Select the mall in a playlist -> Right-click -> Context menu -> Tagging -> MP3 Tag Types. Uncheck ID3v1 then click Update files.

IMPORTANT!:
This MAY change your ID3v2.3 tags to ID3v2.4 (and for any dev reading this, should it really? ), which you've stated you don't want.

To avoid this, make sure that you first enable "compatibility mode". (Preferences -> Advanced -> Tagging -> MP3)

This may be a good time for a question about tag updating, because I guess I'm a bit confused.

Let's assume we have a whole bunch of music files, including MP3, APE, FLAC, WV, you name it. Let's also assume these files have been tagged over a long period of time using various programs (foobar, iTunes, Tag&Rename, etc.). So we may end up with all types of tags : ID3v1, ID3v2.x, Vorbis, APE, etc.

And now the question : how can we use foobar to update all these tags to the most relevant standard for each file type ? (shakey has given the method for MP3, but is it the same for other file types ?). And what would be the recommended standards ?

I mean, let's take MP3 for instance. The tags are ID3v??, so we can update them to ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4. 2.3 is still the most widely used, and there seem to be some discrepancies about 2.4. So is 2.3 still the recommended version here ? (and could someone please explain in a few words the 2.4 problem ?)

Now let's take FLAC files : Vorbis comments is "the only tagging system required and guaranteed to be supported by FLAC implementations". But what if we have some FLAC files unproperly tagged with ID3 tags ? How can we find them and update them to Vorbis comments ?

Etc, etc... in other words, I'm looking to achieve some tag consistency within my music library. Thanks.

Actually, thread-jacking is never really a good idea.

Generally speaking, foobar2000 only writes tags to the "most relevant" standards, unless told to write other tags for compatibility reasons.

Actually, the discrepancies lie in id3v2.3. iTunes, WMP, MP3Tag (which writes to the de jure standard) and others all seem to have different ways of writing the tags. id3v2.3 has been stretched and abused and misused over the years, mainly because the spec wasn't that good to begin with. ID3v2.4 fixes most of these issues, but 8 years later, still hasn't be adopted by the most popular players and taggers (or even window's explorer ), which gives the illusion of it having "problems".

I don't know if foobar supports reading id3 tags on FLAC files or not. However, if it does support reading, I'm sure it only writes Vorbis comments.


Then just use foobar2000's defaults.

Hey shakey, thanks for your help and quick reply! At lest i now know why Foobar is reading the wrong tags.
Unfortunately as i feared on the batch i tested, this just re-wrote the incorrect ID3v1 tags to ID3v2. Any other suggestions?

Most modern (container) formats specify a native tag format which foobar2000 will use. This is unlike MP3 which originally had no tagging support at all and had several tag formats retrofitted onto it.

Ah...
Well, MP3tag can remove id3v1 tags easily enough.


Thank you. That makes sense.

Sorry about that. I just felt emsip's question had been answered, and at the same time I didn't feel my own questions were important enough to deserve a separate topic. So next time I guess I'll start a topic of my own. Apologies.


Even Explorer ? That may be a good reason for sticking with 2.3 (unfortunately).


Understood. Unfortunately the question remains : if we happen to have some FLAC files unproperly tagged with ID3 tags, how can we find them within a whole library so we can update them ? Would foobar support some kind of ' %codec% HAS "FLAC" AND NOT %tag type% HAS "Vorbis" ' search expression ? Any ideas ?

I don't think this is a good idea.
Can foobar2000 developers add an option to disable this function?
I only want it to read from other tags when a field is blank.

Yeah, why exactly is that? Is there no way to force foobar to read id3v2 tags if they're present? (Winamp does it.)