Curious if anyone out there knows what metadata Windows XP uses to populate the Artist, Album and Title fields (columns) in Windows Exporer or My Computer. I assumed it was the id3 tag, but today I found that to be untrue.

I have a few folders of .mp3 files that have no id3 tags (according to my player and ID3-TagIT). However, Windows recognizes the correct song title and artist when I view the folder's contents in My Computer/My Document/Windows Explorer.

Is there a way to transfer this data into id3 tags?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.[font=Comic Sans Ms][/font]

Microsoft reads de facto standard ID3v2.3 and ID3v1 for MP3 content. There is no magic proprietary metadata. What does "Properties... Summary" see? (XP Explorer is fairly limited on what you see/edit... Vista is significantly better.) Try Mp3tag on your files, I can almost guarantee there are ID3 tags there.

Properties... Summary" does show Artist, Album and Title.
Mp3Tag sees it too. But my player does not, and neither does ID3TagIT.

After using Mp3Tag my player now reads the tags correctly. Not sure what fixed it, but it's fixed.
Maybe it just saved the tag in an earlier version that my 3.5 year old non-iPod player can read.
Anyway, after a little more experimentation, all I have to do is open the folder in Mp3Tag, and click "save". Seems to refresh the metadata and make it work. But there is one problem: it adds the letter T to the end of each song title, as in "Word UpT". Any ideas on that one? The T does not show up in Windows or in Mp3Tag, only on my player. Never had this problem with any other files.
Anyway, thanks for recommending that app; it made things better for me.

I would guess that the tag string is null-terminated, but the T is after the null. Some players may not stop at the null but may display all non-null characters to the end of the field.

@wnsham: Is there a reason you're using Comic Sans?

He's a Comedian?