Author Topic: [SOLVED] ID3v2.4 tags cause 'loop failure' when writing tags / analyzing audio  (Read 1179 times)

LedHarvest

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Background: I decided to clean my library by removing all ID3v1 and ID3V2.3 tags then updating all to ID3v2.4. This initially seemed to have worked without any major problems but after I ran 'Analyze Audio' then 'Show Files with Missing Tags' I noticed a recurring problem with several MP3 files.


Example - one track in a Nick Cave album did not have the correct tags listed, i.e. Album, Artist, Genre were blank. So I updated it with the missing tags. After adding the missing tags, Analyze Audio showed that the album needed analyzing again. After repeating the analysis the same track was missing the tags that I just added.

I tried different methods of adding the missing tags but each time I did, Analyze Audio told me the album needed analyzing again which then wiped the tags again.

I eventually solved the problem by switching to ID3v2.3 tags.
Last Edit: May 25, 2020, 09:36:37 AM by LedHarvest

sveakul

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Sorry if this is too obvious, but when you did the tag deletion/recreations were they done within MusicBee itself or by external tools?  Afterwards, did you do a Tools->Advanced->Rescan All Files in MusicBee?

LedHarvest

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Sorry if this is too obvious, but when you did the tag deletion/recreations were they done within MusicBee itself or by external tools?  Afterwards, did you do a Tools->Advanced->Rescan All Files in MusicBee?

No problem! Nothing too obvious about this!

I first removed the ID3v1 and ID3V2.3 tags with Mp3tag. Among the many things I tried, I did do a full rescan with MB as well as 'Synchronise tags'. I also removed all tags from the album / track that I mentioned above with MB while trying to find a solution.

The curious thing is that of the ~30,000 tracks / 3000 albums I have, only a few dozen tracks had the same problem as I described with the example above.

sveakul

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Thanks for the additional info!  I'm wondering that since only a small fraction of your total collection had this problem, there might be some corruption within the mp3's themselves affecting tagging.  I would suggest running those through a tool like MP3val (http://mp3val.sourceforge.net/) or MP3 Diags (http://mp3diags.sourceforge.net/).  I would start with the first and then move on to MP3 Diags if the problem isn't found/fixed.

LedHarvest

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Thanks, I tried MP3val and Mp3diags - neither reported any issues with the problem tracks.

However, I then tried removing v2.3 tags from the problem tracks with MB then adding v2.4 tags again with MB and the problem has been fixed. I thought I'd already tried that without success but I did spend several hours trying different things so maybe I've done things in a different sequence this time?!

So, problem solved for me but it seems like there could be an issue if MB applies tags but they don't 'stick' and no warning is given?

Either way, thanks very much for your help. Thread marked as solved.


P.S. In case anyone else wants to do this, removing ID3v1 and v2.3 tags saved almost 3GB from my 490GB library total.

hiccup

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P.S. In case anyone else wants to do this, removing ID3v1 and v2.3 tags saved almost 3GB from my 490GB library total.

To me that looks like a lot of embedded artwork was removed.
And perhaps the tags were rewritten with some smaller padding for the tag frames in the files, but I don't think that would result in such a decrease of size.