Personally it irritates me quite a bit when people that chose to use an advanced music manager that will obviously need to manage the metadata of files, and as a result might need to update files under some circumstances (without deleting or altering any of the original metadata) complain about metadata being added, or a file timestamp being changed.
I think they should look for other solutions to solve their 'problem'.
I'm sorry I've irritated you. That was not my intent.
Now, when you call this an advanced music manager, and then immediately try to use that to justify the fact that it writes tags that it was never told to do so, how exactly does that back up your statement? How is hard-coding an action to run a pointless, redundant task when an unrelated action is performed, "advanced"? What good does writing the encoder tag do? What purpose does it serve? It already knows the encoder, so why would it then write it to a tag?
What happens if you convert the file? It will have an incorrect encoder tag that would then "need" to be updated. I say "need" in quotes because even if you don't update it, nothing will change. It doesn't affect anything. Musicbee will already know what encoder it's using regardless of the tag and update it accordingly. Since it gets that from the properties of the file, not the tags.
It's like writing the bitrate, sample rate and bit depth to the tags. What's the point? You uh... read the file properties, then write those to a tag? Why?
I don't need to look for other solutions to solve my "problem" as it's already been solved via making a copy of the track, making the edit I want to make, and then restoring the copy of the track. Since the edits I'm making are internal to musicbee, they don't get changed then I restore the original file. This works.
Again, sorry for irritating you, but you have to understand this isn't about you, it's about the expected behaviour of a software that goes against the norm. The encoder tag serves no purpose, and thus shouldn't be forcibly written.
This was brought up in the past when someone was making edits to the tags, which is still weird, but their date modified and date accessed attributes would have already changed either way. In my case, I'm not making any edits to the file, so I understandibly don't want the files to be edited.