iTunes Ate my ID3 Tags

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 | Bad Ideas, Life | 4 Comments

So I thought I would throw all of my music into iTunes now that my desktop computer is up.  I mean that way I can have it download more cover art and can have last.fm read my library from it.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. 

So it ends up in there and there is this new “album view” and I quickly notice an album the artist says “Amos, Tori”, and knowing that was not how it should be listed I right clicked on the album and chose “get info” which is where you go to update the ID3 tags on iTunes.  So I checked in the box for Artist and Album Artist and I typed Tori Amos instead of Amos, Tori.

I hit okay and went back to watching a video.  When I was done with my video I noticed that iTunes had finished “correcting my album”. 

Though now it seems that not just that album was “fixed” but ALL of my albums were “fixed”.  250+ gigs of mp3’s from my Everything Else folder (or 63,439 songs) all had their ID3 tags changed to say that they were by Tori Amos. 

I mean I didn’t think the album Abbey Road was by Tori Amos.  Grr…

There is no such thing as an “undo” for changing 63,000 songs.  So that means every single song in my entire library has bad ID3 tags. 

Oh, I can just hear my friend Josh laughing now…

How to fix this. 

Winamp has this “auto-tag” thing that actually works pretty well, but it’s not perfect.  To prevent it from getting totally confused I need to remove the artist from all of my mp3’s so it doesn’t first look for Tori Amos albums. 

So when it completes that I am going to throw ALL of my music into auto-tag. 

Now, this will actually kind of suck.  My music is VERY well.  I mean I am very anal about my filing system.  Artist\Year - Album\Track# Track Name.mp3

The ID3 tags are just as clean because of it.  When I put them into my Everything Else folder I go and make sure all the ID3 tags are nice and clean to match the filing system. 

So until an hour ago I had the world’s best sorted and cleanest music collection.  After auto-tag it’s really a total crapshot as to if it will even be picking the correct information.

Some of it will be correct, some of it will be wrong.

I guess I am glad this has happened in 2008 and not earlier because mass ID3 tagging didn’t have an even half-ass effective global database even a year ago.

Seriously as stupid as I feel for having done this, I looked through iTunes and in it’s default mode this is 100% for sure going to happen to other people.  Seems that every single file is checked in by default, only you can’t see that it’s checked in.  When you right click on one album it highlights JUST that one album.  So iTunes doesn’t care what is highlighted, only what is checked in, and as I said.  It doesn’t show you what is checked in under the default album view mode. 

I have never liked iTunes but this is a MAJOR design flaw.

BOOOOOO Apple.