WMP doesn't write tags

[Andavari]

I'm pretty much a Windows Media Player virgin as I've never really liked it and such before, however things do change and as my thinking has changed since my entire audio CD collection is now backed up and encoded to LAME MP3 at the quality -V 2 ("old --preset standard") on my secondary hard disk for compatibility with every gadget I may end up using in the future. I'm thinking of actually switching to WMP since I wouldn't need anything else just for playback of mp3's, and I actually like it's ability to quickly add new mp3's, and remove those I've renamed or moved.

 

 

What I've did so far, thinking it would remedy the problem with zero success:

* Made sure all the mp3's weren't set as read-only.

* Checked the various WMP options/settings to make sure I didn't have something disabled in there. Doesn't seem as if there is anything disabled.

 

The problem:

When wanting to re-tag or update an mp3 ID3 tag which only has an ID3v1 tag which ALL2LAME with TAG installed only supports. WMP doesn't write what I've manually inputted ("the additional information") such as the track title which is too long for an ID3v1 tag, and I add a comment yet every time I've did this WMP doesn't write anything into the mp3's, I've confirmed it isn't updating the mp3's by loading them into Foobar2000.

 

Another question:

As silly as this may sound, does the mp3 filetype have to be registered in WMP for it to change the tags?

 

Edit:

Changed sentence structure because it made no sense at all.

[JohnDemolition]

WMP is notorious for not writing tags. i once burned Cannibal Corpse's The Bleeding to mp3(using LAME of course) and when i tried to tag it, it somehow tagged it but foobar2000 showed no change in the tags. basically, nothing was written. so i suspect that WMP uses some kind of metadata system where the metadata is stored somewhere else and not in the files.

 

but really, you should use foobar2000 for all of your tagging needs. well 0.8.3 isn't that great(i believe you use Win98) but i guess it should get the job done.

[rridgely]

Andavari I know you already know about this but to anyone else who wants to edit mp3(or any other format) tags this is the absolute best program to use.

 

mp3tag

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

[Andavari]

so i suspect that WMP uses some kind of metadata system where the metadata is stored somewhere else and not in the files.

 

That would explain some things, but I "think" I read some chart of paper recently where it used ID3 tags, I could be wrong though. I've got that Cannibal Corpse CD as well.

 

Andavari I know you already know about this but to anyone else who wants to edit mp3(or any other format) tags this is the absolute best program to use.

 

mp3tag

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

 

Yeah, it worked like a charm previously be it flat out refuses to use my formatting string for what reason I don't know because it used to use it in v2.35 but v2.36 won't allow it. Maybe I'm doing something incompatible with it.

 

Well, I solved my issue and decided to go back to Foobar2000 well actually I upgraded from 0.8.3 to the newest build solely because of the plugin called Infobox which reminds me of the old official Simple Infobox plugin. I'm not going to mess with WMP due to the tagging issues.

[JohnDemolition]

by newest build do you mean 0.9.3.1? because if memory serves me correctly, those aren't available to Win98 due to it not supporting Unicode

[Andavari]

I'm on WinXP, and know that 0.8.3 is the last Win9x/Me version!

And yeah it's 0.9.3.1 but I didn't use it long before going back to 0.8.3 which is the second time in a few short months I've did that. I downgraded because I couldn't find in it anywhere to write "compliant" 'ISO-8859-1 tags instead of UTF-16'. Also I noticed the ID3v2 tags it writes weren't even recognized by Tag Frontend w/TAG and I ended up mass auto-renaming five currently ripped cd's and ended up with chopped off names.

[JohnDemolition]

that's pretty much what sucks about the whole ID3 standard. the ID3v2.4 standard has been out for 5 years(6 now i guess) and hardly any program supports it.

[Eldmannen]

I don't like WMP, imho its too big, bulky, sluggish and bloated.

 

Personally, I use Winamp 2.81, which is good enough for me considering my relatively small audio collection.

 

But I do also like musikCube, its cool. http://www.musikcube.com/

[Andavari]

I don't like WMP, imho its too big, bulky, sluggish and bloated.

 

Personally, I use Winamp 2.81, which is good enough for me considering my relatively small audio collection.

 

But I do also like musikCube, its cool. http://www.musikcube.com/

 

Yeah it's all those things you stated in the first sentence, however it also depends on your system specifications as to how quick or slow it will operate - on my system it loads faster than Winamp 5.

 

Winamp 2.x was alright in it's day but mostly as you noted for a small audio collection.

 

I tried out musikCube after clicking on it in your signature one day last week. It was impressive and all but I noticed it didn't from what I could see support ReplayGain tags/values for volume leveling in Ogg Vorbis, thus I ended up uninstalling it. When/if it gets ReplayGain support I'll look into it again!

 

that's pretty much what sucks about the whole ID3 standard. the ID3v2.4 standard has been out for 5 years(6 now i guess) and hardly any program supports it.

 

Indeed, truth spoken brother! The whole ID3v 2.x issue is like hitting a brick wall, and then having it fall over on you afterwords, of course it isn't even an issue if someone only uses one audio player but as soon as switching there can be noticable troubles.

[JohnDemolition]

you are right about it not being an issue if you only use 1 media player. however, recently, some programs such as amaroK have implemented ID3v2.4 so i guess this could be a sign that more programs will support it in the future. but for now, that's how it is.