LukeTrocity FTW wrote:
Is there a reason why they were together before, and now are seperated? I really dont want to have to redo everything again, for it to revert back like this.
I'm sure part of it is metadata. The wiki article gives an accurate description when it states metadata is "data about data". Most media managers like MusicMatch, iTunes, Zune, MediaMonkey, use metadata. It presents the underlying data (the actual tags) in a meaningful fashion. It can also help with performance in that it is often faster to read the "data about data" rather than read the data itself.
Performance and presentation are often huge advantages. One of the real disadvantages is that changes made to metadata do not always find themselves to the underlying data. In our case (I suffered from this also), changes made in one media manager or another didn't get written to the tags and as a result, when you change media managers the tags look wonky. I spent a good bit of time with MusicMatch years ago tagging stuff and when I switched to Zune v1, I still found a lot of problems. I got to the point with v1 that I had no Unknown Years, Unknown Genre, etc. All complilations were grouped correctly and everything had art. But because even the older version of the software didn't always seem to write metadata changes to the tags, when I looked at my library with yet another tool (Zune v2 and MediaMonkey), I still found a few areas that needed work. Not a lot -- about 50 or so tracks out of 3500 -- but still...
To permanently correct this and prevent it from happening in the future, the underlying data -- the ID3 tags -- have to be addressed. Sometimes using a different tool like MediaMonkey or WMP can do well in editing the tags but I have found more than a few cases where I had to use an editor that did not use metadata like mp3Tag. MediaMonkey does a very good job but I still have to break out mp3Tag from time to time.
Mp3Tag is not really a media manager in that its purpose is not to organize and display your library in a meaningful fashion. That is what I will use MediaMonkey, WMP or the Zune software to do. However, mp3Tag is a utility that directly affects the "data" (ID3 tags). Those changes should bubble up into any tool you are using to display and manage your library since the metadata is built from the actual data.
That was a very long winded answer...sorry about that. The short form:
When changes are made to metadata, they do not always get to the tags. When the files are moved to another media manager, the previous metadata changes may not follow.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying these types of problems are because of the users. What I'm saying is that because so many programs don't really let you access directly what is used to build what you see on screen that it is sometimes difficult to get feedback on whether or not your changes made their way to the tags.
Microsoft Support Articles for Zune
