tagging

[masterplan]

I'm trying to retag some of my mp3's and I get:

"The song ***** could not be used because the orignal file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?"

whenever I hit get info. Do I manually have to do this for every song? Sometimes I'm not sure I know the correct filename for songs do to wrong original tag information.




Another issue:
I tried retagging using Windows Media Player. Well sure enough all the information I added/changed didn't show up in Itunes. I'm kind of new to all this, but I thought tagging was pretty universal. Does it have something to do with the program?

The bottom line is I just want an easy way to tag so songs can show up correctly in Ipod.

[masterplan]

Almost all of my songs have exclamation points next to them. Would this be different if I made Itunes my default music player?

[ashawley]

OK, maybe this will help--some background on what Media Players are.

They are databases basically. You tell them to search your computer for music (i.e. "Add Folder" or whatever). What it does is scan you computer and then builds a database (or table) of all your tunes. On of the fields (or columns if you think of it as a table) is "File Location". This tells iTunes were the song is located on your computer. Like C:\My Music\The Beatles\The White Album\Revolution.mp3). If you move that song outside of iTunes, guess what? It doesn't know where the song is anymore and can't play it and it also can't update the tags on it.

So, don't use two different media players to manage your tunes.

What I would do is to clear out your iTunes library and then reimport all your music into iTunes.

Then fix tags.

You hit upon one thing about tags: "aren't they supposed to be universal". Well, yes they are. But, you used a Microsoft product (WMP9). Microsoft, as you may know, doesn't really like to use standards that much - unless they developed them on their own. And the id3 standards weren't developed by MS. So, the answer to your question is that WMP9 doesn't follow the standard as it should.

Apple for that matter doesn't do it exactly, but it'll get the basics in. If you want a media player that is religious about adherring to the standards, check out Media Center 9. But iTunes should suffice one you decide to stick with one.

Adam