I've always kept my ID3 tags really organized, with genres listed in the comments in so forth.

Anyway, recently I noticed (not sure when it actually happened, could have been awahile ago) that the comments on about half my songs have been replaced with digits and spaces that look like this:

0000027B 0000025B 000012B1 000012DE 0001ADB0 0001ADB0 0000437E 00004224 0002E675 0002E675

Worse, about half of the album artwork I'd associated with the songs are gone too. Who even knew what else is screwed up...

Anyway, I doubt theres anythign I can do to fix it, I guess. But has anyone seen this before? Have any ideas? A virus or soemthing, perhaps?

The digits and spaces are from iTunes, it's what iTunes and the iPod use to calculate the gain adjustment when you use Soundcheck. It's supposed to be there.

Don't know about your album art.

Really? Because I'm pretty sure I've used gain adjustment on and off in the past, and it's never done that before.

Regardless, if that is the case I wish they'd warned me before I spent days organizng all my music by comments.

Actually, although I answered this in another post and thought the problem might be WMP, aquatika raises an interesting point...

Is it possible that you had Sound Check on in iTunes (Edit->Preferences->Sound) and then turned it off again.

I'm not home right now, so I can't check this, but I seem to remember that I did turn off Sound Check in iTunes around the same time WMP was running on my PC.

I had originally blamed WMP due to the timestamps on the affected files, and because it had gone and downloaded album artwork of it's own into JPG files (so it was obviously messing with my library), but if those internal comment fields really have to do with gain control, then perhaps it's a function of Sound Check having been turned off, and that information therefore reverting back into the comments field...

I'll have test this later myself when I get home, but it sounds like a distinct possibility...

Yeah, sorry, I posted pretty much the same question in two places because I was freaking out a little bit.

Please let me know what your tests turns up.

What are you using to read the digits and spaces, they are usually invisible with-in iTunes. If they are in the iTunes comments box then they shouldn't be there.

The only reason I knew they existed was because I happened to see them in foobars tag reader.

It shows up as this in the tags,

iTunNORM= 000011D6 000011EC 00004FC2 00008797 0002BA89 0002E986 000067C4 000066DA 00016EEC 00016D7C

but the iTunNORM is a seperate field from the Comments so regardless of whether Soundcheck is on or off you still shouldn't see them in the comments box.

Yeah, see, the problem is that it deleted all my comments, and those digits appear in the comments box (as viewed in 'get info' within iTunes) .

Also, those songs all disappeared from my smart playlists that depended on the oringal comments. For example, if I had a smart playlist of all songs where comments = dancepunk. All the songs where I had written "dancepunk" in the comments have disappeared from the playlist since there is now nothing in the comments except 000011d6 and so forth.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what happened here... I did test the sound check thing and couldn't get it to affect my ID3 tags, comments, or artwork.

Feeling a bit brave, however, I decided to fire up WMP against my music library again, and guess what.... It pooched about three albums worth of artwork and other tags before I shut it down.

So that seems to prove that in my case at least, WMP was the problem.

Well, it must be WMP then. That's incredibly lame. Thanks again, MS.