Hi!

As you may be aware, Windows Media Player 12 (and Windows 7 media foundation in general) corrupts tags in MP3 files without user intervention: the extended tags, such as ALBUMARTIST, seem to be overwritten or at least no longer properly read by non-Microsoft software. This topic has been under discussion on Microsoft's board for many months, but getting Microsoft interested in fixing this bug has proven impossible, for example see here:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums...62-e9471b7a6d49

Recently a new post has been added to this old thread claiming that the tag data is still in the files, it is just written in a way that does not adhere to ID3 standards:

"Sorry to resurrect an old topic, but I have some insights as to why the tags are corrupted in the above scenario. I recently made a tag reader and while debugging it, I found that WMP does not store Frame sizes as SynchSafe integers, which is required by the official ID3v2 specifications. Rather it stores the sizes as simple 32-bit unsigned integers, which when treated as SynchSafe int will give wrong result for all values bigger than 127. Smaller frames with size less than 127 , like those which contain title, album etc, are read correctly. But the album art (Frame 'APIC') contains bitmap which is larger than 127 bytes. Hence unless treated as 32 bit uInt, all frames appearing after APIC, or any other larger-than-127-bytes frame, will not be read correctly by tag readers which follow the ID3v2 standard.

The corrupt tags can be fixed by modding available open-source tag readers to read frame sizes as uInt32 but save the same sizes as 32bit synchsafes. "

I am one of the many people who have had their music collections corrupted by WMP and haven't had the energy to go through all the files and recreate the extended tags from scratch. Since it seems as if the data is still there according to the above post, would it be possible to add a feature to MP3Tag that would extract this data and fix the tags automatically? I (and I am sure many others) would be extremely thankful!

Thanks and regards!

Mp3tag is an excellent tag editor and I would rather have Florian spend his time improving his great program instead of trying to solve the problems that the Microsoft army of programmers has ignored.

I don't want to see Mp3tag turn into a WMP pooper scooper.

i think its a fair request. mp3tag already does similar things, like optimizing mp4 tags.

having said that, keep itunes and wmp away from your files! they are CRAP. wmp/windows will also ruin your RG tags, from even the smallest edits, like rating updates.

Sorry but this is a misconception.
There are two different problems with WMP12:

1) The problem with the extended tags that are overwritten cannot be fixed! Their content is overwritten and lost forever.

2) The "solution" quoted by wigster refers to files that get corrupted after adding a cover to them in WMP12 because the size of the cover is wrongly calculated (which is the wrong explanation anyway).

I've recently convert to WMP12 and as others have discovered it is not without issues and getting MS to fix the issues is like pushing a bunch of wet noddles. However I have made some progress (I think) with the following:

1. I first place any new music in to my "_Music Need Work" folder
2. Each album is in its' own folder
3. I open all of the folders in the temp folder in Mp3tag
4. I use a filter (this was from another post in this forum) %_tag% HAS APE, this presents only the tags with APE
5. I then press CTRL+A to select all of the filtered entries
6. I then right-click and select CUT
7. After the cut is completed I then right-click and select PASTE, this removes the APE stuff and creates valid (most of the records) entries
8. It is highly possible that the files will contain errors that will present other problems for you thus it is a good idea to scan all of the files and correct them as the next step. The best tool for this is mp3val-frontend. NOTE this does not fix issues it just identifies possible issues, see http://mp3val.sourceforge.net/
9. At this point I just hope for the best

mp3val fixes issues for me.

winamp is far better, and more respectful. use winamp or foobar or something else, WMP is crap.

I assume ... additionally you have to tell what options have to be set in Mpeg options for reading, writing, removing of tag data.

DD.20111117.1037.CET