How do you edit Metadata on MP3 - And make it stay?

[rescue161]

I know all about locked and read-only files, but this one has me stumped. I'm reorganizing some of my music folders and updating the metadata because my truck radio shows wrong info while the songs are playing. Everything was going well until I came across a few songs that I knew were released in the 70s, but the "year" field shows something else, like 1997 or 1989. So, I go to change the year and it lets me because the file is not read-only. I hit apply and the year then shows 1977. If I close the properties and reopen, the wrong date is back. I've also tried to erase all of the metadata and it makes a copy with everything erased except for the year, which is wrong. I wasted a whole bunch of time changing a lot of folders and happened to check and they have all reverted back to the wrong year. It is just the year that is affected; everything else retained my changes. I can live with it, but why is it doing that?

 

[RDGDigital]

I've seen a similar problem where Windows can't edit a particular metadata tag because of an odd character, usually a Cyrillic character, in the tag. When that happens, I switch to using Mp3tag to edit the metadata. It seem to resolve the issue, and Windows is then able to edit those tags.

I'm not sure if this is the issue you're having, but it wouldn't hurt to give it a try.

Hope this helps.

 

[rescue161]

ID3v2.4. It lets me change everything but the date, even using MP3Tag... I give up. I don't understand why someone would lock just the (wrong) date. Thanks for the sanity check.

 

[ai8o]

Everything was going well until I came across a few songs that I knew were released in the 70s, but the "year" field shows something else, like 1997 or 1989. So, I go to change the year and it lets me because the file is not read-only. I hit apply and the year then shows 1977. If I close the properties and reopen, the wrong date is back.

Part of the problem is that when the recording was originally made it was analog.

When the recording was transferred to a Digital format years later in the 80s or 90s, the MP3 recording device format assumes that the 70s analog recording was created on the date the file was transferred to the digital format.

The MP3 recording has DRM or some other rights management hidden, burned, into the MP3 data stream.

This harks back to the fiasco from about twentyfive years ago where a music company was burning rights management software that detected usage of various tracks into the root files of peoples computers.

 

[rescue161]

Ah, that makes sense. I do remember that Apple did this. I have a lot of music that I transferred from vinyl to MP3 and spent a lot of time doing it. My Wife got an iPod a long time ago and when I installed the software, it immediately started deleting music that it thought was stolen, which is music that didn't have a certain signature or file embedded in it, my homemade MP3s. Luckily I had a backup. I uninstalled the Apple software and vowed to never use another Apple product.