SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

ID3 Tags, SongKong and iTunes

#1

Being as I cannot manually edit ID3 tags in SongKong, I have a related question.

When I use the “Get Info” contextual menu option for a song inside of iTunes, select the “Details” tab, and change the genre of a song, does that actually write my selected genre to the audio file itself, or is it merely writing to a database inside of iTunes itself?

The reason why this is important to me is because when I choose to fix songs in SongKong, I don’t want to enable the “Update Genres” option on the “Basics” tab, if it is going to wipe out the manual ID3 work that I do in iTunes directly.

On the other hand, if iTunes is only writing the new info to its own internal database, then I suppose there is no danger in enabling “Update Genres” when fixing files in SongKong.

Of course, I suppose when it comes to personal music libraries, genre is a very subjective thing. While I may consider a song to be of one particular genre, someone else might consider it something else entirely. :slight_smile:

#2

If you don’t want to modifying existing genres either disable option completely or change options in Genres tab to only [b[Replace if Empty[/b]

SongKong writes to the file itself, but iTunes will read this value and put it into its internal db, so if you modify the genre expect it to be reflected in iTunes

#3

Okay, so you seem to be confirming what I suspected.

That is, that iTunes does NOT actually edit the ID3 tags in my audio files. It only writes to its own internal database and leaves the ID3 tags in the actual audio files untouched.

Is this correct?

In contrast, SongKong does write to the actual ID3 tags in my audio files.

iTunes will see these changes in the ID3 tags and update its own database accordingly.

Correct?

In short, if I understand this correctly, iTunes doesn’t really make any changes to ID3 tags in the actual audio files. It merely copies SongKong’s changes to its own database.

#4

No, for most fields iTunes actually changes them in the files themselves AND then copies them to internal database for speedy retrieval. But there are some fields such as Rating where it just uses its internal database.

#5

Okay, thanks for the clarification.