What are all the numbers in the comment field of songs.

I don't know if there is a definitive answer to this question anywhere but one possibility is that it records the result of the *Gapless Playback* or *Sound Check* analysis so that if you remove & reimport the files iTunes doesn't have to do the work again. As far as I can tell nothing bad happens if you delete the text and leave it blank or type in other information that you want. What I've never been certain of is if it corrupts existing comments or only ever appears in comments that were otherwise empty.

tt2

+the song loses the track number of "total tracks" information+


That is something a little different. I think Windows Media Player is doing that....it happened to about 500 of my songs after I stupidly took a WMP upgrade.
It also put a bunch of Composer info in the Composer field which I know I didn't put it there, and itunes is too stupid to do it.



Anyway....it hasn't happened since I turned off the WMP options to get media info from the internet.
It's in 3 places: the general, library, and privacy tabs.
WMP goes out and gets info from the internet and overwrites the artwork tag (unless it's v2.3 tags), deletes the y in track x of y, puts composer and sometimes album artist info in, and possibly those random numbers in the comments field.
My advice is to turn that option off in WMP! Because it can do it even if you don't have those songs in its music library. It picked random songs from my hard drive on different days, until I turned it off.


Oh, and the reason it looks like itunes is doing it when it plays the track is, itunes doesn't refresh the tags until you click on a song or play it. But WMP has already +made the changes+ in the background and itunes is +just now displaying+ them.

Message was edited by: Katrina S.

These numbers only seem to be added to the songs that were not purchased from iTunes. For example, all the songs I imported from my CD collection got these numbers added in the comment field.

My problem with this is that it *wipes out* whatever you put in the comment field. I use the comment field to add meta data that helps me search for songs and create playlists (e.g., female, soft). I also like to put a text representation of the rating of the song (e.g., 5 stars = "Great" in the comment field) as the ratings are not saved in the mp3 file but rather in the iTunes XML file. This helps me recreate my ratings easily if I have to re-import my library.

I think this should be considered a bug and be fixed by Apple.

Yes, this is very annoying. I just transferred close to 100 Gigs from my old computer and many files have these numbers in the comments field. The real problems I have are

1) When you play the track, the song loses the track number of "total tracks" information and then sorts to the top of the tracks in the album.
2) If you erase the junk in the comment field, the album artwork disappears.

What's the deal?

Thanks for that info. I had a lot of files in the WMP and I didn't even know it. At least I know what the problem is, though I feel like my files have already been ruined. At least it won't happen again.

Yeah, I wasn't too happy, either. Finding the total track numbers and replacing them took quite a while.