can itunes metadata be updates without deleting and re-adding the items

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can itunes metadata be updates without deleting and re-adding the items

I have a large amount of music that I set the 'Category' tag to a certain value using Winamp. When I use iTunes to put into onto my iPhone, the song titles show the value of the Category tag, not the actual song title even though the titles show up in iTunes.

I can't see to find that tag in iTunes, so I changed it in Winamp, deleted and re-added the album into iTunes and put it back on the iPhone. The titles now show up and life is good.

Except after I deleted all the Category tags in Winamp the titles don't show up on the iPhone unless I delete and re-add the items. I don't think I'm up to doing this for 35,000 items. Plus, I'm sure some of the artwork will disappear.

Is there a way to force iTunes to re-read the metadata ? That would seem to be the way to fix this.

Thanks for any help on this,

Don

Posted on Aug 30, 2019 4:38 PM

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Answer 1

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turingtest2

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274,988 points

Sep 2, 2019 6:31 PM in response to djohnson123

Not in Windows, but you can make bulk changes in Get Info. Select a bunch of tracks, Get Info, tick Use Work & Movement, click into the Work field, type a space and delete it. There should now be a tick against the empty field. Untick Use Work & Movement and click OK. All the Work values in the selected tracks should disappear. Sync to sort out your device.

tt2

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

274,988 points

Sep 2, 2019 2:08 PM in response to djohnson123

Can you display Category in Songs view? Does it show the unwanted values or as empty? If you see values, and they should have been cleared by WinAmp then does playing a song make them disappear? I'd expose Work as well just in case that is a factor. See also Repair security permissions for iTunes for Windows - Apple Community. If these files are in mp3 format there is a possibility they have multiple tags which can sometimes lead to inconsistent results when media is transferred to a device.

If needs be I can modify one of my KeywordsToProperty scripts to clean the Category values.

tt2

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Answer 3

turingtest2

Level 10

274,988 points

Sep 1, 2019 4:02 PM in response to djohnson123

Apologies, I skimmed your post and assumed you were trying to get iTunes to notice changes made externally, but it seems that isn't the whole story. I think you may be seeing something similar to the issue that can occur when the Work value is filled in but Movement values aren't, when iOS devices show the Work value instead of track names. Tied to this is another issue that causes Work values to be inherited from Grouping in some cases. It may help to check for unwanted values in Work and remove them.

Standard practice is to keep all media in iTunes, then sync it to your device. If all of your content is in your library, and removing it from the iPhone and adding it back fixes things why can't you can do that in one batch?

tt2

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Answer 4

djohnson123 Author

Level 1

9 points

Sep 1, 2019 6:16 PM in response to turingtest2

Thanks for helping. Here's what the problem is :

~The content in the iTunes library has always shown the correct values, it's when I put the music onto my iPhone that the problem shows up. The titles have the old value of the Category tag.

~I cleared the Category tag using Winamp, deleted the album from iTunes, re-added it to iTunes then put it onto the iPhone and the titles were OK.

~I ran your script on an album and added it to the iPhone and the titles were still wrong.

~I don't really want to delete and re-add a thousand albums in iTunes and was hoping there was a way to let iTunes know that the Category tag was blank.

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Answer 5

djohnson123 Author

Level 1

9 points

Sep 2, 2019 4:41 PM in response to turingtest2

Sorry - didn't look at Work before but you were right. The former contents of Category are there and when I expand the iTunes entry to use work and movement there it is ! I deleted the data from the Work column, put the album onto my iPhone and the titles show up just fine.

Now, is there a way to programatically delete the data from the Work column ?

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