iTunes is not recognizing album tags from my MP3 files. It only happens on some MP3 files, even through they all have the album info in the ID3 tags.

You can try mp3val, that might fix them up.

Alternatively, if the files are in a standard <Artist>\<Album>\## <Name> layout then turn off Copy to iTunes Media folder when adding to library and use my script TagFromFilename to fill in the missing information.

iTunes often has an issue handling files with multiple tags. These may be introduced by other software such as Windows Media Player, Winamp, or MediaMonkey. Files may have both ID3v1 and ID3v2.x tags, and if I read the ID3 specification correctly, there is also support for multiple ID3v2.x tags each coded for a different language. When there are multiple tags iTunes behaviour can sometimes be unpredictable. In some cases edits to the metadata can be written to one tag, and visible in Windows Explorer, but iTunes insists on reading back unchanged values from the other. In such cases you can use Convert ID3 Tag > None several times followed by Convert ID3 Tag > v2.3 and whatever iTunes knows about the file will be written back to a clean tag. Embedded artwork is erased so needs to be reattached. Using my script CreateFolderArt before and then after the tag conversions is one way to workaround that part of the problem.

Also of note is that certain pre-defined genres are represented by a code number rather than text so that they can be presented in the local system language. There is always a possibility that Windows and iTunes have slightly different values in the look-up tables for some of these.

tt2

I've seen this issue reported here with iTunes on Macs too. It seems MP3s can be encoded and tagged with slightly different formats depending opon the tool used and iTunes won't read all versions. Perhaps a MP3 epair tool can resolve the issue.

This is old but I am having this same problem. I have tons of files from my Mac that all have complete metadata. I have a Windows PC at work so I brought my files in, installed iTunes, and dragged the music I wanted to iTunes to import. A lot of them show up as missing artist, or in the correct artist but as Album Unknown.

The above fix worked for me. If I opened the properties window for one of those files, the encoded by said iTunes v1 or v2. If you just delete that encoded by altogether, it fixes it. However, you need to either play the track or edit something in iTunes for iTunes to recognize it and fix itself.

You can select multiple files in Windows Explorer and choose properties to change that setting on all the files you selected. Just delete the encoded by completely.

Then in iTunes, select those files (this works great for the unknown artist ones as they all show up together) and edit something in the get info window. I don't use ratings so I just changed them all to a 5 start rating. That update caused iTunes to recognize everything. You can find some setting that you don't use or care about and make a small change. Alternately, you can just leave it until you play the tracks. Playing the track seems to trigger iTunes into seeing the update.