I wanted to find out if anyone here could answer this...are changes made in
Musicmatch, Mediamonkey, Fixtunes, etc. made directly to your files and stay
that way no matter where they are accessed or are the changes made only for
that particular program? The reason I ask this is because I made some
updates in Musicmatch to a certain group and then accessed the same group in
Mediamonkey and the changes didn't show up. Thanks

The answer is a firm "it depends". Normally, changes WILL be written
directly to the mp3 file, but even when they are written to the music
file, you might not see the changes when using another music program.

First, there are two widely used tagging formats out there -- ID3v1 &
ID3v2 tagging. The ID3v1 format is very simple, and limited to only
artist/album/title/track and short comment. The ID3v2 tagging format
is very flexible, which is great in that it allows you to store almost
anything you want in the file -- but not all of the fields will be
supported by all of the programs. Also, some of the music programs
will create custom fields that only they know about (early versions of
MusicMatch did this, but later versions standardized on the more
commonly used ID3v2 tags).

So...the first thing to look at is whether you are writing ID3v1 or
ID3v2 tags, and whether both programs are using the same tagging
format. Most programs today support at least the most common ID3v2
fields, and every program I'm aware of supports IDv1 tagging.

John
http://www.mp3-boss.com


JW wrote:

I haven't determined which format the files use but I'm talking about
something both formats recognize...album name. I accidentally changed the
album name for a group that had multiple albums to one album and then
decided this would be a good time to check out my suspicions. when I
checked it with another program, the names were as they should be...not what
I changed them to in the other program. Joe

"John" <google-post@mp3-boss.com> wrote in message
news:1164205874.887378.195750@h48g2000cwc.googlegr oups.com...

The ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags aren't necessarily synchronized, so you should
make sure that they are both using the same tag type. Changes to the
ID3v1 file are very easy to see, since the ID3v1 is stored as the last
128bytes of the file -- you could use a Hex file viewer like the
freeware xvi32 to directly view that content.

One other thought is that some programs will keep the information in an
internal database, and will only scan the file content the first time
it is located.

John
http://www.mp3-boss.com

JW wrote: