iTunes Changing ID3 Tags

Does this only happen to me?

I have all of my music tagged the way I want it tagged and when I add it to iTunes, then to my iPod it fucks it all up.

For instance, I have an album by The Buzzcocks which was tagged perfectly fine, then on my iPod iTunes in the list of Artists

Buzzcocks
The Buzzcocks
Buzzcocks
The Buzzcocks
Buzzcocks
The Buzzcocks
Buzzcocks
The Buzzcocks
Buzzcocks
The Buzzcocks
Buzzcocks
The Buzzcocks
Buzzcocks
The Buzzcocks

Each of those Artist Directories have two songs in each which is completely ridiculous.

Any idea how to have iTunes leave my shit alone?

It does this with me too, and I don't know why.

With "Tool", there are 4 different "Tool" Artists on my iPod, but they all have the same shit in them.

I have a program called Tri-Tag for my Mac, probably a similar one out there for PC, but I can't seem to fix this.

Wait, so it is adding it to your iPod twice? Or is it on your computer twice?

What exactly is it messing up, because it sounds like it is copying the music twice to your computer (which is what I assume; please correct me as needed). Is your iPod set to automatically sync with your computer?

I use Tag & Rename to tag all of my music.

Then when I add that music to iTunes and subsequently my iPod, iTunes changes the tag information to what [i5f560b5750]it[/i5f560b5750] thinks is correct.

It doesn't add anything twice, just tags it the way it believes is correct.

iTunes does not automatically sync with my iPod, it's simply a matter of iTunes changing the tag information for each song/album/artist etc.

The only reason I asked if your iPod was set to automatically update was because that has also been known to mess up the information stored by iTunes, since it compares the information from both the computer and the iPod and tries to determine which to use, and it mostly goes with the iPod in my opinion because that's where the songs are most likely to be more recently played/changed (results may vary).

However, are you using the Tag editor that is built into iTunes to change the ID3 tags? If you try to change them with an external application, that has also failed a few times for me as well.

No, I only touch the ID3 tags with Tag & Rename (separate application), it's just iTunes doing it on it's own and I want them to leave me alone.

Cwy cwy.

Is "update media info" (or words to that effect) turned on in preferences? That might be retrieving album art, but also might be overriding the tags you create.

For Tyler, if you see separate entries for an artist on your [iaf4e420e86]iPod[/iaf4e420e86], then there's probably a trailing space at the end of the artist name on some tracks that is separating them. You need to sort your tracks by artist, then highlight all and change the artist field en masse. If you see them in iTunes separately, then maybe you have that music stored in more than one folder? It will display multiple entries unless you set it not to. This will happen when you backup an iPod, for instance.

[quoteaf4e420e86="theysayjump"]For instance, I have an album by The Buzzcocks...[/quoteaf4e420e86]

I always thought you were a Homosapien. ;)

[quote862e3edd56="theysayjump"]No, I only touch the ID3 tags with Tag & Rename (separate application), it's just iTunes doing it on it's own and I want them to leave me alone.

Cwy cwy.[/quote862e3edd56]Yeah, iTunes doesn't always agree with personal tags. Especially, as Tholek said, if the auto update is on. The two settings for this that I would worry about would be once you get to the preferences would be
1. In General, look down a little more than halfway; there's an option to automatically update the album art. While it shouldn't, this has been known to sometimes change ID3 tags.
2. And in Advanced>Importing, there is an option near the end of the short list that says "Automatically retrieve CD track names from Internet". If that's on, it will also mess up your ID3 tags.

Something I noticed about iTunes is that importing doesn't just mean copying the music with iTunes into your music folder, but also using iTunes to play your music.

Maybe this will solve the problem .... or maybe not. Worth a look, though.

I haven't seen this yet, and my iPod has close to 1000 tracks that I've ripped and tagged outside of iTunes. I do auto-sync and album art as well.

BTW the album art itself can be embedded in ID3 tags. I don't remember if there's an option in iTunes to control that or not (I don't have iTunes here at work), but perhaps doing so could corrupt tags. I've not seen it myself though.