Possible Genre Corruption when using both SB & iTunes

We had a couple of reports about Genre's changning to numbers(17, 20, etc,).
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...

Are you saying, you've never changed Genre in Songbird?
I will try to dig on this more, so far we can't find the pattern.

That's correct, I never changed the genre in Songbird. I added lyrics (and saved). I did this with 3 songs (all classical) and then returned to iTunes. I had these same 3 songs with a genre of "32".

I too have this problem btw

I just started having this problem last night. I just got Songbird several days ago and added lyrics the same day. The problem only arose last night after adding music to iTunes. After importing the new music to Songbird, about 1300 songs were changed to about 15 different numbers. This ranged from random songs lumped with one number to songs of one genre only.

This has happened to me too. Usually only some of the artists I have under a particular genre will change to a random number rather than every artist under a genre changing to a number (for example, only some of my artists with the genre "new age" changed to a number as opposed to all my new age tracks switching to a number). The change seems to happen randomly; I added some Rihanna tracks to my playlist last week and I only noticed last night that the genre had been changed from "pop" to a random number.

I have this problem too; happens to only a few tracks though, not all and certainly not any kind of majority. But it is still annoying and hopefully can be fixed soon.

I notice the numbers, in general, correspond to the string value for genre. ie, blues is the first genre in my list, and some songs with that categorization are changed to genre '0'. Maybe iTunes is reading/writing some other value? I don't think Songbird itself is doing it, but its definitely happening during the syncing.

At least, this is what I've gathered.

Yep, I have it with most tracks where I have added lyrics.

This really sucks because I spent about 1 day perfecting my itunes library and now its all messed up thanks to songbird. I was a HUGE songbird fan but now im starting to have second thoughts. I hope there is a fix for this problem.

I have the same problem - circa 10% of my files have had the genre changed to a random number (or have simply been erased). It seems to have happened when I've edited the genre tag in Songbird. I have never added lyrics to any of my files.

Moreover, quite often the track number and/or artist tag have been erased. I don't know if it has something to do with the quality of certain mp3s or if there's a bug in Songbird's metadata editor, but this seems to happen to certain albums although rarely to all tracks of the album.

All of iTunes' track info is stored in an XML file so there could be an issue in how Songbird syncs that information (assuming you have that enabled). It's not clear where the genre categories are stored, but I'm assuming in the iTunes database which is not easily accessible. Does anyone know where in the Songbird package contents the sync code for the iTunes library lives?

I posted this bug in the past. But I noticed that he still persists.
I did a test with a long list of songs.
Edited in any field a mass as the "composer" and see that it still persists.
My list of songs from 2753 now has 602 songs kind of problem with corrupted (I did a test after the backup:) ).
THE BUG PERSISTS WITH THE SONGBIRD 1.1.1a 948 (my last test with the last nightly)
Songbird Hendrix version

I have posted some musics on the hd online from rapidshare (bugzilla don't able me to upload more than 2 megas from each file.
The files are at these links
http://rapidshare.com/files/188349783...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188349784...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188349785...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188349786...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188349788...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188349789...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188349790...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188349791...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188349792...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188319221...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188319222...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188319223...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188319224...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188319225...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188319226...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188319227...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188319228...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188319229...
http://rapidshare.com/files/188319231...

I have reopen the bug
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...

I'm not a techie and have only just installled Songbird. But having spent a few hours looking at this and monitoring with MP3tag, it seems that the problem for me was when the ID3 tag was v2.2 (and possibly lower) at the time you save the lyrics with Lyricmaster. In this situation it seems the tag name is saved as ID3 v1 and it loses the embedded album art, lyrics and sets the genre to a numeric value. Saving the tags via MP3 tag to v2.3 or 2.4 prior to saving the lyrics seems to have (so far) fixed the problem for me - your mileage may vary. Sorry if this is not the correct way of reporting things round here. I am new to Songbird.

That makes perfect sense. I'll give that a go myself. Thanks for reporting that!

Look !
http://rapidshare.com/files/188349783...

Look on itunes, and see that the genre is R&B and open this file on songbird
Do a change of metadado "artist" by [Ashanti] to [Ashanti 1]

Look that "apparently" the genre is right
But open on itunes and "play this music"
The genre will change to 14

It is some exemple that the songbird do with my musics.
This is big wall to migration from itunes to songbird.

I don ́t recomend anyone to migrate before this bug still fix

Next file
AC DC - BLACK IN BLACK
http://rapidshare.com/files/188349784...

Look on itunes, and see that the genre is "Rock & Roll" and open this file on songbird
Do a change of metadado "album artist" by [The Rolling Stone Magazines 50] to [buuu] (lets do a diferent change...using the album artist , to the other music we used artist)

Look that "apparently" the genre is right
But open on itunes and "play this music"
The genre will change to 78

I just want to report in and let everyone know that John's suggestion of converting the ID3 tags to version 2.4 seems to have worked. I have listened to music for several days now with no reocurrence of the number anomaly and I would have normally seen the issue again. So, there indeed seems to be a connection to the ID3 tag version as to whether or not the genre issue occurs.

Most of my problems are now resolved but I can still replicate Erik's continuing problem if I attempt to insert lyrics manually using the metadata editor, even if the ID3 tag is 2.4. So looks like there is still a problem out there.

As far as I can tell, the automatic fetching of lyrics seems unaffected as long as the tags are 2.4.

Aye, I had not attempted that as of my last reply and I can attest to that as well, but without knowing the difference on how a manual insert is done versus the add-on code-wise, that's probably as far as we'll get. The devs should be able to sort it out from here though. :)

Look, this next file has a "ID3 v2.2" and have the same problem with the v2.4 (I belive the problem is not about the version of ID3)
---

Bajofondo_con_Julieta_Venegas_-_Pa__Bailar__Siempre_quiero_mas_
(ID3 V2.2)

http://rapidshare.com/files/188349785...

Look on itunes, and see that the genre is "Tango" and open this file on songbird
Do a change of metadata "album artist" by [ ] to [1234] (remember that "artist" is [ ] )

Look that "apparently" the genre is right
But open on itunes and "play this music"
The genre will change to 113 (and a new problem- the artist right the same 1234 that I right on "album artist")

BEFORE
album artist: [ ]
artist: [ ]
genre: [tango]

AFTER
album artist: [1234]
artist: [1234] (wrong)
genre: [113] (wrong)

Songbird 1.1 beta 1 still with the problem

I submitted a new bugzilla with the same subject from our getsatisfaction topic
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...

Let s see how visible It will be. (please guys, Vote for this bug )

I have the same problem but it's definitely only on some files where lyricsmaster has uploaded a lyric...

This is definetly an issue with lyricsmaster. (WHICH RULES, please make it default with songbird as soon as this is fixed :P)

When I play a song in songbird... it replaces the genre in itunes with a number. The numbers seem to be organized, "Rock" is always replaced by a "17". "Alternative" is replaced by "20" This is kind of a dealbreaker right now...

Same problem here. Using the 1.1 release. It does seem to be correlated to LyricMaster. I don't have iTunes at all so that's not it for me. What I'm seeing, when I have LyricMaster automatically update lyrics, is when it grabs them it also changes the Genre in the ID3 tag.
For example I'm listening to U2's "How to Dismantle...". The tracks already have a genre of "Pop" and no lyrics. When the tracks starts playing and the lyrics are written to the ID3 tag the genre is also updated. I'll add an image.

Look at that answer on bugzilla.
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
They think is a itunes bug

I just found this bug too. I however haven't used LyricMaster. It's very bothersome because when I go back into iTunes to sync my iPod, it suddenly has like 2,000+ songs to re-sync, when all I did was add a couple albums. It's very annoying.

This is a big problem for me; I'm an avid Songbird fan, mostly because of the LyricMaster extension (I love having all of my MetaData accurate!) Until this is fixed, I'm going back to iTunes full time. Fixing my genres everytime I load up iTunes for iPod and podcasts is pretty darn annoying.

I have this problem too... please I really like Songbird but fixing my genres every time i use songbird is not an option

This seems to be very common problem according to the number of users replying to this post.
There is one problem for files imported from iTunes which seems to be an iTunes bug, not Songbird.
More info in a Bug #15303

Also, there is a Bug #15971; looking similar (adding numbers in a Genre field) which has nothing to do with iTunes. That one is about to be fixed pretty soon.

So, stay tuned and re-test this issue with the latest builds, when our bug is fixed.

Thanks.

Yes, bug 15303 describes my problem. It's a shame that it seems to be an iTunes problem, because this is really keeping me from enjoying Songbird. As much as I would love to have Songbird as my *only* music player, it's just not feasible yet, and this bug makes having Songbird *and* iTunes together also unfeasible. Here's hoping Apple fixes it!

This bug is a massive showstopper for me. I'm trying to use songbird full time bue the metadata editor is slow and cranky and now that my metadata is all over the place, it's all getting really frustrating!

I really, really, really, really hope this gets fixed soon. Even if it is an iTunes problem, can't someone incorporate something in to the next build of sb to work round it?

Big love if you can!

this seems related to or duplicated by:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
which has many more people listed as having the issue.

I did disable lyricmaster last night, then listened to some music on my iphone this morning, and synced just now with iTunes, all without running songbird. And, corruption of genre happened again, with the genre names changing to numbers.

This is only one test of this, but first thoughts are that this isn't strictly a songbird issue, unless songbird is altering the format of the iTunes Library.xml file and iTunes is having trouble using it after this chance. I'll keep watching to see.

Meanwhile has anyone seen this issue reported to Apple?

I installed Songbird for the first time yesterday and I immediately got this bug after syncing with ITunes. I deleted Songbird when I first noticed the bug 4 hours later, and have been frantically searching untul now to see if it was this or an infection.

Same issue, no changes to song information except getting lyrics (perhaps an issue with that plugin rather than SB itself?)
duplicate of http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...
not sure what "resolution: invalid" means
http://www.id3.org/id3v2.3.0#head-50c...
you should be able to change them back manually in itunes for the codes that match up. (use common sense of course, I.E. ACDC != Classical)

I changed back to just using iTunes, as I couldn't eliminte the issue by removing SB extensions.

I've been having the issue even though I'm purely using iTunes now.

The corruption seems to happen on songs I haven't played for some time, perhaps pointing to a version or file format incompatibility..

I'm wondering whether SB has touched and in same way changed the file format of the iTunes xml file?

Nick

So when you say "all those songs that you edited in Songbird, they were converted to a 2.4 tag", that means the iTunes XML wasn't touched, rather the ID3 tags on the files were, and hence caused iTunes the issue?

Does this mean that, in 1.2, these ID3 tags will get fixed if I simply open SB, or will I need to do something like reimport the files, or manually edit each file, or..?

thanks, this sounds promising...

@Nick
This all depends on how you used iTunes and Songbird... I'll go through the possible circumstances (this is with Bug 16430... the other bug is a separate problem)

1. You kept your Songbird Library in sync with iTunes. (BAD News)
If you changed metadata in Songbird, you played/edited that track in iTunes [changing the genre], then used the iTunes importer again (putting the new genre in Songbird). Your gonna need to manually edit the genre back to the correct one.

2. You imported your iTunes Library just once. (Your GOOD!)
The genre in Songbird is still "ok" to the id3 v2.4 standard, and once you edit it again, it will implement the workaround in the id3tag for iTunes.
(you can do a mass edit of the 'comment' tag or something else that you dont use to force the change)

3. You just imported media via a folder or drag n drop, no iTunes syncing (Your also Good!)
Same as #2...

In Songbird 1.2, you will also be able to sync your SONGBIRD library back to ITUNES, and i have not investigated/tested if that will automatically fix the issue without editing the files in Songbird(as stated in #2)

Thanks Michael. to confirm, even if I've been editing and changing in both SB and iTunes, once I move to 1.2, and reimport my songs, all ID3 tags will be updated (or whatever else is required to fix this issue) and I'll no longer see corruptions in either application..

thanks, Nick

OK. The 1.1.2 version of Songbird has the fix. I tried and finally the genre and the disappearing album cover has been solved.
However, you got to use Songbird and change Genre and Cover. You may see the album cover correctly on SB and not on Itunes.
So, to change the album cover correctly: 1) select one mp3 and copy the album cover, 2) paste it on another mp3, 3)select all of the mp3 from the same album and choose "clear" and add a dummy cover (or a different cover). 4) select again all of the mp3 and select "clear" again and now paste the the correct album cover.
Maybe it will work without doing step 3. Try it.
After this i won't use again SB and i will just keep my itunes. I still need the "Album by year" sort.

Btw, i am using only itunes and i use SB only because of the LyricMaster so i keep SB in sync with my itunes library.
About the step 3 it's better. It's better to force SB to update the mp3.
The same thing happen with genre. You got to selected all of your mp3 with the same genre and change it to a totally different genre (if you used the same genre it will update only the mp3 with the numeric genre). And after that, change them all to the right genre.

I've downloaded Songbird 1.2, imported my iTunes playlist, and fixed the genres in Songbird. The problem still persists. What am I doing wrong?