confusion with iTunes genre tags

[steklo]

Hello,

 

I use iTunes to manage my music library for many years now. I ripped and tagged nearly all my CDs with XLD, then added the files to iTunes and re-edited metadata if necessary in iTunes. As long as I used a MacMini with iTunes/Amarra, all was fine.

Most recently I have set up a NAS with Logitech Media Server and stream my audio from there to an RPi with piCorePlayer. On the NAS is a copy of my iTunes library which I let LMS scan. This also works fine. The confusing thing is about the genre tags. I get along with a handful of different genres in my library, one of them being "Klassik" which is the german word for "Classical". In iTunes, all classical tracks have the tag "Klassik". In LMS part of my classical albums appear under "Klassik" another part under "Classical". Re-checking with XLD, Kid3 and Musicbrainz Picard shows that those albums/tracks that appear with "Classical" genre tag in LMS do actually have that instead of "Klassik". Still in iTunes they are uniformly labeled "Klassik".

I tried to change things by selecting all "Klassik" albums in iTunes and give it a completely different genre tag like "gaga". That took some time to get processed. When that was finished I renamed the genre tag to "Klassik" again, refreshed the copy of my iTunes library on the NAS and had LMS rescan it. Unfortunately it turned out nothing had changed. There is still both "Classical" and "Klassik". Re-checking with XLD, Kid3 and Musicbrainz Picard again confirmed that LMS is right.

Now I am looking for a way to comfortably and reliably change all my classical genre tags to "Klassik". Of course I could do that with one of the above mentioned apps, but as far as I understand I would have to load and edit all classical albums one by one which would be a torture in fact, but probably with a reliable result. iTunes allows to select all classical albums and change the genre tag in one step which is comfortable but obviously does not work.

Any idea what I could do to really and easily get rid of the "Classical" tag in favour of "Klassik"?

 

Best regards

Stefan

 

P.S. I guess that all albums with "Classical" tag where ripped that way in XLD (because I simply forgot to overwrite with "Klassik" before starting the ripping process) and changed to "Klassik" in iTunes whereas alls "Klassik" tagged albums where done right from the beginning in XLD.

[kirkmc]

Are you sure the problem is with iTunes? It could be the Logitech Media Server that is caching metadata. Or pulling metadata from somewhere and ignoring your metadata (which Roon does by default).

[steklo]

Very sure! I just reconfirmed by checking with both kid3 and XLD: Those files do have the tag "Classical" when loaded into these programs while iTunes displays "Klassik". Thus I do assume strongly that LMS, Kid3, XLD and brainz Picard are right while iTunes does something else.

[steklo]

I just found even the OSX  finder shows that those music files do have the tag "Classical" instead of "Klassik" as shown in iTunes - see pictures attached. As you can see there too, there isn't any "Classical" genre at all shown in my iTunes library even though it turns out that a lot of albums are tagged that way.

I once again tried with a single album to overwrite the genre tag with something else, once again "gaga", and both OSX finder and iTunes display "gaga" as genre. Renaming this album's genre back to "Klassik", iTunes display "Klassik" while the finder displays "Classical". Mad isn't it? Actually this is on another computer so this is not some strange anomaly of my iMac at home.

So for the moment ist seems I cannot heal the problem with iTunes. Do you know of any metadata editing app that allows to choose all "Classical" tagged files from an existing library and change that to "Klassik" for all of them in one step? Otherwise I would have to go through my collection album by album, which would be a pain...

[bubbamike]

tag and rename might work but I think it is a windows program. MP3 Tag would retag them but I don't think it would allow you to search for files with that tag. It also is a windows program but works well with Wine.

 

[steklo]

Hi,

 

I solved my problem! After some research I asked both Amvidia (Tag Editor) and Nightbirdsevolve (Meta) if their metadata editors might help. It seems, both would have worked.

I used Amvidia's Tag Editor and could load all the music files of my complete iTunes library into it. I the did "sort by genre" by clicking the tab, selected all "Classical" tracks and changed them to "Klassik" – just like I had done in iTunes, but other than iTunes this time it did really change the genre tag.

 

Here's the link to both editors in case someone might find that helpful:

 

https://amvidia.com/tag-editor

https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/

 

For LMS users: It was not enough to simply scan the updated music folder for new and modified tracks, I had to make a complete "delete database and rescan" procedure to get the now correct information into LMS!

(I did this procedure before already, when I had iTunes change the gernre tags, but obviously without success – just in case someone might think iTunes did it right already the first time and LMS failed to read the modified tags).

 

Best regards

Stefan

[kirkmc]

As I suggested above, it was caching metadata. It's probably not the only app of that type that does that. Glad you figured it out. 

[steklo]

On 14.4.2018 at 11:14 AM, kirkmc said:

As I suggested above, it was caching metadata. It's probably not the only app of that type that does that.

Not quite, Kirk!

 

Actually in step one, where I was swapping all "Classical" genre tags with "Klassik" using iTunes, I also had LMS deleting and rescanning the library afterwards. But that was obviously not successful. At that point I found that even the "get info" menu of the Mac still showed "Classical" as genre tag while iTunes pretended it to be "Klassik". I described that fact in my post from 23.3.

 

Only after step two – retagging with Amvidia Tag Editor and after that again having LMS deleting and rescanning the library – everything was correct.

 

So in my particular case the reason for my problem was iTunes, not LMS.

[kirkmc]

Do you use iCloud Music Library? That will change tags, but I've never heard of iTunes changing genre tags otherwise. 

[steklo]

No I never used iCloud Music Library.

 

One interesting thing happened in between: I had my library free of "Classical" tags as reported. One day I changed the genre tags of some albums in iTunes to "Klassik" that before were filed under "Jazz". After deleting and rescanning my library in LMS the "Classical" folder reappeared with nothing else but these newly retagged albums inside... I had to retag them with Kid3 (which also displayed "Classical" instantly) to "Klassik" and after that (and delete, rescan), all was nice again.

Possibly the german iTunes version has some inbuilt workaround to handle "Kassik" and "Classical" as one. Still it is pretty strange that if you write "Klassik" into the genre tag in (german) iTunes it actually gets "Classical" written in.

[kirkmc]

Is your computer set to use German or English for its interface? If it's the latter, then I can understand that it makes that change. It would probably do so for other genres that are localized. (World music, for example.)

[steklo]

It's set to German and "Weltmusik" does not get translated to "World Music"

[kirkmc]

That's very odd. Are you signed into the German iTunes Store?

[steklo]

Quite sure I'm signed to the German iTunes Store (at least all information is displayed in German) but generally I'm not connected to it. I need to sign in manually everytime I want to.

[kirkmc]

I don't see any reason why iTunes would make this change. The only one would be if you typed Classical and it changed to Klassik, which would make (some) sense since the OS is in German. 

[steklo]

I don't see any reason as well, still it does (at least on those two different iMacs I have access to). Anyway, it is not a real problem to me, as I was fortunately able to understand what's going on (still not why it's going on) and find a solution that works for me.

So this is more or less for the record if anyone else might head into this confusion some day.