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Total niches o I doubt anyone can help...

These are from CDs ripped years ago with EAC and LAME. They work fine in iTunes on Windows + VLC on the Mac but iTunes is failing to read the ID3 data from a lot of files. Is this a known bug with an easy fix? I found nothing on Google or here other than the tools that 'correct' tags. I know all my tags are correct and don't want to risk corrupting the rips

I do have a history with ID3 (wrote first .Net ID3 library) and might just upgrade one of my tools (from 2001!) to rewrite the ID3 tags. From memory ID3 v1.1 was an unwritten standard so maybe that's the issue

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are we talking about id3v1 tags, or some particular flavor of id3v2? (v2.2, .3, .4?) – quack quixote Dec 30 '09 at 7:46
not sure but probably v1.1. VLC and Songbird reads the data fine but does not indicate the version. Do you know a tool that will indicate which version of id3 without me having to deconstruct the data? I used Notepad++ and it looks like v1 or 1.1 because the data is plain text at the end of the file – Paul Lockwood Dec 30 '09 at 19:09
see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#ID3v1 for the v1 layout -- there's not much difference between v1 and v1.1 -- v1 is a 30-byte comment field while v1.1 is a 28-byte field. does itunes read any of the data, or does it simply fail with all? – quack quixote Dec 30 '09 at 23:34
iTunes in OS X says all the tags are v2.3. I uninstalled iTunes from my Win7 machine (runs fast again!) so I do not know what it said, but it read them fine At this point I'll probably just run Jaikoz against them and keep a back of the original MP3s for a year in case it trashed anything – Paul Lockwood Jan 1 '10 at 14:41
As a follow up to help anyone else with the same problem: Jaikoz cost $24 and did an impressive good job but has messed up some of the albums. It appeared to ignore my original ID3 tags and the same song is on multiple albums by an artist it will 'randomly' assign an album. It fairly easy to correct but will take me some time – Paul Lockwood Jan 1 '10 at 18:55
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I thought iTunes automatically fixes broken tags, I guess not.

Try using Jaikoz, I'm fairly certain it corrects tags into the correct format also: http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/

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This a useful comment but does not address the real issue so I'll leave it unanswered. A test run of Jaikoz went well so I guess I'll run it against all the files as I don't have time to resolve the original issue. I'll keep a backup of the MP3s just in case because I don't want to rip all those CDs again! – Paul Lockwood Jan 1 '10 at 14:43
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