[Rhythmbox-devel] while we are talking id3tag writing

[Matthew McGowan <matthew joseph mcgowan gmail com>]

Bug 424629 – handle multiple id3 tag sets better
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=424629

This bug is a total pain!

When a music file has as more than one id3 tag Rhythmbox(rb) does not 
use the most recent and does not know what to do with the other tag 
versions. Consequently changes made _in_ rb are rolled-back on the next 
reopen of rb. Well not exactly rolled-back, the change exists as a 
seperate id3 instance and is ignored by rb in preference for the 'top' 
id3tag which is the oldest (see the bug report).

This leaves my id3 tags in rb looking like a total mess. Banshee, Ex 
Falso as well and winamp on windows handle this scenario better though 
offer no means to properly fix the problem (as far as i can tell). This 
means the less id3tag savvy players such as rb and wmp fail to present 
the tags intended by the user.

Is there any chance this issue will be fixed before the next release? To 
me this is the most pronounced bug i experience. I suspect that anyone 
who dual boots between Windows and Linux and uses a combination of 
windows media player 10/11 and rb will experience this bug to some 
extent, as these apps succeed in munging id3tags it seems. In my opinion 
this bug should be a priority.

Short term could rb be designed to display the most recent id3 tag which 
is most likely to be the preferred tag, or otherwise mimic the behavior 
of banshee or ex falso which seem to display what i expect when it comes 
to id3 tags.

In the longer term, imho, rb should be good enough to try and remedy the 
problem rather than just use the most recent id3tag. Similar to how 
'missing files' or 'import errors' pops up there could be a category in 
the sidepane for 'fix tags' or 'duplicate tags' or something, under 
which are listed all the files that have multiple id3 instances, and 
lets you review the versions, and provides a set of functions to choose 
the preferred tag instance and optionally lets you strip out the other 
unwanted tags.


Cheers
Matthew