In iTunes on the desktop Mac, we manually fixed spelling errors, filled in missing data, and generally made cleaned up the music list. It turned out that many of the songs did not have ID3 tags, so instead of looking like the desktop Mac's iTunes list, a large number of songs had descriptive names such as "track 23 - JB.mp3," which is why we needed to do a little housecleaning.
We wanted to use our desktop Mac's MP3 collection on a laptop, so we enabled file sharing for the desktop drive and dropped a remote folder of songs on the laptop's copy of iTunes. Sometimes these tags become messed up, or were never created in the first place, in which case iTunes only has the MP3's Mac filename to use as an identifier.
Also, this utility can edit ID3 tags under Mac OS X.) When you drag a folder of MP3 files into iTunes main window, iTunes scans the folder for MP3 files and imports the contents of each file's ID3 tag in order to populate the music database. MP3 files can store information about the artist, track name, and other descriptive information in an ID3 tag. We do not know if the 'updated' data came from the song file itself or from a network source such as CDDB.įirst, a little background. We realize that iTunes uses CDDB to look up track information for CDs, but we were surprised when it updated track information for MP3 files, in several cases overwriting information we had added ourselves. While housecleaning in our MP3 collection recently, we stumbled upon a disturbing behavior in iTunes 1.1: modifying song information without asking us beforehand.