Then also some of this stuff has not been touched in years. So you can end up with quirky bugs. Like if you use picard in a particular way then give it over to windows media player, WMP sometimes will corrupt the file. However, if you tag it in the particular way it likes then it is OK. All of those fields are 100% left up to the interpretation of the program.
Then you have fun things like should you use "; " or " / " or ";" or "/" to do multi item fields. Or should the tagger put the same tag in more than once? What happens if the band/artist has that char in its name? What will the player do? Do you want utf-8 or 16? It is a quirky mess. Then lord help you if you mix in 2 or 3 different programs that have their own interpretations of all of that.
Oh then you can have all flavors of an id3 tag in one file, plus ape, etc. That may or may not be synced between each other.
Then there is the generic TXXX tag. Oh boy that thing is an interesting one. Random things are stored in them. Is it necessary? Some is, some isnt. I have seen anything from picard NVP bits, random binary data, XML purchasing data, volume leveling, etc. Then if your editor of choice does not recognize the particular NVP they usually just ignore it. So removing them is interesting.
Oh then the data in the tags themselves can be fun. Depending on your source data. You can end up with "Random Person" "Random Q. Person" "R. Person" "R. 'coolnick' Person" "Random P." and so on. Musicbrainz uuid tag for that sort of fixes it. But only if the player supports it.
There is a tool out there that does a sanity check of some of this. Unfortunately the name eludes me at the moment. I usually use it to remove extra padding. Some of the editors like to leave 2-4k extra padding in each file for if you make another update. It speeds up updating. But once you are done...
Then you have fun things like should you use "; " or " / " or ";" or "/" to do multi item fields. Or should the tagger put the same tag in more than once? What happens if the band/artist has that char in its name? What will the player do? Do you want utf-8 or 16? It is a quirky mess. Then lord help you if you mix in 2 or 3 different programs that have their own interpretations of all of that.
Oh then you can have all flavors of an id3 tag in one file, plus ape, etc. That may or may not be synced between each other.
Then there is the generic TXXX tag. Oh boy that thing is an interesting one. Random things are stored in them. Is it necessary? Some is, some isnt. I have seen anything from picard NVP bits, random binary data, XML purchasing data, volume leveling, etc. Then if your editor of choice does not recognize the particular NVP they usually just ignore it. So removing them is interesting.
Oh then the data in the tags themselves can be fun. Depending on your source data. You can end up with "Random Person" "Random Q. Person" "R. Person" "R. 'coolnick' Person" "Random P." and so on. Musicbrainz uuid tag for that sort of fixes it. But only if the player supports it.
There is a tool out there that does a sanity check of some of this. Unfortunately the name eludes me at the moment. I usually use it to remove extra padding. Some of the editors like to leave 2-4k extra padding in each file for if you make another update. It speeds up updating. But once you are done...