Media Player Tag Issues

[MissileCop]

Not sure if this is the right place to throw this out, but this is where I'll start.

Have recently been having issues with song tags, when importing songs into a media library. Songs will take on the tag information of another song, or I will have a string of songs all take on the same (and all wrong) title.

This week, I was building a media laptop for my brother, and needed a light-weight distro, so I used TinyMe, an offshoot of PCLinuxOS. I installed Songbird, and had the above issue. Uninstalled Songbird, and installed Amarok. Same issue again. I thought that this was related to only TinyMe. Until last night.

Last night, I went to burn a cd on my LM5 Xfce desktop, using Brasero, and as I tried to add files to the song list, numerous song titles changed. I burned cd's a couple of weeks ago, and had no such problems.

I'm fairly new to Linux, and still fumbling my way around. Being that the problem lies on at least two different distros, three different media programs, and two different computers, is there something out in the repositories that has changed recently, to create this problem? I've done some looking for an answer, but if the answer's out there, my search-fu is weak on this one. Any answers, or ideas on where to look next, would be greatly appreciated. Having to individually go through, and edit some 400 tags, did NOT make for a fun afternoon.

[Husse]

I'm not at all into music apart from internet radio stations and I found that I got all sorts of hits when I tried googling this.
I have noticed that sometimes an answer appears first after I have answered a post, people probably use the "New posts" option so I answer in the hope someone who knows answers

[newW2]

I've had to make some edits manually before, but not that many! Did you try any of the tools in the repository?
---------
id3tool:
Command line editor for id3 tags
A simple and complete editor for ID3 tags in MP3 files. ID3 tags are a way of
identifying mp3 music files - you can store Artist, Album, Title, Track,
Year, and Genre in a tag, as well as a 28-character comment.

Highly recommended for scripting and bulk operations where you need
to edit id3 tags from scripts.

Can also be used to read id3 tags.

Homepage: http://nekohako.xware.cx/id3tool/
------

[MissileCop]

After further research, this has become more than just a tag issue. I went through, and played each song in the library on my brother's soon to be laptop. A number of them are now a series of chirps and screeches. Even after deleting them, and putting a fresh copy on the laptop, I still get the chirps and screeches. Yet the same songs work fine through the Amarok 1.4 on my desktop.

I made a cd the other night on my LM5 desktop, using Brasero. One of the songs on the cd has a screech at the beginning of the song, much like the other ones on the laptop for my brother. However, the song that has the screech on the cd plays fine through my library.

My only guess right now is that there is a dependency that Songbird, Amarok, and Brasero use, and that has recently been updated, that is causing this problem. Or, there's a dependency that doesn't want to play nice with my hardware. Now that I have an idea about what direction to head in, my stubborn gene can kick in. It's very rare that my search-fu is weak. Must have been a poor planetary alignment of some sort last week, throwing me off. *chuckle* If I find an answer, I'll be sure to update.

**newW2,
While I had to view them all, I didn't have to edit them all. There was probably about 50 that I had to actually edit, though it seemed like far more. Thanks for the tool tip, I'll keep that in mind.

[newW2]

MissileCop,
Very interesting this latest information on chirps and screeches. I encountered this when transferring music to a different computers and a file conversion didn't go well. For example, I had music on an old computer that had formats that I wanted to change when leaving windows behind and moving into the future with Linux. I used a script to convert these files ogg ... so I thought. Some of the conversions didn't go well - I didn't see any errors either. The result was allot of the same noise you are describing. I then used SoundConverter (in synaptic package manager):

GNOME application to convert audio files into other formats
SoundConverter is a simple sound converter application for the GNOME
environment. It reads sound files in any format supported by GStreamer
and outputs them in Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, or WAV format, or MP3 format if
you have the GStreamer LAME plugin.

All was well after using SoundConverter. It's great if you have an iPod can want to convert to mp3 (newer ipods aren't / weren't supported by RockBox last I looked).