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[rhowland]

I have over 30,000 files on an external hard drive. I have had to make the drive write protected because Media Jukebo wants to change tags and move files. How do I disable this automatic feature, yet still do a tag lookup on a file on demand. I do not want Media Jukebox moving any file ever!

[JimH]

MJ doesn't move files unless you tell it to.  Why do you think it is?

[rhowland]

Well right now, for example,

"Media Center encountered erros while tagging and moving files. Check that the files exist, and are not read-only, and are not in use by other programs.

File read-only:F:\Music\Collections-Etc\-TO BE FILED...\.......mp3"

[Alex B]

That's a general error message text. It is used when file tagging or file moving (also renaming) fails.

MJ and MC do not move or rename files without user interaction. Some tag changes are done automatically. Depending on what you do and how you have the options set some operations may write tag changes to the files. For example, a cover art change triggers tag update.

If you want to always keep the disk files unchanged you can disable physical file tag writing: Tools > Options > General > Importing & Tagging > Update tags when file info changes.

This should work also if you still want to keep the drive write protected. The error message should not appear when tag writing is disabled in the general options.

When the "Update tags when file info changes" option is disabled all metadata is kept only in the library. However, whenever you want to update the physical file tags you can enable the option, select the files you want to update and do: right-click > Library Tools > Update Tags (from library).

If you want to allow only manual tag changes you can disable the "Analyze audio" and "Get cover art" auto-import options. I don't think other automatic features write file tags in the background. As I already said, a cover art change always updates file tags, but MJ and MC do not change existing cover art automatically.

Personally, I don't usually let the auto-importer run in the background. Most of the time I add new files by dragging them from Windows Explorer to Playing Now and doing a "right-click import" inside MJ/MC. (I use a temporary location for new media files.)

I have Playing Now set to "Details" mode and I have added all tag fields I want to maintain as columns to the view.

In this way I can check that all tags are correct before importing. Then I use the "Rename, Move, & Copy Files" tool for moving the files to my permanent library location. After that there is no need to change the files anymore. This makes possible to update my backup sets (on separate drives) very quickly because only the newly added media files appear as changed in my backup program.

[druid]

I have disabled this option.  However, it does have a problem (apart from the fact that I need to use other programs to tag my files); when you synchronise to a device, and it converts audio, it won't tag the new audio files, leaving them untagged for the player!!

I would probably let MJ change tags if I could disable editing tags within the main window (I'd rather ONLY use the little tag window in the bottom left), and if I could change the default tags to my liking.  For instance I used to store the release date in the [date] field as YYYY.MM.DD, but MJ did NOT like the dots.  I couldn't change that fact, either.  I've now switched to YYYY-MM-DD and now MJ displays correctly, but it has ideas on tags that I do not, and I can't change the ones already there.

So those two reasons, at least for now, are why I do not allow MJ to alter tags.