This is my first post...I hope it is acceptable and is in the right place
I recently discovered that one of the tracks in a MC album was absent. The file for the missing track was in its proper folder in Windows Explorer, and I found the missing track in JRiver in an album titled 'Unassigned'; it is an m4a audio file and it plays just fine. When I look at the tag for this file, there are only 5 pieces of data: Name, Filename, File Type, File Size, Image. The Name field has been changed and shows the track number followed by the name truncated to about 30 characters. When I examine the tag for this file in the MusicBrainz tag editor, all the tag data is present and the Name field is complete without the track number prefix.
My initial hypothesis was that MC had failed to read the tag correctly. Since the Name field is different in MC and MusicBrainz, it looks like a failure rather than a sampling. So I concluded that what I am looking at in MC is what the MC Library had saved in the past, not the actual current file data. So I tried various maneuvers to try to force MC to re-process the tag data from the file itself and update the library.
1. Running Auto-Import and Update Library from Tag (notified Successful, but not!) made no difference.
2. I created a whole new path for the file in Explorer by copying it out to a new folder (unwatched by Auto-Import) and renaming the file, then Importing a single folder in MC.
3. I changed some tag data in MusicBrainz, saved it to the file, verified the file timestamp had changed, then ran Auto-Import.
None of these made any difference. By the way, I unchecked 'Ignore files...', checked 'Update for external...', and checked 'Write file tags...' in Configure Auto-Import, and I checked 'Update tags when file info changes' in Options>General.
I can manually enter the tag data into the Library so that the track appears in the proper album in MC album view. This is an acceptable work-around, but doesn't get at the problem and is a bit of a chore. Also, the manually-entered data doesn't get written to the file (which again suggests MC is disconnected from this file's tag data), and that creates other problems. The reason I care about this issue is that I have a few dozen of these unassigned files and am hoping for an easier and permanent fix, and also I would like to understand what is happening.
So...MC seems unable to access this file's tag data, which seems odd since an external tag editor has no trouble. It doesn't tell me it can't read it at all, it doesn't return all blanks or some blanks, but it does show an incorrect Name string. Is there some way to start over with the processing of this file that I haven't tried yet? Does MC Library have some hidden memory that I haven't been able to clear yet? Has anyone else encountered a file like this? I haven't been able to find any reports quite like this, but there are a lot of posts about tagging. Maybe I'm missing something obvious.
My final conclusion is that either (a) this file is corrupted so that its tag data is unreachable by MC's tag editor, or (b) the file is OK but MC can't see or is ignoring the file tag data in favor of what it has in the Library database. My other conclusion is that I don't understand tag editing well enough--maybe someone can enlighten me.
Sorry if this is too long and detailed.
I am using MC 29.0.58 on Windows (64-bit) with 58K+ files in my Library
The files in question are all m4a files which were ripped from CDs 10-20 years ago in iTunes, then have been copied from hard disk to hard disk over the years.
I have been using MC for 3-4 years after using several other music organizers and am very happy with it, by far the best!
