I've been running with no tag updates to the files for a few months now and survived 3 lib corruptions to date tho did not deal with this particular prob as yet.
If tags are being replaced...then my suspicion is as follows.
The file has been modified in some way by an external app and MC thinks it must re-read the file tags again, i'm not sure if its file size difference that triggers the re-readt, or something else (Matt (?)). If you find the answer to this part you have solved the problem.
Any chance you open a media file in an app that then saved some tag info back. This possibilty can be discounted if your media is stored on a read-only parition.
I have noticed this happening when i replace an inferior quality rip with a better one, but want to retain all the tag info since its only the physical file i'm changing.
So in this case i substitute in the better files with the same filenames as previous and MC does not think anything has happened. But if i do a Locate->Inside MC for the album, MC will re-read the tags and substitute in any that are in the new better ripped file.
To prevent this happening, i tell MC to look at the tags via update library from tags, it does the replacement, then i copy back the fields one at a time, from backup fields of the same name.
So i have Artist (B), Album (B), Name (B), Track# (B), Date (year) (B) & Genre (B) for backup tags. I mention only these tags as they are basic tags that are filled by default hen i rip anything.
The actual fields are copied over to their corresponding (B) counterpart
- then u replace the older files
- then update from tags
- finally re-copy from (B) back to the original fields.
After this, you can do a locate inside MC and MC will not modify the tags anymore, that is until it detects a file size change which should not happen since i'm not saving any changes to tags at all and no other apps are allowed to save tags to the file.