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Author Topic: Question about tagging m4a's  (Read 1943 times)

syndromeofadown

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Question about tagging m4a's
« on: October 03, 2010, 02:36:22 pm »

Up until now I have dealt almost strictly with mp3 and flac. Recently my special lady friend and I combined our music libraries on the same PC for convenience, though its not too convenient. She has about 5000 m4a's that I am trying to set to the same tagging standard I use. Note that I use DC-Bass for playback and I don't have iTunes or Quick time installed.

Problems with m4a tags:
1)
Tags that are edited in J River are only visible in J River, and only on the PC that tagged them.
I assume that the meta data is stored in the library database and not in the actual m4a file.
This is a problem because we use one PC as the main HTPC then copy desired music and movies to our work and travel laptops. These laptops will not have properly tagged m4a's if we use J River for tagging.

2)
I found that using other tagging software(TagAndRename) edits the m4a's meta data but many of the edited tags won't show up in J river.
      The tags that do show up are as follows:
Album
Artist
Comment
Composer
Date/Year
Disc#
Genre
Name/Title
Rating
Track#
Composer
      The tags I use/need that don't show up are as follows:
Copyright
Conductor
Grouping
Lyricist
Album Artist

Note that I don't use these tags for there intended purpose. I use them for my custom tags because of compatibly. I'm not actually concerned about copyright or the lyricist. So saying “who cares about Copyright” is not a solution.

Also note that if any of these tags are edited in J River, the tagging software doesn't see the changes.

So what do I want?
I want to edit m4a tags so that they are stored in the m4a itself and I want to do this with all of the tag fields I listed above. I want compatibility with J River. Basically I want to tag m4a's just like I do my flac. Is this possible?

Does having Quick Time installed change anything?
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Alex B

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Re: Question about tagging m4a's
« Reply #1 on: October 03, 2010, 02:50:30 pm »

MC doesn't have an m4a tagger and it can read only a limited number of tag fields from m4a files (as you listed). Any changed tag data is stored only in the database.

Yaobing from JRiver is working on a new tagger component:
I am still working on overhauling the mp4/m4a tag reading and adding tag writing.  It has been slow because of other things to do.
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syndromeofadown

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Re: Question about tagging m4a's
« Reply #2 on: October 03, 2010, 03:07:13 pm »

Thanks.
The link in your reply pretty much summed up everything I needed to know.
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