Been doing some testing today and have noticed an artist has been given an extra genre which is not part of any album I have for them.
I have genre set to embedded tags in my music library. Artist is MIKA and you can see from the screenshot below that pop and britpop are populated at the artist level.
Mmmm, let me check the files again but I cannot imagine its getting it from the files. I have “clear existing tags” set in picard so everything bar what I included in the screenshot above is removed. This britpop genre is also not something I have tagged and never existed before I upgraded to 1.40 and refreshed the metadata.
Okay, so leave this with me, I found one of the tracks in plex with this genre. Checking it in picard and I see its set to pop, however checking with mediainfo it has the BritPop genre so I need to figure out why that is happening.
Very weird. Anyhow, I have a workaround of sorts. When I re-encode the media it seems to reset the tags and then when I write them again with picard it seems to solve the problem.
Thanks, I’m all sorted for now so will mark this as solved.
As this is a very strange and weird situation I said I’d post this here.
Using mediainfo on the left panel you can see genre in this example is set to noel for this track. Using musicbrainz this same track has Christmas Music. So what I done was a basic ffmpeg copy ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -codec copy output.mp3 and the resulting output which is the panel on the right has the correct tag. No other change was done.
No idea why this is the case as even ffprobe can’t see this rogue genre in the input file. Anyhow, I’m going to just script a basic bash script calling ffmpeg copy across my 120k music files to cleanup any other files which may have a situation like this. I’ll also update the tags in picard for good measure moving to ID3v2.4 tags.
Very interesting case. I have had similar issues myself. I’ve been in contact with people developing Picard some time ago and I know it has had bugs with clearing tags. For example, last time I checked, acoustic IDs were not cleared by Picard, no matter what you do.
This is just for curiosity, but does mp3tag see this rouge genre?
No, it does not. Have tried mp3tag, easytag, ffprobe, puddletag and picard. All reported what I expected the tag to be, Christmas Music in this example above whereas mediainfo reported it as Noel. Its a very strange one indeed. Maybe its was embedded into the stream itself.
Possibly Picard writes this as a similar genre to the id3v2 genre?
But I doubt it would “group” them like that, since it would be incorrect. Especially since Pop exists in id3v1 (place 13). If it proves to be an id3v1 value then it’s probably a bug in Picard.
Shouldn’t have id3v1 tags as I typically strip my files before tagging with picard. I use single genre tags, not multiple so shouldn’t be grouping either but will look again.
So the sample file you sent me has two sets of ID3v2.4 tags, I’m not entirely sure why but could be the default behaviour for Picard, or a bug I’m not sure.
This is the first block of tags (as viewed in a hex editor):
As you can see there are two sets of TCON tags there. I’m guessing most software will only read one set of these tags, in the case of MediaInfo it seems to use the latter. I think the correct behaviour here would be to only read the first block, I’ll file an issue for us to address this.
