Windows 7 - Windows sees MP3 tags, but no audio players do

A very strange thing:

I have a pretty large MP3 collection I've mostly ripped from my CD's. I used iTunes to rip them and they came with the proper ID3 information attached. Worked beautifully with pretty much everything and anything.

I recently did some reorganizing of my file system and I moved all of my music files to another internal drive. And suddenly no music player recognizes the appropriate information. However, when I browse the files in Windows Explorer, the tags show up just fine and I can organize my files according to them.

What could be the reason for such strange behaviour? And more importantly: is there a good way to solve this?

Use a reliable, popular, widely regarded and easy-to-use free 3rd-party tag utility such as MP3Tag, to examine your MP3 files. Using Windows components, players, Explorer, etc., can often mislead you or hide what's really going on. Same with other all-in-one products (e.g. Media Monkey) which are powerful, but "intrusive" and somewhat mystical. You get much more useful and manually controlled results using specific 3rd-party tools such as MP3Tag.

You will see whether or not there truly are valid tags inside of your MP3 files. If not, you can easily manually edit/repair them with MP3Tag... although this doesn't explain where they might have disappeared to, or were actually stored when you built the MP3 files in the first place.

I'm not familiar with iTunes (don't use it, never have) so I don't know what it might have done. I build my own MP3 and FLAC files from my own CDs using Audiograbber and LAME, or Audiograbber and FLAC-Frontend. Tags are 100% properly imbedded in all files by either process.

I suspect that itunes has tagged them with its own tag or used its own codec in much the same way that when you open itunes it will reasign all your mp3 files to files it will recognise, i.e aac, its clever like that

There are many variations of the ID3 tag and a single mp3 can have multiple TAG versions applied to it, personally I think winamp does a stellar job of showing you this information, however it's autotagger has previously made some errors and I ended up with wrongly identified tracks being updated in my library. Although 99 percent of the thousands of files I threw at it came up perfectly.

razy, iTunes will handle mp3's normally, unless you edited or imported the info through the iTunes interface in which case it will default to putting this data in the iTunes version of the ID3 tag and create one if it dosn't already have one. Of course for formats iTunes isn't licensed to play such as .wma's you are quite right it will convert them.

MP3 Tag is a great recommendation to fix your problem, I just thought I'd let you know why it might have happened.

(when you say no music player will read the tags are you excluding itunes?)

This issue is now solved. Thanks to everybody for chipping in.

Glad it's closed, but for closure what turned out to be the explanation for what you saw? What was the actual problem and what was the actual solution you implemented???

What did the tags look like when you investigated? Did you have to manually correct things? MP3Tag? Winamp? What?

(don't leave us curious cats in the dark)

Well, unfortunately the solution wasn't very creative or helpful to the general public. MP3Tag diagnosed the problem and indicated that the tags were simply corrupted for some reason. I tried getting suggestions from there to see if I can bring them back to health, but unfortunately their suggestion ended up wiping out the little tag information I had.

In the end, I went to my external backup drive, copied and reimported everything and the tags were fine on those files. It's probably what I should've done to begin with, but since it's pretty cumbersome to move around large batches of files, I wanted to find if a more streamlined (read: nerdy) solution was possible.