Special iTunes tags

[foxx]

I have recently bought some tracks from the iTunes store. Playing them from LMS I also looked into the tags and realized that LMS reads tags which MP3Tag and foobar do not recognize. AKID, ATID, GEID ... just to name few. They are only on newer purchases. Until about a year ago, they were not present

Does anyone know a tool that will read and edit those tags?

[Mnyb]

I have recently bought some tracks from the iTunes store. Playing them from LMS I also looked into the tags and realized that LMS reads tags which MP3Tag and foobar do not recognize. AKID, ATID, GEID ... just to name few. They are only on newer purchases. Until about a year ago, they were not present

Does anyone know a tool that will read and edit those tags?

Not even the extended tag info in mp3tag ? Rigth click for it ?

[foxx]

nope...

[garym]

I have recently bought some tracks from the iTunes store. Playing them from LMS I also looked into the tags and realized that LMS reads tags which MP3Tag and foobar do not recognize. AKID, ATID, GEID ... just to name few. They are only on newer purchases. Until about a year ago, they were not present

Does anyone know a tool that will read and edit those tags?

Will iTunes itself allow editing of these fields?

[foxx]

I usually do not use iTunes, so I am not an expert on it. But looking at the track information did not reveal those tags. Therefore I would say: No.

BTW: The contents of those tags is all numeric. With one exception. XID is showing alphanumeric values

[JJZolx]

They shouldn't pose a problem in LMS, if that's what you're worried about.

LMS will read all tags, but if they don't have any meaning then they're simply ignored and not stored in the database at all. It's the same as if you were to add a tag field named 'BLAHBLAHBLAH', with any data that you like. LMS will read it, not recognize it as anything it can use, and ignore it.

If you're using the 'View Tags' in the web interface then what you are seeing are the raw tags that are being read at that moment from the file.

[foxx]

I'm looking at the 'view tags' in iPeng.

I am not concerned with the functonality of the files in LMS. I am more concerned with the fact that I have paid for something which is suppoed to be my property now but which still seems to be governed by somebody else.

[JJZolx]

still seems to be governed by somebody else.

In what sense?

[foxx]

In the sense that I did not pay money in order to acquire music which contains proprietary information which can neither be read nor edited by the common tag editors.

[JJZolx]

??? I still don't really get it.

I believe the reason that Mp3tag isn't showing the fields is that for anything other than free-form tagging system (such as vorbis comments and APE tags) it has to specifically be looking for fields by name and then has to map them to its own internal field names. I'm not completely certain why that is, but Mp3tag has never worked with raw field names.

My experience with Mp3tag is that it won't remove the tag itself, just fields within it. If you were to remove all fields within an ID3v2 tag, an empty ID3v2 tag would still be left behind. If there are fields that Mp3tag doesn't read and write, then it will leave them, which is what you're probably seeing. The only way I can think to be rid of them for sure would be to find a tool capable of removing the whole tag, then to retag the files from scratch.

A few google searches turn up some code suggesting what the fields may be, although much of it looks speculative. It appears they have to do with the iTunes store and accounts through which the files were purchased.

const string Tags::CODE_ITUNESACCOUNT     = "apID";
const string Tags::CODE_ITUNESACCOUNTTYPE = "akID";
const string Tags::CODE_ITUNESCOUNTRY     = "sfID";

http://code.google.com/p/mp4v2/wiki/iTunesMetadata