Jul
02
2009

Refresh ID3 tags of entire music library in iTunes (Windows)

If you are like me and manage your ID3 tags outside iTunes for your music, this is how you force iTunes to refresh all ID3 info without having to recreate the entire library.

  1. Select all songs (Ctrl+A)
  2. Right click the selection, click on ‘Get info’
  3. Without entering any data, just click on ‘Ok’ this will force iTunes to refresh ID3 info.
    NOTE: Care full not to enter anything in the ‘Get info’ dialog when it is open. Because anything you enter will be applied to all songs.

Voila! that should do it.

Written by Kishore in: windows | Tags: , ,

11 Comments »

  • Jave

    googled for a solution to this and found your blog. thanks for the advice, i hope it works =)

    Comment | July 14, 2009
  • It worked perfectly on my Mac. :) Thanks much!

    Comment | July 22, 2009
  • Mikko

    thanks a lot. a simple tip but saves me a lot of time.

    Comment | August 6, 2009
  • Robert

    Brilliant. This is the only site I’ve found that actually answers this question. Thanks a million. This was on a PC too, for interest.

    Comment | August 14, 2009
  • Mark

    This was brilliant! I am embedding jpeg into my MP3s using MP3Tag, and after doing the above trick Itunes started showing the album covers I had recently embedded. Rock!

    Comment | October 15, 2009
  • seekingtruth

    Amazing! Believe it or not, this simple solution is no where else on the web, apple forums, or fanboy sites. You should see the incredibly convoluted suggested solutions out there. I was about to basically dump iTunes because it didn’t seem to have any viable way to do something so seemingly simple (and should either be automatic, or have a button on the GUI).

    Good Work!

    Comment | March 30, 2010
  • Simple. It works. Love the solution. Like most of the folks above, I was reading all kinds of disgusting hacks to do this.

    Comment | April 11, 2010
  • ToñoSecundino

    Thanks! I was doing similar things to get that fixed. And YES, it doesn’t exist one single site that has this simple and great idea. BUT, it just didn’t work with me, and i cannot figure out why. See, i use the “comment” id3v2 field for determining the music that will be in my iPod. (I mean, if comment=ipod then it will be in the iPod.) BUT the files didn’t refresh. I removed all of them from the library, i copied all the folders into iTunes… i tried everything… i will keep trying this solution. Thanks again! (:

    Comment | April 16, 2010
  • Max

    WOW… Nice trick..
    Works on Windows.

    THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

    Comment | April 19, 2010
  • erkan

    Thx worked like a charm.

    Comment | May 24, 2010
  • Goofy

    Awesome! Took me ages to find this gem of information. I can’t belive that even in version 9.x Apple still hasnt figured out that people actually edit tags in other software.

    Comment | June 10, 2010

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