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.
- Select all songs (Ctrl+A)
- Right click the selection, click on ‘Get info’
- 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.
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googled for a solution to this and found your blog. thanks for the advice, i hope it works =)
It worked perfectly on my Mac.
Thanks much!
thanks a lot. a simple tip but saves me a lot of time.
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.
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!
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!
Simple. It works. Love the solution. Like most of the folks above, I was reading all kinds of disgusting hacks to do this.
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! (:
WOW… Nice trick..
Works on Windows.
THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!
Thx worked like a charm.
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.
This method doesn’t seem to be working for me…
osx 10.6.4
itunes 9.2.1
I select all, get info, everything is blanked. click ok, goes back to the list and does not update my comments.
Anyone else not having any luck?
Derp, reading comprehension for the lose. Didn’t see this marked as Windows. Thanks anyway!
@Josh in itunes 9.x you have to modify some field before, i just check comment field
What @knoopx seems to be right. you can see this on apple forums too.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10557062
This doesn’t seem to work on iTunes 10 on Windows, even if I change a field (like composer). Perhaps Steve Jobs decided that using other programs to manage ID3 tags was a threat to iTunes domination so they plugged that hole.
Apple has outsmarted us once again!
Barry
OK, but it is not a real refresh: it does not remove deleted files! I really cannot understand how to remove all files that I deleted from my PC (non iTunes folders)
If it doesn’t work if you just get the info and click on ok, try to add a comment. That way, it has to go through every song and add a comment.
Thanks Pietje, your advice worked fine!
Can’t get this to work in ITunes 10 in windows, even when I have updated the comments field.
• select all
• right-click
• select “convert ID3 tags…”
• check the box and select the latest version
• click “OK”
This will cause iTunes to refresh your ID3 tags (even in iTunes 10).
Beware: your “Date Modified” field will be updated to reflect the time of the refresh, so if you need that data, take note of it first.
Stubborn tags will update…. wait for it…. when you play the track! – just updated 400 tracks in 2 mins by tapping down arrow and return keys! safe and reliable!
Thanks, Jason. That worked for me, though it takes some time. But, at least it shoved the stubborn iTunes into action. None of the other solutions had worked for me and I don’t really care about the ‘date modified’ field.
using iTunes 10 on a Mac, I found I had to make some change to metadata to force an update. i examined the fields available and determined since there was no valuable bpm data in any of my 50k+ tracks, I would set bpm to a value of 1. it takes time to update of course, but if i wish i can set it back to nothing again. if i use an external program to calculate (and write) bpm’s, i’ll need to use a different field in the future.
@ToñoSecundino If you are editing the ‘comment’ tag of your mp3s using an external program, it may not work. I wrote a script using php-reader-1.8.1 from the Zend PHP framework to add the file system location of each of my mp3s to the Comment field. No matter what I tried, the comment I added did not display in itunes. I used the php-reader tools to discover that multiple sub-comments exist in the mp3. There is the comment that my external tool wrote and there is the comment that iTunes writes. They are two different comments.
Hi, I’ve been researching this topic for awhile and I must say the information is great. Thanks!