When adding edited tracks to Swinsian or Apple Music no artists come up

Numerous attempts tried with different settings. Please can someone help advise.

Once I add the MBP edited tunes into the program it shows no artist and if it does show artist it’s in the track area (only occasionally). Despite MBP showing it has found the artist in the software it never appears in Swinsian or Apple Music.

Picture 4 is how I would like the music to appear. I only access my music through a program like iTunes (when it wasn’t music and good). I just want to have my music like in picture 4 please help




What file format are those files? If it’s MP3 or some other format using ID3 tags check the settings in Options > Tags > ID3. Try to switch between ID3 v2.4 and v2.3 and try the different encoding settings. Also try disabling ID3v1 tags if those are enabled.

Also note that iTunes / Music does not update tags in its database automatically when you just change the data in the files. There should be some discussion about this here on the forums on how to trigger a library update.

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Hi! Thanks for helping. So they are mainly aiff .

Okay that is much appreciated I will give it a try and let you know

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For AIFF it is indeed ID3v2 metadata that is used. The screenshot you shared indicates that iTunes didn’t read any metadata (and only uses the file names to display something). But generally iTunes is supposed to handle ID3 tags in AIFF (and I assume this is still true since the rename to Music).

Under the assumption that iTunes can in general read tags from AIFF there are two plausible scenarios:

  1. iTunes only either reads ID3 v2.3 or v2.4 (likely v2.3) or expects a specific encoding. In this case it should be possible to configure Picard accordingly. I am very interested in the results, both if some settings work or if nothing works.

  2. Picard writes the ID3 tags to AIFF files in a way iTunes does not handle. In this case we would need to fix this in Picard’s code. If 1) does not give results this would be the next thing to investigate.

Let me know how your testing goes. I can also do some testing, but it might take a few days untill I get to it.

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Hi there, so I tried using different combinations of ID3v2 tags and it was to no avail. Perhaps this is just not something that works for AIFF files, could it work with wav instead maybe?

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WAV will be worse. While it is a very similar container format (both AIFF and WAVE are based on the RIFF format), there is less standardization regarding metadata. Picard will embed ID3 tags in a similar way as it does for AIFF, but only some applications can handle that.

Better option would be to convert tom some lossless format like ALAC or maybe FLAC (does Apple nowadays support FLAC or still not?). With both you get proper metadata support.

I’ll also do some testing with AIFF and my mac. Maybe I can figure something out.

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I’ve had good experiences with ALAC and iTunes / Music.app, but it doesn’t support FLAC today (I can’t say if it did in the past.)

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As I lack access to my mac mini currently I gave this a test with iTunes on Windows. There things work as expected. Data written by Picard gets read by iTunes and vice versa.

Now it’s totally possible that the new Music app on an actual Mac maybe behaves differently. But maybe we are also looking at the wrong issue. So let’s go a step back and check other possibilities.

  1. Verify if Picard actually wrote the tags: If you load the files into Picard again, does it show the metadata as expected in the “Original Value” column? If yes, the data got written to the file properly. If not, then the data is not yet in the file. In this case please check whether you have Options > Tags > “Write tags to files” activated and that you have actually saved the files.

  2. If Picard does show the data in Original Value but Music doesn’t, maybe Music just did not update its data. Try removing such a file from the Music media library and re-add the file. Does it update now?

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Thanks guys. I am in the process of converting all my wavs and aiffs in this folder to a separate folder in FLAC format (which swinsian does support).

I will then do the MBP process again and then put them into Swinsian (which is basically an emulation of old school iTunes). Fingers crossed!

Outside context, I will make sure to follow your instructions first to see if the tags are saving an being recognised in MBP before sending them into Swinsian.

Thanks for the help so far

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Hi All,

I have now started converting my aiff into FLAC and it seems to work when then running through MPB.

Will keep you posted once I have done it with the 4,000 tracks and see how it comes out.

Thanks for all the help so far Outside Context

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