Windows Media Player 12, ID3 tags and permissions

I’ve been having the strangest problem in Windows 7 with WMP 12. Basically what happens is that I use 3 different audio players: Windows Media Player 12, Nokia Music and Songbird. I noticed that some of my tracks kept on losing their info in WMP. I tried editing the tags of the files and didn’t get anywhere, so decided to try doing it through explorer instead. I then discovered that all the tags on these files looked like they had been erased / were blank. Trying to edit the tags then gave me an error that I didn’t have permissions to edit the file.

The problem was that everything was actually working fine and playing as it should. And in the other two programs, the file meta data was reading fine. So the files weren’t corrupt. I then found this post which helped:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/GettingReadyforWindows7/thread/2af26d67-ea9a-4305-98a1-b4a05e13fa17

After a bit of searching, I found a batch tag editor for multiple audio formats at www.mp3tag.de. Browsing through my music collection showed me that the issue was in fact with the tag type. For some reason, ID3v2.4 tags aren’t properly supported by WMP12. Sorting my collection by tag name in mp3tag allowed me to select all of these files, change some arbitrary field and automatically re-save them in ID3v2.3 format (you can set the format up in the program options).

Problem solved.