Why's my old school winamp broke?

December 27, 2006 11:34 PM

My winamp (v2.95) has just started to do something strange; it's creating id3 tags on it's own!

For the last few days I've noticed that some mp3's in winamp are now appearing in this format: " - Artist - Title" compared to the previous (and desired) "Artist - Title"

None of my mp3's have(..or had) id3 tags.

But I noted that these files with the weird naming are files that have an id3 tag, and removed the tags and just thought that I had missed them in the first place...until it started constantly happening, and then I realized that *as soon* as a song is played, the id3 tag is generatated, and then the song takes on the annoying " - Artist - Title" format.

What's causing this? I searched through the options for winamp and found nothing that would suggest to this, I also haven't changed any options myself and have been using this same version of winamp for months.

posted by Sonic_Molson to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Perhaps you're listening to music that wasn't, until recently, in the CDDB?
posted by SilverTail at 12:59 AM on December 28, 2006

Sounds like what you really should be asking is "How do I make WinAMP display metadata in my prefered format". There should be a setting somewhere that lets you specify what's displayed; metadata is your friend.

I just tried installing it to see where it is, but WinAmp crashed on startup. I'm sure it's there somewhere though, it'll probably be something like "%tracknumber% - %artist% - %title%" or so. Adjust to taste.
posted by Freaky at 7:53 AM on December 28, 2006

I don't know why you're using an ancient version of Winamp -- 5.2x is the latest, and it's no heavier in terms of CPU usage or memory footprint, if you use the classic skins, than the older versions.

Settings for display guessing with id3/filenames in the playlist are found (in this version at least) by going Right-click --> Options --> Preferences --> Media Library/Local Media --> Watch Folders Tab --> Metada Reading Settings --> Configure

To change the way in which the playlist displays metadata (again in my version) go to Options --> Preferences --> General Preferences/Titles. You can edit format strings and set further preferences there.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:36 PM on December 28, 2006