DRM-free mp3s that refuse to be edited?!

June 18, 2007 8:22 AM

Why can't I edit the track information of certain MP3s I've downloaded in iTunes?

Yesterday I downloaded some albums from eMusic. Today, when I wanted to tweak the album names and add some artwork via iTunes, I found that 2 tracks of of 28 on a certain album didn't change. Nor do they want to. When I right-click on them and select "get info," everything is greyed out and inaccessible. Worse still, it appears I can't easily delete them from iTunes (i.e. by pressing delete).
Why would this happen? I've been happily using eMusic for years, have thousands of tracks from the site on my computer, and I've never run across this before.

Thank you!

posted by Bromius to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Quick check: Select the track in question. Go to File>Show in Finder (or press Cmd-R). This will bring up the song file. Select File>Get Info (or Cmd-I). See if the file is "Locked" in Get Info.

On my Mac, the exact behavior you describe happens when the file is locked, or if it has its Unix permissions set to Read Only.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:33 AM on June 18, 2007

Kadin-

I should have said I'm using a PC. Still, I checked the files in explorer and they are NOT set to read-only.
posted by Bromius at 8:40 AM on June 18, 2007

Can you delete the files from Explorer?
posted by grouse at 9:43 AM on June 18, 2007

What you are describing is exactly what happens in iTunes when a file is set to Read-Only. But if that's not it, I'm helpless.
posted by yeti at 10:28 AM on June 18, 2007

Grouse-

I can delete them from Explorer. iTunes then notes that the file's missing, asks me if I want to find it when I try to play it, but still won't delete it.

I've since tried redownloading the files in question, and when I reimport them into iTunes they work (and can be edited) fine, but the older, uneditable (immutable?) copy still hangs around.
posted by Bromius at 10:45 AM on June 18, 2007

Right click on the songs in iTunes and choose the option that lets you convent ID3 tags. Choose the highest version offered (don't have access to iTunes here, so can't say for sure what that would be, probably v2.2?). If that doesn't help, try converting the tags to other v2.x versions.
posted by kindall at 3:06 PM on June 18, 2007