Help / Troubleshooting
Super-Tag said it applied but nothing changed
You ran Super-Tag, it worked through the list, and afterwards the library looks much the same. Here is how to read what it told you.
The short answer
Super-Tag counts a track as tagged only when the details actually reached your file. The panel finishes with Done and a count of how many were tagged, and every track it could not tag carries a dash and a short reason instead of a tick. Three reasons cover almost every case: no match was confident enough, the file could not be written, or the track was skipped on purpose. A fourth, the free allowance, ends the run early instead.
The free allowance ran out
Super-Tag is metered on Free and during the trial, and before a large run it tells you how much your allowance covers. It tags what the budget covers and stops there. Nothing is lost: the tracks it never reached are untouched, a later run picks them up, and tracks that already carry a match are skipped and cost nothing.
This one leaves no reason beside each track, because the run simply ends. Everything past the stopping point is never examined and never appears in the list, so the finished count can be smaller than your selection with nothing to show for the gap. If the allowance is already spent the run does not start, and it says so up front. See What the free allowance covers.
No confident match
No confident match found means the lookups ran and nothing cleared the bar. Super-Tag will not write a guess. The bar is a score of 50 out of 100, and below it nothing is written to your file. Three things commonly land a track under it:
- Nothing in the databases matches. Obscure pressings, bootlegs and music never formally released often have no entry at all.
- The title is a placeholder. "Track 01" and its relatives give a text search nothing real to work from, so the app refuses that search rather than accept a confident-looking hit on an unrelated recording of the same name. Fingerprinting does not need the title and still runs.
- The match disagreed with its neighbours. When a folder's other tracks resolve firmly to one artist and a single fingerprint match lands on a different one, that candidate is capped just below the bar. Fingerprint indexes are crowd-sourced and occasionally polluted; the folder is usually right.
Nothing is thrown away: open the track in the tag editor, press MusicBrainz under Identify, and the candidates come back with their scores so you can apply one yourself.
A match was found but the file could not be written
This is the case that looks most like "it said it applied". The row shows a dash and the write error, the run does not count it, and the match stays in your library so the metadata still shows. The track is flagged in Library Health under Matched but not written to file. Because the match is in the library and not in the file, a rescan or a move to another machine loses it. The usual causes sit outside the app:
- The file is read-only. Vesari Stylus will not override the read-only attribute quietly. Clear it in the file's Windows properties.
- The file is in use. A tag write ends with an all-or-nothing swap of the file, which cannot complete while something holds it open, including the app playing that track. Play something else and retry.
- The filename cannot be written here. Files copied from a NAS or a Linux share can carry a colon, or a trailing dot or space, that Windows cannot open for writing. Rename it and try again.
- The file is damaged. A corrupt file can read well enough to fingerprint and still refuse a write.
Fix the cause, select those tracks, and Super-Tag the selection to retry. A write that lands clears the flag by itself.
Formats whose tags cannot live in the file
- Raw bitstreams: DTS, AC-3 and TrueHD. These carry no tag container. Their details live in your library instead, and Library Health offers DTS/AC-3 tag sidecars, which writes them to a portable
.tagsfile beside each track. - Tracks inside a CUE sheet. A whole-album file plus a CUE sheet is one file with markers, so a track has no file of its own. See CUE sheets.
Neither counts as a failure, and neither appears under Matched but not written to file.
It skipped on purpose
Three skips are by design, and each says so in the results:
- Already matched. Tracks carrying a MusicBrainz match are left alone, so re-running over a tidy library does not re-pay the lookup. To force a fresh match, select those tracks, press Super-Tag and choose Re-tag everything.
- Manual tags protected. Once you have saved a track by hand in the tag editor, automation never overwrites it.
- Video file, not music. A container holding a real video stream is left alone.
If none of this fits
If a well-known album refuses to tag, or tracks land on obviously wrong artists, report it. Open Report a Bug in Settings and name a few of the tracks. Is this a bug? How to report it explains what that sends.