Help  /  Troubleshooting

Auto-tagging replaced tags and artwork I had curated

You ran Super-Tag and came back to find titles, artists or album names you had set yourself replaced. Here is which fields a match can change, which it never touches, and what you can get back.

The short answer

Super-Tag writes its match into your files, replacing the three fields it treats as a track's identity, Title, Artist and Album, whenever the match has a value. Everything it treats as your taste, Genre and Album Artist among them, is filled only where yours is empty. Anything you saved yourself in the tag editor is skipped in every mode.

Replaced text is gone from the file. There is no tag undo. What you can do is set it right again and arm the protection for next time.

What a match overwrites, and what it leaves alone

A match is merged over the file's current tags and the result written back. Three classes of field behave differently.

• Replaced when the match has a value. Title, Artist, Album, and the MusicBrainz recording and release identifiers.
• Filled only from a real release match. Year, track number, track total, disc number. A recording-level or cached match leaves the numbers already in your file as they were.
• Filled only when yours is empty. Album Artist, Genre, Label, Catalogue number, original release date, sort artist, disc subtitle, disc total. A non-empty value in the file always wins.

Fields a match knows nothing about, such as Comment, Composer, Lyrics, Copyright and BPM, are read out of the file and written back unchanged.

Why your curated tags were not protected

The hand-edited protection is the app's own record that you edited a track in Vesari Stylus. Saving in the tag editor marks the track as manually tagged, and from then on Super-Tag skips it and reports Skipped: manual tags protected. That mark holds unconditionally, including under Re-tag everything.

A library curated in another program arrives without it. Every file a scan reads is recorded as having taken its tags from the file, however good they are. Two things then decide what happens.

• If the files carry a MusicBrainz recording ID, as most MusicBrainz-aware taggers write, the default run skips them as already matched.
• If they carry no recording ID, the default run treats them as outstanding work and can rewrite Title, Artist and Album.

The Super-Tag prompt settles it. Where something in range is already matched you choose: Tag what's missing is the additive run, Re-tag everything drops the already-matched skip and warns that titles and artists may change. With nothing matched yet there is a single button. The prompt always states its scope, so a run with nothing selected tells you it covers your whole library.

Artwork and lyrics have their own rules

Super-Tag writes no pictures of its own. A run is followed by a separate cover-art fetch in the background, the same one behind Online under Missing artwork in Fix Library. It leaves alone any track that already has a cover: an image file in the album folder, one you picked in the app, or a picture embedded in the track's own tags. It reports the number it left alone rather than calling them failures, and it writes nothing into your audio files, it records a cover for the library to display. The lyrics fetch that follows fills only tracks with no lyrics.

The tag editor's artwork buttons are deliberately different. Choose image… and picking a result from Search art both embed the new picture into the file, clearing any pictures that were there.

What you can recover

• Tracks you saved in the tag editor, and album-folder cover images. Untouched.
• A wrong match. In the tag editor, press MusicBrainz under Identify and Apply a better candidate. That fixes the track and records the new match, so the default run leaves it alone, but it is not a hand edit. Put the values you want in the fields and press Save to lock it. Only a Save arms the protection.
• The old text of an overwritten Title, Artist or Album. Not recoverable inside the app. Tags live in the files, so a backup taken before the run is the only route back.

Avoiding it next time

1. Save anything precious through the tag editor first. That one Save is what arms the protection.
2. Select the tracks you want first. With nothing selected, the run reaches your whole library.
3. Read the prompt and pick the additive option unless you want existing matches redone.
4. Leave Reset Tag Data, in Settings under Developer, alone unless you mean it. It clears the MusicBrainz identifiers and tag provenance on every track, and the hand-edited protection with them.
5. Treat Discogs under Identify as the exception. Applying a Discogs release, a Lifetime feature, overwrites Genre, Label, Catalogue number, Country, Barcode and Year even where you already had values.

If it still looks wrong

If Super-Tag skipped tracks you expected it to fix, see Super-Tag ran but nothing changed. For covers that vanish rather than change, see Cover art disappears or shows the wrong album. Background on the sources is in Super-Tag and Where metadata comes from.

If a match landed on a track you had already saved in the tag editor, report it: Settings has a Report a Bug box. Is this a bug? How to report it covers what to include.

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