Rhythmbox cannot update artist on some music

[mrs1179]

I am on Ubuntu 9.04. I have imported my music files from my Windows PC to Rhythmbox. I'm trying to fix some of the song and artist names that have incorrect or unknown information.

When I right-click on the song title and select Properties, some songs let me update the information, but others don't. I thought perhaps there was a permissions issue at the file level, but when I opened the directory where some of the songs are, permissions were all set to 777.

I saw a suggestion to use Ex Falso to edit tags in audio files, so I installed that. The odd thing is that when I open the file tags in Ex Falso, they are already correct, but they don't match what I am seeing in Rhythmbox.

Any ideas why I can edit some tags in Rhythmbox but not others -- and how to make the others updateable? Also, why are the tags already correctly displayed in Ex Falso, but don't match what shows in Rhythmbox?

[kahlil88]

What format are your music files in? If they're MP3 or AAC, that might be why Rhythmbox doesn't read the tags right. You probably need to install ID3 tag libraries and MP3 decoders.

[mrs1179]

I just did a quick check and it appears that the tags that I cannot edit in Rhythmbox are in wma (Windows Media Audio) format.

Based on this information, do you have any ideas?

[kahlil88]

Rhythmbox uses the Gstreamer backend to play audio. WMA is considered a "restricted" format so playback isn't installed by default. You need to install either the gstreamer-plugins-bad or gstreamer-plugins-ugly package in Synaptic.

[bigtomrodney]

Tagging wma in Linux for a long time was a problem. I don't use Rhythmbox myself but Amarok has been able to do this for a few years now.

[mrs1179]

Rhythmbox uses the Gstreamer backend to play audio. WMA is considered a "restricted" format so playback isn't installed by default. You need to install either the gstreamer-plugins-bad or gstreamer-plugins-ugly package in Synaptic.

I'm already able to import and play the WMA format. My problem is only that I can't edit the tags on these. I checked my packages, and I already had gstreamer-plugins-ugly installed. I went ahead and also installed gstreamer-plugins-bad, but that offered no improvement.

[kahlil88]

You may want to try Amarok, as bigtomrodney suggested, or Exaile if you don't like KDE (version 0.2.14 might work better than the development version).