How to re-link an audio file to its Tag-Attributes

I have been having to run a program I set up in VBA that uses "SetItemInfo"
to plug values into tags. I have been able to do this because I can
interpret from the file name and location with in directory structure the
artist, album, track and title. This worked fine until I needed to convert
my files from WAV to WMA. All of the tag data was lost in the conversion
(even though dbpoweramp's "maintain tags" was checked). But I can re-run
the VBA program pointing to the converted music folder and rebuild the
artist, album, track and title. I would really like to have the Album art
tag back in place so it would download to my portable device.

What I am missing is a hook so that ALL the tags can be refreshed from the
web-database. How can I reset the tag that is used as the index to uniquely
identify the CD so that all the rest of the tags can be lookedup and
populated by playing the song and letting WMP automatically update the
missing tags? I think that I read that it is a data steam built from track0
on the CD that is used to index to the database. If that is true, is there
an alternate way I can get that text stream and assign it to one of the tags?
If I could read the webdata base by Artist, album and let it return how
ever many "like" entries it finds so I can then programmatically choose one
to use (just like the manual process does when you try and tell WMP to
lookup album information, and it makes you choose one of the releases that it
thinks match)

What kind of tag has been created using SetItemInfo? How do I reset tags
so that they use one of the industry standard versions for Tag data, perhaps
there is some other thing I have to do when using SetItemInfo?

I really don't want to have to re-rip all 700 of my CDs

--
Regards,
John

I found my old post where I was remembering wrong. Its not Track 0 on the
CD, its a "Disk Id"... this is what I want to rerieve, even if I have to
grab 25 of them because the CD title was released 25 different times thru
various countries and re-prints. at leat I can then force my CD to lock on
to one of these and pull the rest of the tags.

** Im going to repost my first msg in this thread back in to the
microsoft.public.windowsmedia.player.web group too. **

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: Setting Atrist and Album info 7/30/2005 10:45 AM PST

By: Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media] In:
microsoft.public.windowsmedia.player.web

On Sat, 30 Jul 2005 09:11:07 -0700, "John Keith"
<JohnKeith@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>I have 3000+ songs ripped from CD's I own. they are stored in
>..\Artist\Album\trackno - title.Wav

I think the problem you'll find is that media player gets this info by
looking at the disk ID stamped onto it by the producer, and then
looking up the disk ID on a database run by AMG and other data
providers.

Once you 'liberate' the data as just .wav files, you've lost that
association with the album, and it has no way to look up the
attributes **

** Well strictly not true, it could be intelligent enough to query a
web service by album and title, but it isn't and they didn't.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

--
Regards,
John


"John Keith" wrote:

> I have been having to run a program I set up in VBA that uses "SetItemInfo"
> to plug values into tags. I have been able to do this because I can
> interpret from the file name and location with in directory structure the
> artist, album, track and title. This worked fine until I needed to convert
> my files from WAV to WMA. All of the tag data was lost in the conversion
> (even though dbpoweramp's "maintain tags" was checked). But I can re-run
> the VBA program pointing to the converted music folder and rebuild the
> artist, album, track and title. I would really like to have the Album art
> tag back in place so it would download to my portable device.
>
> What I am missing is a hook so that ALL the tags can be refreshed from the
> web-database. How can I reset the tag that is used as the index to uniquely
> identify the CD so that all the rest of the tags can be lookedup and
> populated by playing the song and letting WMP automatically update the
> missing tags? I think that I read that it is a data steam built from track0
> on the CD that is used to index to the database. If that is true, is there
> an alternate way I can get that text stream and assign it to one of the tags?
> If I could read the webdata base by Artist, album and let it return how
> ever many "like" entries it finds so I can then programmatically choose one
> to use (just like the manual process does when you try and tell WMP to
> lookup album information, and it makes you choose one of the releases that it
> thinks match)
>
> What kind of tag has been created using SetItemInfo? How do I reset tags
> so that they use one of the industry standard versions for Tag data, perhaps
> there is some other thing I have to do when using SetItemInfo?
>
> I really don't want to have to re-rip all 700 of my CDs
>
> --
> Regards,
> John