AccurateRip: Writing Tags Modifies Unrelated Metadata

[seanbob]

When using AccurateRip to write tags to my existing files (FLAC, if it matters), unrelated metadata is being updated unexpectedly. I'm seeing two unique behaviors:

1) Renames -- %DISC% is being renamed to %DISCNUMBER%. If a %DISCNUMBER% tag already exists, it adds a second (duplicate) tag anyway.

2) Deletions -- Some custom tags and/or rarely used tags are being removed. Examples include %ENSEMBLE% and %ALBUM ARTIST% (with a space in the middle). Admittedly, some of these fields are garbage, but I've kept them around for compatibility with older devices/software.

While I can fix up the metadata afterwards, it is a bit of a pain to redo it again and clean up the duplicate tags. The expected behavior for 'Write Tags' in AccurateRip, as I see it, would be two new tags are added to the file (or updated if needed): %ACCURATERIPDISCID% and %ACCURATERIPRESULT%. All other metadata tags already in the file would simply be ignored. But maybe that's how it's supposed to work...

Is this current behavior intentional or a bug?

[sower]

Hey SeanBob, I’ve seen similar behavior with tag renaming and loss when using PerfectTUNES. It does seem like AccurateRip tries to normalize certain fields, even if it's not strictly necessary. I agree, it’d be better if it left unrelated tags alone. Hopefully, this gets flagged if it's not intentional.

[Spoon]

It is how our flac tag decoder works, the block has to be read and re-written. FLAC tagging is a mess because it is based on ogg vorbis comments and they never even designated standard fields such as album artist.