Rhythmbox (or any music player) doesn't change songs properties

Question

I have some songs in my Rhythmbox, but I cannot change their properties, i.e., I cannot write anything in the properties window. It seems to be block or something like that.

I thought that such files are read-only or protected but I change such properties with sudo and nothing changed.

Any idea?

Solution 1

The artist name, album title and other information that you are trying to change are called ID3 tags. You can search the Ubuntu Software Center for id3tag editors and pick whatever you like/prefer and use that to change the information. Most players have that functionality inbuilt, not sure about Rhythmbox(coz I have never used it), but I use Clementine and it allows me to change the ID3 tags as required.

Solution 2

I had the same problem and noticed after a while that I was trying to change a .wma file. So instead of switching to another player (I really like rhythmbox) I used the sound converter (via software center) to convert it to .mp3. Close and start rhythmbox and now I could edit the id3 tags.

Solution 3

I think you can try easytag. You can install it by running sudo apt-get install easytag.

Comments

[Admin]

Are you talking about fields like Artist name, album title, year and genre and stuff like that?

[Admin]

yes, I don't know why I cannot change anything!! :(

[Admin]

I can certainly edit fields in Preferences for many songs in Rhythmbox. So I think there are two different issues here. One is that rhythmbox doesn't seem to be able to export files with id3 tags that reflect the changes that you make under preferences. That's what nitstorm wrote about. Another is that for some files you can't even change things in Preferences. That sounds to me like your issue, and may be fixable even in Rhythmbox via @Fred's answer. It seems to match your stated symtoms better, and if so you should mark that as the best answer.

[Admin]

Hmm - it looks like I was misled, and Rhythmbox generally can be used to edit id3 tags, at least the version (2.96-0ubuntu4.1) I'm running in Precise. It's just that I didn't see either an "export" option, or any change in the file times after editing the tags in Preferences. But "ls -lc" does show time changes, and id3v2 tags were written to my mp3 files (as shown by the "id3v2" program), which is great. What format were your files?

[Alejandro]

ohh, I didn't know that Rhymthbox just read such ID3 tags, but cannot change them. Thanks for your help. I will try and let you know if this helps me. :)

[Nitin Venkatesh]

I am not sure if Rhythmbox is able to edit ID3 tags. I have never used Rhythmbox.

[Alejandro]

hey.. clementine is great!!! thanks for the advice!!!

[Eliah Kagan]

Unfortunately, when you convert an audio file from one lossy format to another, there is always substantial quality degradation, especially when the formats use dissimilar compression algorithms (like mp3 and wma). Because of this loss of quality, it's best to avoid this kind of transcoding when possible.

[Eliah Kagan]

Before running sudo apt-get install ..., unless one has done so recently, one should make sure to run sudo apt-get update. (This updates the information about available packages and their software sources, it does not upgrade any software on the system.)