Metadata

The Metadata Editor covers seven primary fields: Title, Artist, Album, Year, Track Number, Genre, and Comment. These map to the standard ID3 (MP3), Vorbis Comments (FLAC/OGG/OPUS), and APE tags (APE/WavPack) across all supported formats.

When you open the editor, TrackRate reads the actual embedded values from the file — not the cached database copy — so you always see what is really on disk. Changes can stay in the database only, or you can enable file writes to persist them into the audio file itself.

Select multiple tracks with Checkbox Mode or select a folder directly, then open the Metadata Editor from the right-click context menu. Fields that make sense to batch — Artist, Album, Year, and Genre — will apply to every selected track when saved. Title and Track Number are intentionally per-track and are not overwritten during a batch operation.

For album-level corrections, the most reliable workflow is to select the album folder in the Library tree, open the Metadata Editor, set the correct Album, Artist, and Year values, and save. This ensures every track on the album receives the same metadata without touching individual titles.

It is optional. By default, changes made in the Metadata Editor update TrackRate's internal database immediately. To persist those changes into the audio files themselves, enable the Write to audio files option. TrackRate then writes the values into the appropriate tag format — ID3 for MP3, Vorbis Comments for FLAC and OGG, APE tags for APE and WavPack, and so on.

Writing to files modifies them on disk. Back up irreplaceable audio before broad write operations, and test with a single album first to confirm the result is what you expect. If another application also manages those metadata fields, inspect the result to make sure the programs do not overwrite each other's information.

TrackRate's database is the primary source of truth for library operations — searching, filtering, sorting, and display all use the database values. When you open the Metadata Editor, however, it intentionally reads from the file on disk so you can see any discrepancies.

Conflicts typically arise when another application has edited the file outside TrackRate. To resolve them: open the Metadata Editor on the affected tracks, review the file-level values, and save. Saving updates both the database and (if Write to audio files is enabled) the file. A full rescan of the folder will also re-read metadata from every file and update the database, but this is a heavier operation for isolated conflicts.

The Comment field serves double duty in TrackRate. It can carry ordinary free-text comments, and it is also the field where TrackRate stores hashtags when you choose to write tags into audio files — values appear as #jazz #vinyl #live.

TrackRate's tag-writing operations are surgical when possible: adding a tag appends only the new token without touching existing comment content, and removing a tag deletes only that token. A full sync operation replaces all hashtags in the comment field with the current tag set. If you use another application that writes to the Comment field (such as DJ software or a tag editor), inspect a few files after the first write to confirm the tools coexist cleanly.

Tags written to the Comment field are readable by Serato, Rekordbox, Traktor, and other DJ applications, making your TrackRate tag vocabulary portable across your music workflow.

Yes — during scanning, TrackRate reads Title, Artist, Album, Year, Genre, and Comment from every file and stores them in the database. Beyond standard fields, TrackRate also imports certain specialised metadata when it is present:

TrackRate does not calculate musical key itself — key detection is unreliable for general music and is best left to specialised tools. See the Tags guide for more on key handling and Auto Tag on Scan.

Yes, through several complementary tools. Start with a missing-field search — type missing:artist, missing:album, or missing:year to surface tracks that need attention. The Tagging Quiz includes a metadata health check that flags large libraries with missing artist or album names before you begin tagging.

For bulk repairs, select the affected tracks and use the Metadata Editor to fill in the correct values. For large or complex cleanups, Premium MCP lets an AI assistant search, identify inconsistencies, and apply corrections across the library with your approval — particularly useful for normalising capitalisation, fixing inconsistent artist spellings, or propagating album-level metadata to orphaned tracks.

After any metadata cleanup, consider running the File Organizer with an updated pattern to reflect the newly consistent metadata in your folder structure.