Scanned replaygain info for my whole library and now all my metadata is messed up!!! How to revert?

[rexendevar]

Hi, I downloaded Deadbeef specifically to write replaygain info for my whole library of 6000 songs. In the process, it also messed up all my metadata. I think it found some other metadata format that I hadn't changed and simply.... combined it into the metadata i already had!!! Songs which were previously on the album "Sore" by "Buzzov*en" are now on the album "(1994) Sore / Sore" by "Buzzov*en / Buzzov(write to us unicode character)en". And the same across my whole library. Why was this done when all I was trying to do was write replaygain and, more importantly, what do you recommend I use to clean it all up?

[Oleksiy-Yakovenko]

First of all I'm sorry to hear that something bad happened to your music library.
Generally, because of the nature of this kind of edits - those operations are not reversible, and can't be undone.

The easiest way to repair would be to restore from backup.
And yes, the issue is caused by multiple tags with conflicting data in the same file.

One way to repair the problem is by selecting all tracks, and then editing individual fields of all selected track in the tabular editor. This may be quite time consuming though. But you can do it by right clicking a field, and choosing Edit.

(You can probably do the same type of mass editing in other tagging and music player apps, in case you lost trust in deadbeef)

Alternative solution is to ask chatgpt to write a script to remove the 2nd album value from tags, using your preferred command line tagging program.

Also remember to make backups this time, because those edits would not be reversible either.
Also it's a good idea to first try your approach at bulk edits on a small subset of files (after backup), and see if your chosen approach doesn't destroy anything.

[rexendevar]

so it looks like I pretty much solved this issue, although it'll take some time to go through and fix it all. My question now is, why was this done in the first place? is there a way to turn off the automatic metadata changes?

[Oleksiy-Yakovenko]

The root cause of the issue is that deadbeef doesn't support partial modification of the tags / it can't just append replaygain info.
So it first reads all tags from a file, then adds replaygain info to that combined data, and then writes new tags back to file.
This works as intended, and generally works fine for well formed files.
But of course it can be annoying if the files contain junk tags with outdated/mismatched info.

[rexendevar]

Which metadata formats does Deadbeef read? Most of this data was read from fields Musicbrainz Picard does not even display, at least with default settings, which tells me it's some like ID2 or something I've never heard of that I'll have to make sure I overwrite in the future.

[Oleksiy-Yakovenko]

Assuming you're asking about MP3 files:
deadbeef reads and writes ID3v1, ID3v2, APEv2, and all of these tags can be present in the same file at the same time, containing different data.

[Oleksiy-Yakovenko]

You can usually see which tags are present in a given file, from deadbeef track properties.
But after you overwrite them with new ones e.g. by replaygain scan -- deadbeef would overwrite them, according to the chosen settings (probably defaults in your case):

[rexendevar]

yeah i went with chatgpt and picard tagging

$set(artist,$if($in(%artist%, / ),$substr(%artist%,$add($find(%artist%, / ),3)),%artist%))
$set(album,$if($in(%album%, / ),$substr(%album%,$add($find(%album%, / ),3)),%album%))
$set(title,$if($in(%title%, / ),$substr(%title%,$add($find(%title%, / ),3)),%title%))
$set(albumartist,$if($in(%albumartist%, / ),$substr(%albumartist%,$add($find(%albumartist%, / ),3)),%albumartist%))
$set(genre,$if($in(%genre%, / ),$substr(%genre%,$add($find(%genre%, / ),3)),%genre%))
$set(composer,$if($in(%composer%, / ),$substr(%composer%,$add($find(%composer%, / ),3)),%composer%))
$set(date,$if($in(%date%, / ),$substr(%date%,$add($find(%date%, / ),3)),%date%))
$set(comment,$if($in(%comment%, / ),$substr(%comment%,$add($find(%comment%, / ),3)),%comment%))

this script removes the first half of the field if it detects " / " anywhere in there