Disappearing Lyrics

[SteveB23]

I have an issue where after adding lyrics to songs in MMW and syncing them to my phone, they sometimes disappear from the Windows side. They can still be seen on the phone, and I've been able to recover by making a change to the lyrics on the phone and then syncing again, which pushes them back up the the Windows side. After that they seem to be stable.

I'm running MMW 2024.1.0.3113 (on Windows 11) and MMA 2.1.0.1274 (on a Google Pixel 9).

Detailed process:
1. In MMW, I add lyrics to each song in an album. BTW I generally do not use either MMW's or MMA's built-in search -- I'm a bit OCD and I've found a lot of incorrect lyrics that way, so I use a 3rd-party lyrics site to copy and paste and add my own touches.
2. I have found that I can use mp3tag to check to see if the lyrics have actually been added to the MP3 file. (They go into the UNSYNCHEDLYRICS tag.) Often there will be 2 or 3 songs where the lyrics do not show up as tags in the MP3, but they are clearly visible in MMW.
3. I add the songs to a playlist and then sync them to my phone.
4. I verify that the lyrics show up correctly on my phone for all songs.
5. The next time I reboot Windows or restart MMW for any reason, the lyrics are still visible after the restart -- but only until MMW completes its auto resacan. At that point the lyrics can no longer be found, presumably because the auto rescan did not find them in the MP3 and therefore removed them from the database.
6. I spent a fair number of hours duplicating the work of re-adding the lyrics in MMW (thinking I may have not actually saved them correctly the first time) before I discovered that if I make any small change to the lyrics on MMA, I can resynch and that apparently forces MMW to add them to the MP3.

Questions:
1. Where are the lyrics normally stored, e.g. in both the MMW database and in the MP3 file?
2. Why do they sometimes NOT get added to the MP3?
3. Is there a way to force the lyrics to be added to the MP3?
4. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks,
Steve

[Lowlander]

1. Both
2. Maybe a file corruption or MediaMonkey lacks write access to the files. You can try Update Tags to see if that saves the missing Lyrics to the files. Does it still fail? If so, do any other tag changes also fail to save or just Lyrics?

[SteveB23]

I do not have any files I can test at the moment. I'll try to add some lyrics tonight and test the Update Tags function.

This happens almost every time I add lyrics to an album. It's pretty consistent. If I do 15 or 20 songs, I'll end up with two or three where the lyrics tag does not get added to the file. No pattern or commonality that I can see. The songs are all in the same folder, so I don't see how that can be a permissions or file corruption thing, plus MMW has no trouble adding the tag once I update the lyrics in MMA and resynch.

Thanks!

[Lowlander]

Please retry with the latest MediaMonkey 2024.2 beta and see if you can still reproduce the issue.

[SteveB23]

I just added lyrics to another album (10 songs). One of them did not save the tag to the MP3.

I used the "Update tags" function on that song and it worked. Thank you! This has been bugging me for a long time.

I think I'd rather not jump into the Beta program at this point, if you don't mind. However, I'd be interested to know what's happening. Can you tell me if this is a known problem? Can you tell me why the tag doesn't get added to the file at times?

Thanks again!

[Lowlander]

I'm unaware of anyone else experiencing this. Only a debug log (step 4b) would be able to tell us why this happens on your setup. This would be best with the latest 2024.2 beta though.

[SteveB23]

I've finally found the root of the problem with disappearing lyrics. It comes with additional questions, possibly including a change request or two, which I'm not sure how to submit.

Usually, when I'm adding lyrics to a song, I like to listen to the song at the same time, so I can compare the new lyrics to the recording. One option is to start the song before I open the File Properties window, but unfortunately there are no playback controls available once you get there, so if I want to pause the playback or back up, I have to save my work, exit, change the playback to where I want it, and then get back in. That's way too much work. I've resorted to opening up File Explorer in another window, finding the file, and then playing it outside of MMW. My standalone media player of choice is VLC. If I'm doing a whole album, I'll load the whole folder into VLC and then I can skip forward and back whenever I want. What I did not realize until just recently is that VLC apparently places a lock on those files (or at least on the "current" file) while it's playing. If I finish adding the lyrics in MMW and click on OK or Previous or Next while VLC still has that file locked, MMW cannot add or update the lyrics tag in the file. It does at least update the database.

All that makes a lot of sense now that I see what's going on. I understand why some files are successfully updated and some are not. What I don't understand is why MMW doesn't notify me that it was unable to write to the file. Other programs that find themselves unable to complete a write operation (especially if it is simply because of a file lock condition) will typically notify the user of the error and ask if they want to skip it or try again. At least then I would be aware of the problem, plus I would have the opportunity to try to clear the lock and try again.

The error is compounded the next time MMW performs a restart or rescan. When it finds the mismatch between the lyrics in the database and none in the file, IT DELETES THE LYRICS FROM THE DATABASE!!! Forgive me for yelling, but I find this inconceivable! Why would it do that? Again, I don't understand why the choice was made to *not* display a message about the inconsistencies and give me the chance to fix them instead of just tossing all my hard work?

Now, I readily admit that I may be very wrong about this. I really hope that there are some configuration options that I've missed that would prevent these two situations from happening, but I've looked and can't find them. If that's the case, I will gladly apologize and we can all move on.

However, it occurs to me that all of this could be prevented by having some sort of playback controls embedded in the File Properties window, so I could start/stop/reposition the playback without leaving the File Properties window. At a minimum, start/stop/pause buttons and a progress bar where I can move the pointer to anywhere in the song. Beyond that, a pair of "|<<" and ">>|" buttons to move to the previous and next songs would be nice, or perhaps it would be better to add those functions to the existing "Prev" and "Next" buttons so the playback moves along with the visible file properties. Another option would be to have the File Properties window *not* be a child of the main window, so the main window (and the playback controls) would still be active, i.e. not locked out until the File Properties window is closed.

While I'm thinking of it, those same playback controls would be very helpful in the MMA lyrics editor as well. (Actually, the MMA lyrics editor could use a *whole* lot of work, but that's a topic for a whole 'nother post.)

So... how do I turn these into formal feature requests?

1. Notify the user when a write operation fails and give them the option to quit or try again
2. Notify the user when inconsistencies show up during the file scan, with the option to write missing or updated tags to the file instead of simply deleting them from the database
3. Add playback controls to the File Properties window, or provide the functionality in some other way

Thanks!
Steve

[Lowlander]

MediaMonkey would only replace existing database value for a file with nothing, if you rescan the file and the file has been modified (Date Modified has been updated) with the default settings. So if VLC is modifying the file on playback this can occur. Unless you're editing the file in VLC you may want to disable any updating of files in VLC.
Note that I did not observe a problem with MediaMonkey changing tags on a file being played in VLC. Also, when setting the files to Read-Only MediaMonkey informed me about editing Read-Only files.

MediaMonkey has the DB / Tag Mismatches node to find files where the database is different from the file tags. And you can also use Update Tags if you want to force writing of database values.

You may want to use the Preview window set to Allow edits to be able to edit tags while having full access to the Player.

[SteveB23]

Lots of good stuff in your latest post. Thanks!

At some point I apparently unchecked the "Only for files with changed timestamp or size" box, so that explains why the database lyrics were getting deleted during a rescan. That is now checked, and we are moving on...

I had never heard of the "Preview" option before, and even searching for it, it took a while before I figured out how to add it to the toolbar, view the toolbar, and find the right combination of buttons to click so I could see the preview panel and play with it. Hardest of all was figuring out how to set the "Allow edits" option. Whew, I'm exhausted. But it's working now, I think I like it, and I think that'll be the way forward for me.

So, I apologize for assuming these features were not available and all the ugly things I said in my head about MMW.

That all being said, according to the screen capture below, VLC *does* place a lock on files when they are playing, which would definitely affect MMW's ability to update the file tags. Apparently this is a well-known and documented problem with VLC, especially on the Windows platform. Please note the message displayed by other programs when they run into this error. This is what I would be looking for in this situation with MMW, with the options to quit or try again.



Thanks again,
Steve