Hi,
Let me try to address some of your concerns:
1. Grayed tracks in MM can happen only on three occasions a) Tracks are not in path where they were when MM scan the path or MM is not allowed to read them (Possible reasons are Moved outside MM or new HDD is added or partition is formatted which makes MM detect it as new drive, permission to folders/files are changed) b) If they gray on playback then something is wrong with output settings or codec settings (Sound card not available or used by other app exclusively or missing not accessible, Codec is corrupted/not missing)

2. Re MMA There is something wrong and as MMA 1.x depend on Google Media Scanner it is possible that some info is filled if not there, it depends if you synced over USB or over WiFi with MM or you have copied files using any other file manager and not MM to sync files.

3. From what I understand problem is that you manually deleted some or all tracks from library and rescanned, which you got same or similar results.


So only thing we need to figure out where, what and why it went wrong to be able to solve it.

To not be blunt let me know if I missed something eg. not read all correctly and I'll ratify that also.

[quote=Lowlander post_id=471105 time=1596396882 user_id=262]
Share a file with support, there may be other tags in the files.
[/quote]

Nah. I really don't need someone else not reading my posts and instructing me on things I clearly didn't do, only to blame me for a problem that is specific to Media Monkey. Instead, I'll take my business elsewhere, since this program clearly cannot handle the very basic things I need it to. WMP didn't sync all my files, but at least it gets tue metadata right.

Thanks. You have been a shining example of why I hate asking for help from the internet. I am very glad I hadn't shelled out for Gold yet, or I'd have lost money along with time, patience and my meticulously curated files.

Share a file with support, there may be other tags in the files.

[quote=Lowlander post_id=471036 time=1596231094 user_id=262]
MediaMonkey doesn't automatically change tags. There is the option to Infer File Properties, which I would disable under Tools > Options > Library, which guesses tags from folder/filename on scanning, but otherwise there is no auto-changing of tags in the files.

Try removing the Aimee Mann files from the Library (Library only) and then rescanning to see if this gets the right tags (make sure Infer File Properties is off).
[/quote]

It's definitely not inferring them from folders, as my music library is arranged Music Library > Artist > Album title. Most of my tracks have file names of Track # - Artist -Track Name.File Extension as well.

I turned off the infer file properties option, deleted the blank tracks, rescanned and got almost the exact same results. The only difference is that my files all have the correct artwork again. I then deleted the whole folder's contents under Aimee Mann > All and rescanned and it got rid of my duplicate and triplicate files, but the other issues persist.

I don't know what MediaMonkey does or doesn't do, but there has to be some reason this isn't showing up as an issue for other media players/managers. There has to be a reason it's losing data and there has to be a reason I'm getting metadata in MMA that isn't appearing in my files (potentially hundreds of tracks having The Mammals as the album artist when it's not in the metadata on my PC)

Something is being added between MMW and MMA at the very least. When I manually looked up the first one of these Mammals tracks I found, I checked the artist (35th Parallel) in Play Music. It has an extra album called "unknown" with album art from a Rockalella album and tracks from Betty and Carnivore (among at least a dozen other artists).

Some of these were purchased as MP3s. Some were ripped from my own library. A few are bootleg live tracks. And some were edited by me because they were hidden tracks and I wanted a version without ten minutes of dead space. I can't vouch for the bootlegs, but the other three categories should all have metadata. And do on my PC.

MediaMonkey doesn't automatically change tags. There is the option to Infer File Properties, which I would disable under Tools > Options > Library, which guesses tags from folder/filename on scanning, but otherwise there is no auto-changing of tags in the files.

Try removing the Aimee Mann files from the Library (Library only) and then rescanning to see if this gets the right tags (make sure Infer File Properties is off).

But... I haven't deleted or renamed any files. I have had this issue twice with fresh installs. I never even had a chance to edit outside of MM. When I thought this was a one-off, I used MM to rename the files.

And the dead link node is still empty. Zero files when I click on it. I already set MM to monitor for changes, but as I have made no changes, I don't think that's going to do anything.

These tracks are coming in changed without any input from me.

Anytime you rename/delete files outside of MediaMonkey this will happen as MediaMonkey is a database that points to files. You can remove non-existent files from the Entire Library > Files to Edit > Dead Links node (enable under File > Manage Collections).

I'd recommend deleting/renaming files with MediaMonkey to prevent this type of problem, but if you don't want that you can have MediaMonkey running with Folder Monitoring enabled while doing this outside of MediaMonkey and the changes will be picked up automatically: https://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/WebHelp:#Using_Folder_Monitoring_to_Automatically_Update_the_Library

[quote=Lowlander post_id=470963 time=1596056793 user_id=262]
Greyed out files: https://www.mediamonkey.com/support/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/92/0/why-is-music-greyed-out--fails-to-play

Did you remove the database file when you did a fresh start: https://www.mediamonkey.com/support/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/53/0/how-to-completely-uninstall-mediamonkey

What File Type(s) have issues with missing tags?
[/quote]

The greyed out tracks come in two flavours: tracks MM has misnamed or lost the tracks to, or duplicate entries of tracks where only one version exists. My Aimee Mann example turned out to be the former; the correct track tags and album art show up in WMP, but when I manually browsed the folder in MM, all the tag data was gone and the wrong album art showed. For the latter, I have one track by the same artist called "Goose Snow Cone." There are three listings, two greyed out and one that exists. Further, there are no files whatsoever in dead links.

As such, nothing on that pages really addresses my problems that I can see.

I have just done a reinstall with the removal of the Roaming and Program File folders, and the problem still persists.

The problematic files are mostly MP3s, but I did find one WAV file in the mix so far.

I don't know if this information helps, but I verified the missing Aimee Man album is on my phone and the tracks play. They have the right track tags and artist name. I'm having different problems with the Android app, and I don't know if it's related, but I put all my Queen tracks on shuffle and got a bunch of tracks not by Queen. They had two things in common: the album was "unknown" and the album artist was The Mammals. Nothing I can find seems to tie to Queen, but I'm guessing this is part of the same problem.

Greyed out files: https://www.mediamonkey.com/support/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/92/0/why-is-music-greyed-out--fails-to-play

Did you remove the database file when you did a fresh start: https://www.mediamonkey.com/support/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/53/0/how-to-completely-uninstall-mediamonkey

What File Type(s) have issues with missing tags?

Hello,

I have done a fresh install of MediaMonkey Free (don't remember the initial build, but I updated to ver 4.1.29.1910 to see if I could fix my problems) on a new Windows PC. (10, home). I have used MM on Windows and Android to sync my media library to my phone, and it's worked like a charm. This time, I have run into some problems.

The first thing I noticed was missing tracks on my phone. I confirmed they weren't on my SD card, so MMA wasn't wrong. I double-checked my PC to verify they were in my file folders. Since they were, I did a rescan of my library folders and they still were not added.

I did a google search and found some topics, which led me to verify the files were in MMW's library, so I navigated from the location node to a specific album where I knew all the tracks were missing and found they had no metadata. Then I found about a fifth of my library was missing artist tags alone. Long story short, I downloaded an auto tagger to handle the literal thousands of songs, and they all have complete metadata. I set up Windows Media Player and searched for some tracks and found their data listed completely. So this seems to be on MM's end.

This is furthered by swathes of files being greyed out. Liks Aimee Mann's One More Drifter In the Snow. Curiously, all tracks are greyed out in MMW, but on my phone, the tracks are there, albeit with the art to her Smilers album. Because the tracks are greyed out, I can't verify the tracks have the right art in MMW, but the correct art is there in WMP.

I also just discovered some tracks not transferring to my phone are in my MMW library and not greyed out. Now I am really stumped.

It seems like something specific to MMW is causing this. As I mentioned above, I tried updating to the latest version after an uninstall/reinstall.