I don't know if there's a tool to delete duplicate tags (of course that why there's Google but I didn't see anything in a cursory look)

Of course id and back up the badly tagged tracks before trying to fix them

things to investigate
1)Retagging of the bad tracks
a) MediaMonkey has an auto tag from the web function
b) musicbrainz based taggers can create fingerprints and suggest tags (Picard, Magic MP3 Tagger, Jaikoz Tag Editor & Amarok 2.4) see http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainzTagger

2) kid3 does have scripting capabilities http://kid3.sourceforge.net/kid3_en.html#dbus-examples

3) Maybe you can find a tagger that displays all the tags is a spreadsheet and just delete the duplicate columns (all the ones I've seen, Linux only, limit what tags are displayed)

4) You could maybe retag using directory and file name but you'd loose genre, cover and other data

5) does iTunes have a tag fixer utility?

6) you could look at mp3diags, which is supposed to be able to fix bad tags - maybe find other tools that do this also http://www.google.com/search?client=ope ... el=suggest

here's another possibility using kid3

might be quick and easy but you will probably loose any of the ancillary tags other than the basics

- check and see if tag 1 is filled for all the bad tracks, if not you can fill them using the "from tag 2" button
- clear the tag 2 tags using the "remove" button
- copy the tag 1 tags to tag 2 using the "from tag 1" button

ps - tag 1 iirc is id3v1 and tag 2 id3v2

I ran into much the same problem, specifically with downloaded mp3s. Tags set with libTag appeared to be fine, while others could end up in a mess, i.e. not show at all, or partially missing (comments), or 'mixed up' (artist, album artist)

What worked for me, though, was to simply remove the tag in its entirety, and then re-establish a new version.

So, load ALL your affected mp3's SIMULTANEOUSLY into, say, Pinky-Tagger and EasyTAG.

Now use EasyTAG to CLEAR all tag fields, and write these to disk --- after ensuring that "Strip tags if all fields are set to blank" is activated in preferences->ID3 Tag Settings.

Once this is done, use Pinky-Tagger, which still HOLDS your desired values, to re-write your tags back into the files.

This way, you don't have to fumble around for each file, but get everything done in a jiffy. Just make sure you've got a second tagger OPEN, and the tag fields LOADED, before you wipe them.

Thanks for thinking along. Because of your advice, I was able to figure out a solution. For future reference, here's what I did (on Windows).

1) I loaded all my iTunes MP3s into Mp3tag.
2) By sorting on Tag, all wrongly tagged MP3s were grouped together.



3) I selected all badly tagged MP3s and clicked "Remove tag".

4) In iTunes, I selected all tracks and used the "Convert ID3 tags..." option to rewrite all MP3 tags.

Thanks everyone!

fyi - Mp3tag runs fine in Linux under Wine

Good to know, but on principle I don't give Linux write access to my Windows partitions to prevent certain doom. And Windows doesn't get write access to Linux partitions either.