Have you ever noticed, especially after you’ve copied your music files to your iPod, that something wasn’t quite right? For instance, I’ve seen cases where the track number or the artist or album information is missing on one or more songs.
While there are third-party tools out there that let you fix things, TagScanner comes to mind, it turns out that if you’re using Windows 7, you can fix your music files directly using features built into the operating system.
Let’s look at an example, shall we?
Looking at music files
Do you notice how the track number on ’08 – Go With the Flow.mp3′ is missing? Look at the column between Album and Title. The one labeled “#”. For this song, it should have an 8, but it’s not there. Let’s fix that!
Right click that entry to bring up the context menu.
context menu
Select the ‘Properties’ item from the context menu and you’ll see the Properties dialog:
Properties dialog
Select the Details tab and put the right value, in this case 8, into the # field:
the Details tab
You’re almost there! Now, just press the OK button.
When you look at the file in your file viewer, you’ll now see that it has the correct track number. Even better, when you copy this file to your iPod, the track will play in the correct order.
correct File Viewer
You did it! Note that this example focused on fixing the track number, but you can change just about any property of a song file including artist, album, genre, etc.
