iTunes song data cannot be edited

In iTunes, users should be able to get information on individual songs or groups of songs and change their metadata tags; however, when some users have attempted editing, the entered text reverts back to the original.

Apple Discussions poster alessio.cap writes:

"Among the several tracks I added to my library, there are some that are basically unaccessible: I right-click on them and go to the 'Get Info' menu; whereas the blanks can usually be filled and artwork can be added, these tracks seem locked... and the only visible informations in the blanks seem hard-wired into them."

For affected users, this problem seems to be associated with certain files and not others. This indicates the problem is either with the files' ID3 tags or with the file permissions, since if the user is not granted write access then the files may be readable and playable in iTunes, but not editable at all. The fixes for these problems are to first check the permissions of the individual files, and then possibly convert the ID3 tags of the files. While Disk Utility has a permissions check feature, it's only for catalogued system files and not for user data so it will not work for users in this situation.

Fixes

Check and change file permissions Right-click the affected files in iTunes and choose the "Show in Finder" option from the contextual menu. Then with the file selected in the Finder, get information on it (command-i, or "File" --> "Get Info") and at the bottom ensure the current user's username is listed with both "Read and Write" next to it. If only "Read" is listed, then users should authenticate and change this to "Read and Write". If multiple files are affected, users can select all of them and press opt-cmd-i to get the inspector and change the permissions in a similar way, or by changing the permissions on the parent folder (either directly or further up the directory tree) and using the gear menu to copy permissions to the items contained within that folder.

One way to bypass this problem, if it is a permissions issue, is to use the "Consolidate Library" feature in iTunes to copy all files to the iTunes library. If a user has a file given to them by another individual, the ownership and permissions of the original user who gave the files may still be retained with them. While having iTunes copy the files to the iTunes folder upon importing should change the owner to the current user, manually doing this with the "Consolidate Library" command will do the same thing.

Convert ID3 tags If the first fix does not work, users can right-click (or ctrl-click) the affected songs and choose "Convert ID3 Tags...". Then choose a different ID3 version than the current one (preferably a higher version, but downgrading if no higher version is available) and click "Ok". If users must downgrade the version, change it back after the first conversion if desired. Doing this should clear any corruption in the ID3 tags, in case that was preventing modification to the ID3 fields.

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