Comment 7 for bug 882947

After some thought, I'll agree with you partially -- the track should not force a re-read of tags if there is a write failure. This should be up to whoever called write_tags() originally. I've adjusted my patch, and committed the relevant changes to my branch.

I like the idea of a visual indicator of whether a tag is supported. Perhaps add this to a TODO list somewhere.

The one thing that I really don't like is relying on the file to not change while Exaile isn't looking. This makes it annoying to use the player with other tools that DO modify the file -- perhaps a favorite tag editor, or even editing the audio of the file in place. The use case I imagine is as follows:

1) User adds file to exaile
2) User edits some tag in external audio player
3) User edits some other tag in exaile

When the user performs step 3, since exaile is only relying on cached data, the user will unexpectedly lose any changes made by the external program. Other players such as Winamp reloads/updates metadata when the user plays a track. Perhaps the solution for exaile is to have something that merges the tags on playback -- so it loads the tags from the file, and only replaces the tags that the file has, and keeps any tags that aren't currently in the file.

This last bit probably belongs in another bug.