If you’re a user of Apple iTunes who experiences a problem where you cannot rename anything about your music including “Song Name”, “Artist”, or “Album”, you may have a problem where your music files are set to “Read Only”. You will need to make them writable with these steps.
- Open “iTunes“.
- Have a look under “Edit” > “Preferences” (Windows)/”iTunes” > “Preferences” (MacOS).
- Select the “Advanced” tab.
- Note the “iTunes Media folder location“.
- Close iTunes and do one of the following based on your operating system.
Windows
- Right-click the “Start” button, then select “File Explorer“.
- Navigate to the location for your “iTunes Media folder location” you gathered in step 4.
- Right-click the “Music” folder, then choose “Properties“.
- Deselect the “Read Only” box, then select “OK“.
- “Apply changes to this folder, subfolders and files” should be selected. Select “OK“.
- Wait until the attributes are applied to your files.
MacOS
- Navigate to the location for your “iTunes Media folder location” you gathered in step 4.
- Click the “Music” folder to highlight it.
- Select “File” > “Get Info“.
- Expand the “Sharing & Permissions” tree.
- Select the “Lock” icon. You may be prompted for credentials for an administrator account.
- Set your account or “Everyone” to “Read & Write“.
Open iTunes and see if you can modify your music files now.
FAQ
I followed the Windows steps, but “Read Only” gets re-checked again. Why does this happen?
You may have to apply security permissions to the folder as well. Use these steps:
- Right-click the “Start” button, then select “File Explorer“.
- Right-click the location for your “iTunes Media” folder located at the place you gathered in step 4.
- Select “Properties” > “Security” > “Advanced” > “Change Permissions…“.
- Double-click your account and check “Full Control. Do the same for the “SYSTEM” group.
- Check the “Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object“.
- Select “OK“, then “OK” again.
- Now follow steps 1 through 6 again.
Note: If permissions are grayed out, select “Disable inheritance“, then choose “Convert inherited permissions into explicit permissions on this object“.
Zaur says
On a Mac, you’ll need to also select “Apply to enclosed items”
Cheers!
bdmckinl says
A quick easy tip I just discovered after nothing else worked: if Airplay in Apple Music is enabled changes to artwork wouldn’t ‘stick’. As soon as I turned off any Airplay sources so the only play source was the Mac again, changes ‘stuck’ lickety-split.
Hope this helps someone else. Cheers!
CAROLYN ROSS says
When you get to – Deselect the “Read Only” box, then select APPLY then select “OK“.
Jack Walsh says
Mario, thank you. I’ve been messing with permissions and so on all week, and finally you came up with the answer. Where did you notice the SONOSDMS user? I can’t find it anywhere, but your solution worked perfectly. I think I don’t really understand the relationship between Sonos and iTunes at all.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!
Mario VAN GINNEKEN says
I tried everything above and was not able to solve it that way,
HOWEVER… I solved it!
My problem seems to arise from the Sonos speakers I added to my house. If I have (a) Sonos speaker(s) selected in iTunes to play to, i can’t change the mp3 tags of the songs. It seems that i a Sonos speaker is selected, the files are approached with a different “user”. The file preferences confirm this, since there IS indeed a user called “SonosDMS”. I can put this user to read/write, but that does not help. If I change the play target back to “Computer” I am able to change my mp3 tags again.
Oleksandr Sokhan says
So what worked for me is
I had to go to iTunes Preferences > Advanced and turn ON these two options:
“Keep iTunes Media folder organised”
“Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library”
Anita says
My problem was that the iTunes app on my Windows 10 pc would not allow me to change any text on the file name or info page. I thought my keyboard wasn’t working at first, but discovered it worked fine in any another app (Word, Google, changing file names). Apple support couldn’t figure it out (2 calls, 2 techs, 2 hours) and nothing I found on google searches worked. Go figure, it was the simplest thing that worked. Here’s what I ended up doing:
Select Control Panel —> Programs —> Programs & Features —> Select iTunes —> Repair
When I reopened the iTunes app it worked fine and I was able to edit my song and ringtone information.
Hope this helps some of you out.
Good Luck!
Ammy says
Sadly this didn’t work for me on Windows 10, and I tried it more than once.
This is so frustrating. Does anyone else have any other solutions I can try. Thanks.
Chris Fox says
The only solution I’ve found is to kill iTunes and restart it. If I remove readonly attribute it might work for three files out of ten. This stinks.
It doesn’t stink as much as watching the memory disappear on my brand new iPad; iTunes calculates it as 9GB free, the iPad says it has about 100 MB free. And it keeps getting worse
Darryl A says
Thanks for the information. My iMac and iTunes are now fully functional; again…
Paula says
This is very helpful!
Although—the read-only continues to check itself after I apply the settings. I did everything listed here more than once, and it still doesn’t work…
Nujw says
Didn’t help me either. I have my music on an external hard drive and it kept turning back to read only.
Stephen Elmore says
This did not work for me. ITunes keeps changing the information back from what I entered
Samantha says
Thank you very much! Very clear instruction which is much appreciated :) Thanks again!
dorothy says
Artist shows up OK in iTunes, but does not display when saved on flash drive and played in car. What will correct this?
Nick Smith says
Thank you so much. Such a simple fix to a problem that has been driving me mad for some time!
Lex says
So nothing that was in this article or what anyone said in the comments worked. It took me putting the files on my iPod (yes, I still have one of the old 80gb iPods) then editing the files on my iPod adding the artist name and stuff.
Alina says
This was very helpful but what do I do if the settings reset every time I close the box after pressing apply.
Jackie says
Thanks so much for your help with this problem. You described the fix very clearly. And it worked!!
James says
What worked for me is the realization that I was trying to edit the metadata right after adding it to my library — which was exactly when iTunes was trying to sync it with Apple Music. Apparently Apple locks changes to the files during the upload. There was a spinning icon next to the search bar in iTunes indicating an update was taking place. I clicked that and hit the X to halt the the upload for now and was instantly able to edit my album info.
Seth says
Save yourself A LOT of trouble….this method does not work for the new itunes update. I wasted hours until i read a comment that worked. All you need to do is download the song you are trying to edit, then view it in the downloaded menu. It should allow you to edit.
Sam Kim says
Was also quite frustrated at this, the fix that worked for me was actually quite simple.
I had Windows Media Player playing the song I was trying to edit, how dumb of me.
All I had to do was to close Windows Media Player or any other program that might be playing the song in any way. Then follow the instructions in unchecking the “read-only” attribute. If the attribute is not there or the line is grayed out, then just go to the security tab and make sure you give yourself full control over the folder.
Hope that helped!
Lucas says
The solution didn’t work for me, it kept going back to ‘read only’ and the further solution didn’t help. But I read Adam’s comment and found that both of mine were already unchecked, but doing the opposite of his solution and checking the two options fixed the problem.
Lee says
So unbelievably frustrating to have to pour hours and hours into trying to solve this problem, but so far I’ve discovered that iTunes 12.7.3 will only allow me to change song info when from the View menu list I select “Only Downloaded Music”.
If I select “All Music” from under the View menu list then all the song info is greyed out. Since much of my music is ripped from CDs rather than downloaded, this is a huge problem. In order for my playlists to work the way I want them I need to be able to change the genres. Thus I need to be able to make that change on the pop-up “Song Info” display.
I’ve tried the above suggestions & so far nothing has worked.
Adam Spencer says
How I solved this problem: My folder permissions were set to “read and write” and it didn’t make a difference. Probably because I don’t store music in the iTunes folder.
I had to go to iTunes Preferences > Advanced and turn OFF these two options:
“Keep iTunes Media folder organised” (turn off)
“Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library” (turn off)
Then FINALLY I could edit song info again. Both of those options had to be off. If I re-enabled one of them, I could no longer edit song info. Hope this helps someone. Can’t believe we are having these sorts of problems in 2018.
Tom says
It seems with every new update from iTunes, something new goes wrong. So tired of this every time this happens. Now I cannot edit songs or make any changes at all. I have followed all of the above steps, and even tried it all a 2nd time, to no avail. Going to look for new software to use, done with itunes at this point.
Derek says
Worked for me, thanks so much!!!
Rod Longuestte says
Thank you!
Steve says
None of the above fixes are working for me, Can’t edit song info, my permissions are “read & write”. This is driving me nuts.
Mr. Pooh says
Crazy. That worked for me.
Thank you for posting this.
It’s November 2017, and I’m finding my way around a new iMac running Sierra, and was surprised to run into this.
Ashlyn says
It didn’t work for me. Still can’t rename the song title.
Lawson says
Thanks for providing the info, Mitch. Sadly, none of this works for me. I followed all of the steps multiple times and also took the advice of commenters. Is it possibly the issue that my music files are on an external hard drive?
XyKOPAT says
Thanks you’re my hero!
Jasper 12 says
Thank you for your explanation on how to add artwork to iTunes. It was so simple due to you.
Anya says
Thank you sooooo much. This was a life saver.
Ben says
Thank you very much ??
Rachel says
After searching around in frustration, I found this page and it finally fixed the problem. I still dislike the new iTunes, though. :) But thanks so much for your help!
Louisa says
Followed all the steps but can’t deselect “read only” because it’s not an option. Early iTunes was so much better. Fix it.
Vampire says
I do not let iTunes organize folders as you have no control over the folder layout and quite frankly it makes a mess of things. It is contrary to the way everything else organizes it and if you use other players, the organization it uses does not play nice.
I found that my problem was limited to using the “Recently Added” view. In Album view, it works fine.
Paul says
‘For those who still have this issue, go on iTunes > Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Check “Keep iTunes Media folder organised” & “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library”
Worked for me.’
This just worked for me too! Had tried everything else! Thanks!
Bryan says
I think just possibly what some people are missing here is a very simple (but admittedly easily overlooked) thing: namely, that a song or album must actually be downloaded to your computer in order to be allowed to be edited. In other words, if it’s only in the Cloud, and not downloaded onto your hard drive, editing will not be possible. Hope this helps.
Tommy says
problem solved, thank you my friend.
salute..
LM says
Excellent solution, thank you!
no one says
It worked for itunes but the edited songs wont sync to my ipod, just the genre and the others but not the artist’s name
Rob Hotz says
Same problem here on Mac book pro. Was able to change the permissions in name only. It says i can read and write now but still am not able to make any changes at all. 500 gigs of perfectly manicured music collection collected over 12 years since going digital is suddenly feeling very nervous & annoyed. iTunes is feeling like a messy roommate. You guys need to wash your damn dishes and pick up your cloths, because there are tracks floating all over the place. They have drawers to be in, but no, if I want socks, I may as well check under the refrigerator. You dig?
G says
I wasn’t able to change the artist nor the album, on my itunes, (mac),
If someone knows of a solution please post it,…
JaNiE Gonzalez says
I’m on the latest iPod of version which is 9.3.5. This issue started happening when I updated, a few days ago, finally after months of receiving alerts to update. I have a Macbook Pro on Sierra (I believe) with iTunes running the latest version (12.5.5 I think). Before the update downloaded & completed on my iPod, I synced a few songs and these songs I was able to change the song info via “get info” and all is well with them. Once I updated to the newest ios version, I added a few more songs but it didn’t want to update anymore. It’s completely annoying since now those songs are just out of order being sorted either by track number, album or artist name.
rh says
Likewise the prior :(
I did every step, including the FAQ/afterword. It will unclick the “replace all child object permissions” once I click it, hit apply and okay, and consequently the read only button.
Shyla says
For those who still have this issue, go on iTunes > Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Check “Keep iTunes Media folder organised” & “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library”
Worked for me.
Julia says
It’s not working for me (windows) because inside the iTunes Media folder there is no Music folder, only “Downloads” and “Automaticly Add to iTunes”.
Can someone help please?
Ross says
Excellent detailed solution information.
hau says
This almost worked for me… but the stupid read-only keeps getting re-checked. I followed all the steps for Windows and I’m pretty sure I’m on the admin account but no matter what everything keeps being undone after I click OK.
Auzzy says
Did all the steps for Mac, including each individual artist and folder and still cannot change info
Pedro says
Oh, actually it did work!
The Read Only option remains, somehow, enabled, tho.
Intriguing…
Thanks, anyway!
KF says
i went to the media folder (for windows) but the only thing that shows up when i click on it is a folder called “Automatically Add to iTunes” with nothing in it
Steve says
This hasn’t solved my issue on my Mac. I have changed the permission in every folder within the Music folder and including the Music folder, but I still can not change an artist name. Anyone have any other solutions?
Carin says
I followed all the steps for: “I followed the Windows steps, but “Read Only” gets re-checked again. Why does this happen?” I have two “WMPNetworkSvc” One has “Full control ” and the other one has: “Read C:\Users\Dell-Desk…” I cannot change the second one to Full control.
Johan says
Thanks for the solution.
The only detailed one that made sense and worked for me.
LRB says
Thank you so much! This fixed my problem. I thought I corrected all my permissions, but I had missed one higher up in the chain.