scribbu genre Behavior on Write ¶If the command didn’t change the tagset for a given file, that file will not be modified. More generally, the tagset will have been changed, and we need to write out the new tagset. Since ID3v1 tags are fixed-size blocks appended to the file, writing them out is trivial.
The default behavior for ID3v2 tags is to first try to emplace them; that is, write them over the current set of ID3v2 tags without touching track data, adjusting the padding if needed. If that is impossible (i.e. the new tagset can’t be fit into the space occupied by the old, even when adjusting padding) a full copy will be made by writing the new tagset to a temporary file, copying the track data from the extant file to the temporary file, and finally appending the ID3v1 tag, if any, to the temporary file. Only then is the temporary file renamed ot the original (which is hopefully atomic).
This behavior can be modified by the --create-backups
option See scribbu genre Options, which will create a backup
of the original file before renaming the temporary file.