force Tractor Pro to reload the metadata from your tags

How to force Tractor Pro to reload the metadata from your tags
first Traktor doesnt get write permission to my files (mapped drive, no write access)
this is as you know because Traktor is a pain in the ass for tags
its ID3 implementation is way too new (v2.4)
which not many devices support,
if it detects v2.3 ID3 tags (which 99% devices support) it rewrites the tag to v2.4
and has a habit of nuking any custom tags and artwork you might have,
i dont trust it, and thats a shit position for a DJ/Hacker

So if like me you edit your tags in something else (itunes/mp3tag/foobar)
Traktor doesnt reflect your tag edits outside of it,
this is because most decent mp3 tag editors
preserve the LastModifiedDate on the file itself
(Programming wise this is probably because of the merging of 4 concepts of filemetadata/filedate/datametadata/datadate
down to a single choice ie. what date field to use))

Our problem is Traktor uses this field to decide wether it should reload the metadata from the tag

and because Traktor uses its own XML database to store a copy of
all the tracks metadata into a single file (called collection.nml)
can often go out of sync with the actual mp3 tags.
in the older Traktor versions you had an option to force Tractor to re-read the tags manually
but they dropped it in the later versions, much to a lot of peoples frustration.

this method below removes the last modified date entrys from the db
then Traktor cant find these values when it loads the collection
on startup and so reloads the metadata from the track, it will rescan all your tracks
and update its db from your tags (without losing the stripes/cue/loop data) takes 5min on 10,000

Open your
collection.nml
in a text editor that supports regular expressions (i use textpad)

then do a search and replace
using the below regular expression

search for:

MODIFIED_DATE="[^"]*" MODIFIED_TIME="[^"]*"

and replace with nothing ie. blank

this should remove those two entries,
ive tried other methods and traktor is very picky,
get it wrong and it barfs on the xml, renames the bad collection.nml invalid,
and creates a fresh blank one (start again, always have a backup;).

but for me with Textpad4 and the above regular expression its golden :)

enjoy

sh0rtie