XFEC 4.4RC2, Thunar 0.5.0RC2 and a plugin dating from december or november (sorry, I am not on my linux machine now) This is very hard to describe, so I apologise for the not so good summary. I am very frustrated with the media tag plugin. What I did recently was to use grip to make ogg from my CDs. I then moved the ogg on my music partition, and opened the property window. First I renamed the file, then switched to the tag tab to fill the tags. Now starts the problem. For the first 5 seconds, whatever I started typing ended up being deleted. e.g. if I started typing a title, after actually having typed a few letters, the whole tab would be reset to what it was (i.e. all fields empty) originally. This makes very hard to use the plugin. You have to hurry to press the "save" button after entering a field. Another example is when changing the year field (I will enter another bug for this field). If I press the spin button, it will go down 2007..2006..2005..2004 and suddenly resets all properties, thus I am back to 2007 and it goes down again. It can happen twice or three times in a row. It looks like the plugin is actually re-reading the information from the file. It is not critical, but can be very frustrating to see the fields "reset". It seems that waiting for a few seconds before editing the fields helps.
Tags are only refreshed if the file was changed (e.g. when it is saved or replaced by another file). The only problem similar to what you describe is still not perfectly fixed refresh after you press the save button; in that case, the tags will be refreshed when the plugin is notified of a file change, which causes information entered between save and this refresh to be replaced with the information when pressing save. I will however try to reproduce it later today and will hopefully be able to fix it (if it happens here).
Has any progress been made on this bug? I just tried to edit tags on an MP3 file in Xfce 4.8 and Thunar 1.2.1 and ran into the same problem. I also noticed a visual flicker every two or three seconds or so as the display refreshed. Note that the file on my hard drive was not changed at all in this time. This basically made the feature completely useless.
That seems very like my bug I filed: https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7906 When you display the Properties/AUDIO tab in Thunar.. you get that window to enter info, such as Artist, Title, Year, Genre, etc. When you do try to enter anything, it wipes it (or erases it), or actually doesn't put anything. See if you have the same error I am encountering.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 7906 ***