thanks to the wonderful members here, ive accumulated a ton of music. ive done a decent job of organizing it, thanks to a program called tagscan, a portable id3 tagger, that supports flac as well.

but, to come to the problem, i keep realizing that there are tons of tags that i cant even see in most tag editors, and i want to get rid of any extra tags aside from the basic ones like album, title, artist, track etc. (including duplicates of those i want to keep left by 'creating' a new tag and leaving an old version attached)

does anyone know of a program that will keep selected tags, and clean all the rest?

With foobar2000, when you select multiple tracks and go to edit properties, it will list all of the tags, I'm pretty sure. It won't automatically purge the ones you don't want, but then all you have to do is select those ones and blank out the field. It would only take a handful of seconds per album.

This may or may not be acceptable for you, but I feel I don't even need an independent tag editor program when I have foobar's capability.

Tag&Rename is priceless; I do all kinds of weird things with ID3, and I've yet to find a situation it can't handle.
It can do the job for you pretty much the same way as nothingtosay described, only it can do every audiofile you've got in one move. Just tell it to search and display sub-folders so you can view your whole collection at once (you'll have to monkey with the options a bit for this, but it's there), press ctrl+a, right click any file and hit Edit Tag in Selected Files, uncheck the fields you want to keep, check the ones you want to clear and erase their content, click save, done.

thanks for the suggestions. i'll have to give htem a go :)