mp3tag

My niece recently turned 20 and her parents gave her an iPod as birthday present. After unwrapping the box, the very first thing she did was connect the iPod to her laptop to transfer some music to her brand new MP3 player. It was in that very moment when she realized most of her MP3s were not properly tagged.

My advice to her – and to all of you with highly messy music collections - was to use MP3tag. This gorgeous tag editor lets you easily tag your music, edit wrong tags, rename rename files, find album covers online… in short, pretty much anything you need to pimp your music collection and give it a fresh, new look.

Using MP3tag is easy as pie. Start by adding a directory from the File menu (this is the folder the program will scan for music) and then decide what needs to be done. If your files don't have ID3 tags or they're wrong, use the Tag Sources menu to download them from any of the provided source websites. Bear in mind that you may have to try a few before getting the right data, and that sometimes you'll need to adjust tag information (i.e. matching your files with the right album information).

Most of us who own an MP3 player or play digital music on a computer will admit that it’s possible to get a little precious over your audio collection. There’s something very satisfying about having a hoard of music with the correct track and album names for each song. Not only does it look a lot cleaner in your player, but it makes it a darn sight easier to organize your collection and manage playlists. Ensuring that all the tags in your audio files are correct can be a daunting task, but there's plenty of software around that will make a much quicker job of it.

mp3Tag is one of the better tag editors around, allowing you to edit the metadata (the information about a track’s name, size, album name, artwork, etc.) with a good degree of autonomy. The app lets you rename files based on this tag information, replace characters or words from tags and filenames, import/export tag information, and create playlists. It carries out its duties and does the job very well too. For instance, the program has a much cleaner interface than many of its rivals and is smaller to boot, making it very quick and responsive.

If you find that you have a lot of different audio formats on your machine that you want to keep in check, then mp3Tag is perfect. It supports virtually every major audio file type, so you can edit tags for Ogg, Musepack and AAC/MP4, besides from regular old MP3s. The program isn't just a tagger, as it also includes cutting and joining functions that perform pretty well.

Perhaps the biggest boon though is the inclusion of a link-up with the online FreeDB database to import tags from the appropriate album, spelling a swift end to those MP3 albums you get with track names like ‘track01’, ‘track02’, ‘track03’, etc.) While the data returned from the FreeDB is sometimes erroneous, it’s generally pretty good (though probably not quite as quick as the import tool in Tag&Rename).

It’s fair to say that mp3Tag is one of the clear leaders in its field, and considering it’s a freeware app, it’s well worth downloading if you want to clean-up your music collection. Tag editing is very quick and once you’ve given your audio the mp3Tag treatment, you should find it so much easier to organize your tracks.

If you're a little on the obsessive-compulsive side then there's probably nothing more satisfying than having your music library all neat and tidy, with all the track titles, authors, musical styles and album names entered correctly. Let's face it though, filling in all those ID3 tags in your music library can be a real nightmare, all the so more if you have a lot of music and have never really tended to it. What you can do then is use an application that will specifically edit music tags.

mp3Tag for one, as you can read up in James's review, is very quick and efficient at editing all this metadata, allowing you to replace words, and most of all importing tags from the FreeDB database. Audio Tags Editor will also allow you to export tags to various formats and automatically applies changes into your own music library. If you're looking for a more basic application, you can turn to Audio Tagging Tools. It has all the editing features you need, can generate statistics on your collection and create HTML reports. Tag&Rename is probably even easier to use, thanks to its double-paned interface. It also lets you complete tags by entering information from the FreeDB database. There's many more tag editors to choose from and we suggest you take a closer look if none of the aforementioned convince you.