Taking care of your digital music collection means organizing your mp3 files so that they can be grouped by artist name, album, genre and so on. In this way it becomes very simple and fast to find the songs on the computer. Even when transferring mp3 music to an iPod, you can quickly choose which tracks to listen to, choosing a particular singer and without having to create playlists.
For each mp3 file, the information relating to the singer, the author, the album, the genre, the date and much more are written, inside the file, in the form of a TAG . The tags are visible from any media player such as Windows Media player, iTunes, Winamp etc. .
The problem for many people is that the music collected on the computer comes from different sources, some songs have been copied from CDs, other mp3s have been downloaded from the internet or are radio recordings. Each mp3 file can have a different name, with busted or absent tags, which prevent the correct cataloging and organization of its collection.
To facilitate the task of affixing these tags and renaming the files, without having to manually edit them one by one, there are some programs that automatically fill in the relevant information and the names of each individual mp3 file .
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Some music players allow you to edit the tags in an mp3 file, however, the editing only works for that music player (like the paid iTunes Media plugin). There is no single perfect and better program but different alternatives can be used which, depending on the case, will be optimal solutions for arranging and writing the tags automatically .
1) D3 Tag Editor is a supported app to tag MP3 and can be used to add missing metadata values. It also allows you to add a cover to MP3 files that remains embedded in the main file itself. Other features include the ability to add custom comments to files, remove all tags at once and compatibility with both 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows.
2) Picard by MusicBrainz, for Windows Mac and Linux, is perhaps the best free mp3 tagger around because it is based on an acoustic analysis.
After downloading and installing it, just add a folder containing mp3 files and Picard analyzes all the music by adding them to a category called non clustered file .
Pressing the cluster button Picard groups the files together sorted by artist and album. This worked well for almost all of my files except for some less popular and unknown songs. After everything has been ordered the way you want, you can edit the mp3 tag information to complete the operation. This process is semi-automatic, you have to select an album from the list and press the search button. It is then a matter of selecting, from the website that opens, the correct names of artists, singers and albums. As a job it is quite fast but requires a minimum of attention. The information is added to Picard's Album section and you then need to drag the names with the mouse to make the right associations so that the program correctly compiles all the tags. Picard also downloads album covers if recognized.
3) Easy Tag is an open source application available for Linux and Windows that allows you to edit tags for MP3 files and other types of formats. There are two ways to use Easy tag quickly and easily: automatic tag recognition and CDDB search which is the most reliable method. This program makes a list of all the mp3 files that you have on your computer and highlights the music tracks that have the wrong or empty tags. The best way to correct the tags and fill them in correctly is to select an entire album of songs. Highlight them with the mouse, press the right button, choose the CDDB search, select the correct list and click Apply. Before closing, go to the menu File -> Save and verify that the information for the selected mp3 will be changed. Once the save is complete, you can go back to the list of songs and see that those files are no longer listed in red, their tags are now correct. If the CDDB search does not give results, then it may be necessary to reconfigure the Easy Tag server from the Settings -> Preferences menu (try with freedb.freedb.org ).
4) Audioshell is a manual compiler that is needed when copying a music CD to your computer and finding yourself with the files named track 1, track 2 and so on. You can then edit the "ID3 tag" of the file by changing the name of the MP3 directly from Windows thanks to AudioShell. After downloading and installing it, you can right click on the mp3 file, go to the properties and then edit the information in the AudioShell Tag Editor tab.
5) Musiczen recovers the information of mp3 music even if the file did not have a recognizable title. MusicZen is a free program to rename and organize, automatically, all music files by arranging them in separate folders according to album, author, title, genre etc.
6) Mp3Tag, only for Windows, is free, even if it is not open source. It uses the FreeDB database and also with Amazon to retrieve information and correctly rewrite the metadata of the mp3 files.
7) The GodFather is a great program to quickly compile the meta tags of music files (ID3 V1 / V2) with a simple and fast interface. Details such as Title, Artist, Album, track on the CD, genre, comments and more can be added.
8) In addition, we also mention ACT-MP3, Cover Fetcher and Album Art Downloader which automatically add the right covers to albums by downloading them from the internet.
9) MP3 Renamer is a powerful tool to rename mp3 all together, based on the chosen tags, automatically.
10) Inviska Rename is a powerful open source file renaming software for Windows, which allows you to rename MP3 files based on ID3 tags.
11) The GodFather
12) Music Tag is an application that automatically downloads album covers and adds meta tags to mp3 files.
13) Kid3 is both an MP3 metadata editor and a tag converter to convert tags to multiple formats. It works with all audio files, including MP3s and can import data from online databases to add them to the files.
