How to edit and fix MP3 tags

Posted on May 30, 2008 at 5:29 am

Looking for a free MP3 tag editor? Have a huge MP3 library of digital music files and can’t find the songs you are looking for? Tagging your MP3 files can save enormous amounts of time searching for specific songs, especially if you have thousands of MP3s.

Basically, each and every single MP3 stored on your computer has some extra information stored with it called metadata. This metadata includes information such as the artist name, the release title, and the list of songs that appear on a release. However, not all files contain this metadata and a lot of times, even if they do, it’s not correct.

Manually modifying MP3 tags is simply too much work if you have a large digital collection. That’s where a few free programs and web services come into play to help you tag MP3 files automatically! My favorite site for tagging my music files has to be MusicBrainz.

MusicBrainz is a user-maintained community music meta database. The cool thing is that all of the data is created and maintained by the users themselves. There are well over 350,00 artists, 550,000 releases, and a whopping 6,630,000+ tracks with meta data stored in the MusicBrainz database. And it’s all free!

Yes, it’s an online catalog service will lots of useful data. However, how does that help you in tagging your files? Well MusicBrainz goes one step further and provides products that can be used to apply the metadata to digital audio files like MP3, OGG, and many other audio file formats. Cool!

To help you fix incorrect or missing MP3 tags, MusicBrainz has a program called Picard that use AcousticFingerprints to semi-automatically identify tracks in your music collection and then write consistent and accurate metadata to your digital audio files.

Picard takes an album approach to tagging files, which makes it quicker than tagging files individually. Basically, you open individual music files or entire directories in Picard by dragging them into the “New files (drag files to tag here)” folder.

Now the software will read through the metadata on all of the files and unless they have been tagged already, they will be put into the “Unclustered files” folder. Files that have been tagged before and contain a MusicBrainz track identifier will be opened up as albums in the album view.

Now click on the Cluster button which will cause the tagger to try and group the files into album clusters by looking at the metadata read from the files and clustering any files that appear to belong to the same album.

Now comes a little manual work, which is inevitable. You will need to look up album clusters or individual files by selecting the cluster and clicking on the Lookup button. This will open a new browser window where you have to search for the correct album using the MusicBrainz web-site.

Once you have found the correct album, click on the Tagger icon in the album title: mblookup-tagger . When this link is clicked, the tagger pops up and loads that album into the tagger (under the Albums heading). Basically these are all the songs that MusicBrainz knows are in that original album.

Finally you can drag tracks from the “Unclustered files” folder or from the album clusters onto tracks in the Albums section. Dragging a file to an album ‘tags’ it to that album and you should see an icon in front of the track. You can also drag entire directories, multiple files at once or an entire album cluster onto Albums and the tagger will attempt to match the dragged files to the album.

Once you’ve matched up your tracks to the corresponding albums, you can select a track or an album and click on the Save button to save that track/album. Depending on your settings, this could move the track to a new directory and rename the track with the correct metadata.

That’s about it! Hopefully, you can tag all of your MP3’s quickly so that they can be searched in Windows, iTunes, or in any other media player. Does anyone else use a different audio tagging program and if so, post a comment and let us know! Enjoy!

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Comments

3 Responses to “How to edit and fix MP3 tags”

Charlie said on : May 30th, 2008 at 6:16 pm

I’ve been using MP3Tag (mp3tag.de/en) for years now and I really like it. It uses Amazon.com, Amazon.de, discogs, or freedb to get info and album art. I haven’t tried this Picard app yet, and normally I tag my albums shortly after ripping or downloading them. MP3Tag is simple and not with extra fluff as other programs normally have, and does everything you need it to do, including easy renaming of files.