Edit MP3 metadata with Mp3tag for free

Posted on May 15, 2008 at 5:16 am

Do you have hundreds or even thousands of ripped and downloaded mp3, aac, OGG and other audio files with inconsistent or incomplete metadata? The freeware application Mp3tag (currently at v2.41) can make life a bit easier for those of us who like to keep files organized, with accurate tags.

We’ve all ripped CDs that we have legitimately purchased which did not give accurate and complete metadata tags in the extracted tracks. You know, the ‘track 01′ of album ‘not indentified’ conundrum. And it’s a tremendous problem when you are converting large numbers of CDs.

There are many tag editors available, and within iTunes you can update tag information as well, but not with the ease-of-use tools that mp3tag includes gratis.

With mp3tag you can:

select all files within a nested directory structure at once – useful for instance to update the Artist and Genre tags when you have all their albums as subdirectories under one directory
rename sets of files based on meta data tags in user-definable ways
set metadata values based on filenames in user-definable ways
gather metadata tags from freedb or Amazon
gather album art from freedb or Amazon
mass update tags for selected files
create playlists from selected files
load tags from a text file

Getting Started

Download mp3tag v2.41 for free here, and install it on your PC. Its XP and Vista compatible. I’m going to illustrate how to complete and correct metadata for several album tracks that I purchased online. I need the cover art, genre and the correct names of six album tracks I purchased online.

After you’ve installed the application, you can peruse the default settings within the Tools – options menu. For now, leave these as they are. What you’ll want to do is use the directory navigation to open a music directory that you want to work on.

The application will open all nested subdirectories, so if for instance all your music is in a directory labeled ‘iTunes’ you can just open that directory. Warning – if you do this it is going to take mp3tag a while to scan all the files and metadata. So you may want to navigate down to the artist or album. In the example I will use, I navigate down to thealbum that I want to fill in data for:

Mp3tag gives me a window showing all tracks within the selected directory.

I select all my album tracks. You can use the normal Windows key combinations to select subsets. The window is divided into two panels. In the right-panel, you see the existing metadata. You can see that my metadata is incomplete for Genre. Four tracks have a null value and two have ‘Pop’. I want to change all to Disco.

The left-panel can be thought of as the ‘control’ panel – it shows the values that you want to update into the tags for selected files. You can see in the example that mp3tag understands that for the selected tracks the metadata for the Album, Year, and Artist are consistent. It defaults the control panel to keep the existing values. The literal <keep> is used whenever multiple values currently exist in the selected fileset. Otheroptions are to type in a single new literal value to replace all the existing values for the tag, or use the <blank> literal to remove the metadata.

So for instance in my tag for Genre I can use <keep> and the hodge-podge in my current audio files of empty tag or ‘Pop’ will be retained. Or I could type in ‘Disco’ in the Genre field and set all the instances of the tag in the selected files to ‘Disco.’ So that’s what I will do. But first I will access an external source to help clean up track titles, check all other tags, and try to obtain cover art.

Updating from external sources

A powerful feature of mp3tag is its ability to pull in metadata from outside sources. So, as I start to make my adjustments the first thing I do is to access either Freedb (which is configurable) or Amazon. I use Amazon in this example, and mp3tag pulls the following options for me:

The highlighted row matches my album. I click OK and mp3tag downloads album art as well as metadata from Amazon. The software is smart enough to realize I have not bought the entire album, and matches as best it can based on my track titles with the album metadata.

I click OK after reviewing the track match ups. Mp3tag now updates my metadata. Notice for instance that my song titles are corrected (Staying Alive is now Stayin’ Alive;How deep is ur love is now How deep is your love, etc). In addition, I now have album art and an updated album title and release year. I will use the drop down for Genre and classify this as disco (rather than Pop). And the resulting: cleaned, consistent, complete song tags:

Now, I’m not yet done. I will go ahead and rename the files, using the new tags. You can see above that my filenames still have the old track title spellings. I also want to put the artist and album directly in the filenames.

I determine how I want my filenames standardized. Mp3tag will do it in all-at-once (how I like it!), or one-by-one if you so choose. It also gives you a preview, of the new filename based on the current filename / metadata parameters:

Update tags from Filenames

That’s nifty but what if you have a lot of mp3s that have album – track no – title in the filename but no metadata? Mp3tag also let’s you go from filename to tags, just as easily. You use the list of variables:

%artist%	Artist
%album%	Album
%comment%	Comment
%genre%	Genre
%title%	Title
%track%	Track-Number
%_total%	Total number of tracks from xx/XX track-number field
%year%	Year

And a whole lot more actually. With these you map tags to your existing filenames. Mp3tag can give you a preview of how the metadata will be filled in – if it looks good click OK and have mp3tag complete the tags for your iPod listening pleasure based on the filenames you already have!

Other features

Mp3tag includes context menus that are very helpful as well -including the ability to play a track within mp3tag. That comes in handy for those times when you have ripped albums that resulted in filenames like track01, track02. You can right-click/play, listen a few seconds, and then type in the correct title. You can also create and export playlists easily for groups of files and directories.

So, go ahead and give mp3tag a try. After all, it’s time for spring cleaning!

Pete Kushmeider, Writer and blogger

Technorati Tags: mp3tag, audio metadata, id3 tag freeware, iTunes freeware

» Filed Under Free Software Downloads

Comments

5 Responses to “Edit MP3 metadata with Mp3tag for free”

Madhur Kapoor said on : May 15th, 2008 at 9:14 am

I have a lot of mp3 files which needs to be tagged. Will use it.

akishore said on : May 15th, 2008 at 9:49 am

Yeah, I’ve been tagging my MP3s and tagging my photos! I have way more photos than MP3s and it’s impossible to find anything unless you add meta tags to all your pictures too.

Nigel Anderson said on : May 17th, 2008 at 6:29 am

Hi Pete

I am looking for a tool for a specific task, maybe having used mp3tag you can tell me if it’s suitable.

iTunes added an Album Artist tag a while back so that you could browse through your Artists without the ‘pollution’ of potentially hundreds of artists who appear in compilations (DJ’s feat. etc. on dance compilations being a particular problem). The problem is the field is empty on nearly all of my music library and I want to somehow batch process it all to, by default, set Album Artist = Artist, and then manually change the compilations so that Album Artist = various. People have suggested applescript on the mac, but do you know of any tool that could do it in Windows? mp3tag have the ability to set one field = to the contents of another?

Thanks for any help.

Brian said on : May 18th, 2008 at 6:53 am

Have you tried Iriver’s application called “Plus 3″? It will identify all of your MP3’s using technology from All Media Guide and re-tag completely. I tested it on about 1500 files yesterday and it worked very well. It takes a second or two per file to recognize, and then it organizes the files into albums if you prefer. Highly recommended.