elmegil's Journal: MP3 tagging tools

Many moons ago, there were discussions in other journals about useful MP3 tools to recover from messed up files. I bookmarked the discussion at the time, but of course, the bookmark monster ate about 1/3 of my bookmarks a couple months back, including this one apparently.

I've got a bunch of MP3's I've ripped from a CD burned from my wife's mac (among other things I wanted some stuff she'd bought from iTunes and didn't want to mess with all the fiddly bits). I didn't realize/forgot that iTunes will not burn any CD Text so I had no way to identify these bad boys.

I did find ID3man, which identifies tracks based on their audio signatures--it has about 50-60% success rate, which is a good thing, but some of its failures are spectacular (it labelled the instrumental version of "Killing Me Softly" by the Fugees with some horrible long impossible name of a remix collection somewhere). I've identified all the songs now, but I still need a relatively easy way to get the tags all squared away, and I'd like to copy ID1.1 to ID1.2 or ID3 tags too.

I've messed with a handful of freeware MP3 taggers, and I haven't found one yet that is easy, batchable, and intuitive to use all at the same time. Suggestions or pointers to that old discussion are much to be desired. Thanks!

Try Musicbrainz?

[gmhowell]

Try the Musicbrainz tagger. There is a Windows executable as well as a Java app. It might use the same tagging as ID3man, so I'm not sure how helpful it will be. But it's free, so that's a bonus.

Re:Try Musicbrainz?

[elmegil]

Oh bah. Free. And here I paid for additional lookups in id3man.... :-)

Re:Try Musicbrainz?

[elmegil]

BTW You Rock. This app does exactly what I wanted. And I found one track that was totally misidentified by ID3man but looked "ok" until I listened to it.

Re:Try Musicbrainz?

[gmhowell]

The standalone app for Windows is much better, but this is certainly tolerable.

Re:Try Musicbrainz?

[elmegil]

Actually I am using the windows version. Wife == mac, Me == PC :-). Definitely a great app.

bookmarks?

[orange_6]

bookmark monster?

Are you not on del.icio.us yet?

best. service. evar.

Re:bookmarks?

[elmegil]

I gave up being an earliest adopter a while back. I sit back and wait for my fellow geeks to vet things :-)

I spose it's probably time to get with this one.....

Re:bookmarks?

[orange_6]

damn straight it's time! del.icio.us better than that good crack from the south side of town!