MP3 Tag Fix - Recommendations

[Bill Bates]

This is a little off topic, but I thought the knowledge of this group
could help me.

I have a rather large music collection that I use with Slimserver. A
good many of my MP3 tags are, shall we say, messed up!

I am looking for a good MP3 Tag Fixer (free is good) for both the Mac
and Windows platforms. Do you have recommendations?

I have looked at MP3/Tag Studio for Windows (but have not tried it yet).

Thanks for the help.

WT

[Ben Klaas]

for windows--
http://www.id3-tagit.de/english/index.htm

don't use a Mac, but there are EasyTag packages available for OSX.
EasyTag is easily my favorite tagging program:
http://easytag.sourceforge.net/

Bill Bates wrote:
> This is a little off topic, but I thought the knowledge of this group
> could help me.
>
> I have a rather large music collection that I use with Slimserver. A
> good many of my MP3 tags are, shall we say, messed up!
>
> I am looking for a good MP3 Tag Fixer (free is good) for both the Mac
> and Windows platforms. Do you have recommendations?
>
> I have looked at MP3/Tag Studio for Windows (but have not tried it yet).
>
> Thanks for the help.
>
> WT
>

[Chip Hart]

Ben Klaas wrote:
> for windows--
> http://www.id3-tagit.de/english/index.htm

I prefer tagscanner. Slight learning curve, but some features
I've seen in no other program. I often run it under wine!

> don't use a Mac, but there are EasyTag packages available for OSX.
> EasyTag is easily my favorite tagging program:
> http://easytag.sourceforge.net/

...however, I use easytag all the time as it does a good job for
moit purposes.

--
Chip Hart - Marketing * Physician's Computer Company
chip @ pcc.com * 1 Main St. #7, Winooski, VT 05404
800-722-7708 * http://www.pcc.com/~chip
f.802-846-8178 * Pediatric Software Just Got Smarter
Your Practice Just Got Healthier

[Gregory Hamilton]

For Windows, I recommend Tag&Rename, It's not free but well worth the
cost in my book.


On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 11:04:32 -0800, Bill Bates <bates (AT) juniper (DOT) net> wrote:
> This is a little off topic, but I thought the knowledge of this group
> could help me.
>
> I have a rather large music collection that I use with Slimserver. A
> good many of my MP3 tags are, shall we say, messed up!
>
> I am looking for a good MP3 Tag Fixer (free is good) for both the Mac
> and Windows platforms. Do you have recommendations?
>
> I have looked at MP3/Tag Studio for Windows (but have not tried it yet).
>
> Thanks for the help.
>
> WT
>

[Walter Wullschleger]

.... i personally prefer MP3Tag http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html. It's
free, running under Windows and it very comfortable. Here are the main
features:

* Write ID3v1.1-, ID3v2-, APEv2-Tags and Vorbis Comments to multiple
files at once
* Automatically create playlists
* Recursive subfolders support
* Remove parts or the entire tag of multiple files
* Rename files based on the tag information
* Import tags from filenames
* Format tags and filenames
* Replace characters or words from tags and filenames
* Regular Expressions
* Export tag information to user-defined formats (like html, rtf,
csv, xml)
* Import tag information from an online database (also by text-search)
* Import tag information from a local database


since about 3 years I'm using this tool, and I'm very happy with it.

cheers
Walt

Bill Bates wrote:

>This is a little off topic, but I thought the knowledge of this group
>could help me.
>
>I have a rather large music collection that I use with Slimserver. A
>good many of my MP3 tags are, shall we say, messed up!
>
>I am looking for a good MP3 Tag Fixer (free is good) for both the Mac
>and Windows platforms. Do you have recommendations?
>
>I have looked at MP3/Tag Studio for Windows (but have not tried it yet).
>
>Thanks for the help.
>
>WT
>

[Michael Peters]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 11:04:32 -0800, Bill Bates <bates (AT) juniper (DOT) net> wrote:
> This is a little off topic, but I thought the knowledge of this group
> could help me.
>
> I have a rather large music collection that I use with Slimserver. A
> good many of my MP3 tags are, shall we say, messed up!
>
> I am looking for a good MP3 Tag Fixer (free is good) for both the Mac
> and Windows platforms. Do you have recommendations?

In OSX you can use the cli program id3v2

There might be a windows shell port as well.
It is all cli - but it works extremely well for me, only thing to
watch for is your LANG variable - if your LANG environmental variable
is set to a UTF-8 setting, some special characters won't display
properly in mp3 jukeboxes because (as I understand it) there is not
proper UTF8 support in the ID3 specification, so it doesn't record the
LANG the tag is written in.

So before I fix tags - I first run

export LANG="en-US"

(that's in Linux)
Then I can use id3v2 to fix tags. And being a cli app, it takes
wildcards for arguements - IE

id3v2 -a "Janis Joplin" *.mp3

will change the artist to Janis Joplin for all mp3 files in the
directory (and it will add ID3v2 tags to files that were done in ID3V1
at the same time)

id3v2 homepage:

http://id3v2.sourceforge.net/

-=-
That being said - the way I usually tag files is through lame when
transcoding from flac, and I use metaflac to make sure my flac files
are properly tagged.

--
http://mpeters.us/

[Michael Peters]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 18:43:04 -0800, Michael Peters <funkyres (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

>
> So before I fix tags - I first run
>
> export LANG="en-US"

That should have read -

export LANG="en_US"

(my system LANG is en_US.UTF-8 - which is no good for a lot of mp3
players, they assume en_US because the mp3 tag itself doesn't have a
way to tell them otherwise)

--
http://mpeters.us/

[Dan Sully]

* Michael Peters shaped the electrons to say...

>(my system LANG is en_US.UTF-8 - which is no good for a lot of mp3
>players, they assume en_US because the mp3 tag itself doesn't have a
>way to tell them otherwise)

Actually that is only partially correct.

ID3 v2.2: iso-8559-1 only (latin1)
ID3 v2.3: iso-8559-1 or UTF-16
ID3 v2.4: UTF-8 only

I recommend using v2.4 if possible, as there is no ambiguity. iTunes supports
it, as does MP3/Media Rage on the Mac. Easytag on *nix, and probably Tag &
Rename, but I havent tested it.

-D
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

[=?UTF-8?B?Ik1yLiBOw7V1Ig==?=]

Dan Sully wrote:

> Actually that is only partially correct.
>
> ID3 v2.2: iso-8559-1 only (latin1)
> ID3 v2.3: iso-8559-1 or UTF-16
> ID3 v2.4: UTF-8 only
>
> I recommend using v2.4 if possible, as there is no ambiguity. iTunes
> supports
> it, as does MP3/Media Rage on the Mac. Easytag on *nix, and probably Tag &
> Rename, but I havent tested it.
>
> -D


Excellent Tag&Rename says in their documentation they only write in
ID3 v2.3 "for compatability reasons". I need/want 2.4. Thus, I have
started investigating other solutions, as my growing mp3 and flac
collection contains many non-ascii characters in all sorts of
fileds, standard and custom.

tagscanner in under investigation, no verdict yet.

/peter