After buying my Creative Nomad Zen Xtra I've learned more than ever that having all of the details filled in for all fields in the ID3 tags is a must. I have found in the past that going through Winamp to make changes to ID3 tags is far from ideal. For instance, if you want to fill in the Artist field for 15 tracks you'll end up typing it in 15 times or pasting it each time.

Does anyone have any good utilities for dealing with ID3 tagging for existing mp3s? Obviously for albums that I rip myself I do the tagging properly these days, but many in the past I was not as diligent with.

Tag & Rename.. I've been using it quite a while and it's SWEET.

http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm

Tag&Rename works fine, but it's not free. If you like a free solution, take a look at:
Tag, Speek's Tag frontend, Tagger, Foobar2000 and many others.

MP3Tag

Alright thanks for your suggestions, I'll try a few of these out to find out which one I like the best.

It seems like any time I ask a question one utility that is mentioned is Foobar2000. So lets say I run out of toilet paper, is the solution --> "use Foobar2000"

Hmmm, anyone know more?


I have tried them all except "Tag & rename" because I don't believe in shareware.

The best one for me was mp3tag so far, although it has many glitches: if a new feature is added some other ones stop working etc. And using it isn't always as easy as it seems.

The tag.exe and its GUIs are a pain in the arse to use.

And foobar 2k... well if someone can tell me a nice plugin for the mass tagger I will give it a try maybe, but the click Add command, ... then click do that, and then click that, and then enter this and that and... click.... finished.... next file. --> no thx!

So if anyone knows a tagger that does it all, handles almost any file format, and can apply any tag to any file format... then please tell us.

I have used MusicMatch Jukebox's tagging utilities quite a bit. There's a few handy "supertagging" utilities such as Tag from Filename, Rename Files (from tags), and Tag Lookup. Tag lookup is by far the most useful. If you have only the artist and title (and they are correct) you can easily lookup the rest of the tags for the file. MMJB's tag editor also allows multiple files to be tagged at once (artist/album/etc). You even get neat little cd cover arts with tag-lookup. I think both id3v1 and id3v2 tags are both updated too (there aren't seperate inputs for each like in Winamp's tag editor). Anyways, MusicMatch Jukebox's tag editor is handy, especially when editing common tags on entire albums, or when using the supertagging stuff.

MusicMatch Website

You can try The GodFather if you haven't already.

If you print out the help file, yes.

That's it!

I feel dumb for asking, because it may have already been answered, but does this "The Godfather" really edit wma tags? Not that I'd ever use a dirty codec created by Microsoft, but I once had a .wma, and I couldn't edit the tag, so I deleted the uncooperative little media file.

Horses for courses. I have not use tag.exe yet, but since I am going to transcode from my properly tagged FLAC archive into mp3 by a script, the command line tag.exe is a gift of God. I am glad that I just came across this thread before I started to search for something like this.

I will have to practice some more with Godfather.. I find it hard to do some of the things I want like sequential track numbering or assigning artist name by the second level up directory name. It IS good for on-line lookup. If the album is in FreeDB then you can fill all the tags in automatically. I even use it when I ripped the files from an LP, but you have to check in case the track list is different on the CD.

I have been using Renamer (also MP3 Renamer) by Albert Bertilsson for several years, but it's not for everyone. I have version 5.0b which I believe I got from downloads.com. Features:

1 - Builds tags from filenames.
2 - Builds filenames from tags.
3 - One-step replacing underscores with spaces (or the reverse).
4 - One-step capitalization of each word.
5 - Simultaneously displays original and new filenames until you accept.
6 - Can work on a single file, folder or all files in an entire tree.
7 - Allows changing the order of fields in a filename ("artist - title" to "title - artist"), etc.
8 - Replaces instances of one string with another.
9 - Allows mass-setting of fields in tag (genre=folk, for instance).

and other features I've never used. It can be used for general file renaming - file doesn't have to be MP3. It's a little hard to figure out initially, but once you do, there's little that you can't do with it.

Thanks for this thread. I'll try some of the other suggestions mentioned.