Hi.

I have a lot of files downloaded from the internet in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format, and they all_have_these_annoying_003-names.ya?

So my question is. Is there a utility that will read the tags of the files and then rename the files after a set of rules. F.x. Artist - Title?

It has to support both MP3 and Ogg, and preferably others as well.

Thanks.

Another questions. What is the difference between ID3 tags and Vorbis Comments? Are there any? Which are used in what formats, and is it true there are multiple versions of ID3 tags? In that case, how many and what's the difference between them?

Thanks
Sinspawn.

First of all, MP3Tag should help you rename your files based on the the tags. It supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MusePack and several other wide-spread formats.

About you problem with the tag formats - MP3 files usually use ID3v1 or ID3v2 tags. They can also contain APEv2 or Lyrics3 tags.
ID3v1 tags are limited to ASCII characters and most fields support only 30 bytes. Also, ID3v1 contains only Title, Artist, Album, Year, Genre and Comments fields. ID3v1.1 also supports the Track Number field (causing in the Comments field to be limited to 28 characters instead of 30).
ID3v2 tags exist in 3 versions AFAIK: ID3v2.2, ID3v2.3 (most used) and ID3v2.4. These tags support more fields (you can even declare custom fields), have UNICODE support and are capabile of handling larger fields (you can put up to 16 MB per field).
APEv2 tags were used by Monkey's Audio and MusePack, but some players (foobar2000) and taggers (Frontah, MP3Tag...) can also add them to MP3 files. They have the same advantages as ID3v2, but are placed at the end of the file. This results in much faster editing / creation time, as the file does not need to be rewritten. Also, players not supporting ID3v2 could fail loading the MP3 file as the first bytes contained the tag rather than the MP3 header.
Lyrics3 tags came after ID3v1. You can use them for adding lyrics and several other fields, but they are limited to ASCII, too. There are 2 types of Lyrics3 tags: Lyrics3v1 and Lyrics3v2.

Vorbis comments can only be used in Ogg Vorbis, Ogg FLAC and Speex files IIRC.

Hope that helps.

Regards,
Sebastian Mares

foobar2000

Like Sebastian, I strongly recommend mp3tag.

Florian's mp3tag/anytag homepage.

It's free, understands a lot of codecs and tag formats, is very "slim" compared to other more "user-friendly" shareware or freeware tag editors and most importantly it's very easy to use.

You should also check the latest development built:

The dev forum with installer.

nice - thanks guys I had the same Q as the original poster

Any forum rules violation here ?

Not that I can tell... I have > 2GB of stuff that I downloaded from various netlabels that use that 001filename2001_strategy_for_annoying.everybody

e.g. kahvi.org, tokyodawn.org, etc... Probably just about everything on the scene.org ftp is named this way.

I usually wind up manually renaming everything anyway as some labels lack consistency in tagging schema.

why would it? if you think of illegall downloads, and as we allready discussed before, if you own the original cds, but you can't listen to them cause of scratches, you can perfectly download the songs from somewhere ...