It seems a common complaint is the lack of a decent free tag editor for FLAC or Vorbis on OS X. So, I attempted to write one! Tag version 0.2.1 is available from http://sbooth.org/files/Tag-0.2.1.zip. It's free and is licensed under the GPL.

I am most interested at this point in feedback; it currently does not support batch editing but it does allow editing of any tags present in the stream.

Another issue I'm addressing is whether Tag should truly be a stand-alone application or whether it should be integrated with http://sbooth.org/Max/, my OS X ripper/encoder.

Please see the Tag homepage at http://sbooth.org/Tag/.

edit: Bugs reported by Shane Cavanaugh fixed.
edit: Added homepage link

Thanks for the work. I'll test it. Hyper impressed you made it a universal binary.

Is this for Tiger only ?

A few minor bugs: I put in some random characters from the "Character Palette...", but Tag wouldn't save it nor would it give me a reason why.

In the Advanced tab, when leaving a new set of tags blank ("No Value"), Tag doesn't dim the icon in the title bar to signify that I'd need to save, but saving it results in the tag set "(null)=(null)". Maybe a sheet dialog would be better? I don't know.

In the Basic tab, when adding a tag then pressing enter, the tag shows up in the Advanced tab, but it's not saved to the file. Maybe enter should save the tags, or do nothing at all?

When deleting a tag in the Basic tab, it shows up as "No value" in the Advanced tab, and saving it writes "TagName=(null)" to the file. Deleting the tag in the Basic panel should remove the tag in the Advanced panel.

When trying to close the window of a file that hasn't been saved, clicking the save button of the resulting sheet dialog doesn't save the file nor does it close the window.


Adding to Max seems best, just to beef up the tag support you already have. You can turn Max into an audio suite: ripping, converting, transcoding, tagging, file-renaming.

First Max, now this. Thanks for both.

Edit: some more feedback

It should work on 10.3, possibly even 10.2 or 10.1. I don't have 10.3 available for testing to make sure, though.

I wanted to ask before bleating On my 10.3.9 system the app launches (w/generic application icon) and the menu bar appears but nothing happens when I try to open a file for editing, either through the File menu or by dragging to the Dock icon.

You're right- Tag will currently only run on Tiger (I should have known this since I built it as a Universal binary which is inherently Tiger-only!). I could compile a working version for 10.3.9, but it would be a separate download. E-mail me if you are interested.

I fixed the bugs reported by Shane Cavanaugh above- thanks for the feedback!

Unfortunately in fixing the Save bug the performance has been reduced; apparently the default saving behavior for Cocoa is to write the file (completely) to a backup location, then copy it over the original. Needless to say, for large files like FLAC this is not at all efficient. I tried to be clever and override some of the behavior, but it obviously didn't work. 0.2.1 works now, albeit a little more slowly. I am looking into ways to improve the save performance.

Thanks very much, I will. I don't think Universal binaries need necessarily be Tiger only, all the recent Apple apps are UB and they work under Panther (though the Intel-specific part of iTunes screws up repairing permissions).

Looks nice and handy. I'd love to see batch editing in it. Maybe you could do that like Podner does.

OK, I have just released Tag 0.3 - see http://sbooth.org/Tag/ for more information.

Version 0.3 adds batch mode, performance improvements, and UI improvements!

Again, I appreciate all feedback here or on http://sbooth.org/phpBB2/.