Fast, lightweight tool to organize and edit audio metadata across formats with online database lookups
Fast, lightweight tool to organize and edit audio metadata across formats with online database lookups
Vote (89 votes)
Program license Free
Developer Florian Heidenreich
Version 3.27
Works under Windows
Vote
(89 votes)
Developer
Florian Heidenreich
Works under
Windows
Program license
Free
Version
3.27
Pros
- Light and Fast App
- Integrated Splicing Tools
- FreeDB Track Query
Cons
- Inaccurate Album Look-Up
- Minor User-Reported Bugs
MP3Tag is a piece of software designed to edit meta data for your music collection.
Anyone who uses a computer or MP3 player to listen to digital music knows that it can be a bit annoying to have songs with incomplete information in your library. If you are like most users, you want to keep your music organized with the proper album and track names simply because of the sense of satisfaction that comes with having fully tagged music. Such organization also looks better through the media player, and it makes it much easier to manage playlists. It might seem like a pointless task to tag each audio file you own, but you can easily find software like MP3Tag to help streamline the process.
Meta data is really nothing more than information about an audio file that isn't actually included in the audio file itself. This might include the name of the album on which the song is found, the name of the song itself, the artist's name, the length of the song, its digital size, and associated artwork. With MP3Tag, you can alter this data in almost any way that you wish. With the app, you can create playlists, export or import existing tag info, rename files to better fit information found in the tag, and replace portions of the file names or tags.
Unlike other apps of this style, MP3Tag is clean, small, and lighter on system resources. It has no issues performing at a high rate, and it is fast enough to handle the most intense jobs.
The name of this software is a bit misleading as well, but in a good way. Since the app is called MP3Tag, you might assume it only works with MP3 files. However, the software works with just about any audio format you might have in your system. On top of MP3s, you can use this software to edit meta data for MP4, AAC, Ogg, and Musepack files.
Thanks to the online database of song tags called FreeDB, the software can import information about your songs or albums and automatically add the data to the appropriate fields. This feature means that you'll no longer have to deal with annoying MP3 albums that load into your music library without any identifying information. In some cases, FreeDB returns meta data that isn't exactly accurate, but it still works better than manually inserting each data point yourself.
MP3Tag is a free piece of software, which is part of the reason why it has become so popular in the category. If you have a vast music library that desperately needs some attention and organization, MP3Tag is the way to go. Organization and recognition will become much easier once you have taken advantage of the power of this powerful software.
Pros
- Light and Fast App
- Integrated Splicing Tools
- FreeDB Track Query
Cons
- Inaccurate Album Look-Up
- Minor User-Reported Bugs
Pros
- Entirely free!
- Allows editing of some audio metadata which popular media players don't allow.
- Supports a wide variety of audio formats.
- You can switch between podcast and regular music tagging.
- Supports tagging and cover art downloads based on online database lookups.
- Allows you to create playlists.
- Allows you to generate CSV, RTF, and HTML reports of your collection.
Cons
- Sometimes crashes.
- Requires some technical expertise.
Mp3tag is a free software which allows you to edit the metadata of audio files. It supports batch editing and individual file editing and supports ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, iTunes MP4, WMA, Vorbis Comments, and APE tag editing, among other audio formats. The program also features online database lookups, labeling, and tagging songs for you based on information from databases such as Amazoncom, Amazon.de, discogs, freedb, or MusicBrainz.
Although the program does require some technical expertise to use, it also includes online support and handy tutorials. While many freely-available media player programs support tagging and cover art downloading based on online database lookups, mp3tag is much more flexible and allows users to have complete control of all their audio file tags.
Do you want to tag your music or sound recordings as a podcast rather than regular music? You can do a batch edit and change them all to podcast, reload your iTunes library, and there they are! Do you want to remove certain data from the audio files or add anything to the metadata? Mp3tag has you covered with complete editing flexibility and even the ability to override settings and tags set by other programs. You can rename audio files, add comments, change tags-pretty much anything you want.
The latest version of mp3tag supports Windows 10 and has many fixes for the bugs that caused earlier versions of the program to crash. While the interface is still highly technical, most users editing audio files will probably be able to learn it quickly. Multiple directories can be added or a favorite directory set for accessing audio files, and music can also be uploaded by way of a playlist file. Modified files can easily be burnt to a CD-R or saved in their original directory. Easy menu options and keyboard combinations support such features as "restore all input fields" and "auto-numbering." Songs in the program window can be sorted by a wide variety of different features, including bitrate, artist, frequency, date modified, and title.
Users are presented with an easy summary menu of the song's metadata in a column on the left-hand side of the screen. From here, they can manually set or reset the song's title, artist, album, year, track, genre, comments, artist, composer, and disc number. A refresh button at the top of the screen will reload all open directories in the program window, in case any new songs have been added.
Finally, the help menu contains numerous helpful links for new users, including a link to the full online user manual, a "first steps" tutorial, an explanation of keyboard shortcuts, a link to online support, and an easy link to check for newer versions of the program.
Pros
- Entirely free!
- Allows editing of some audio metadata which popular media players don't allow.
- Supports a wide variety of audio formats.
- You can switch between podcast and regular music tagging.
- Supports tagging and cover art downloads based on online database lookups.
- Allows you to create playlists.
- Allows you to generate CSV, RTF, and HTML reports of your collection.
Cons
- Sometimes crashes.
- Requires some technical expertise.
