Clean Up Your Music Tags With Two Great Tools
My MP3 collection spans over a decade of tracks that were ripped, bought, ‘borrowed’ from friends and, well…you know. That’s probably a lot like your collection. And a lot of my older files have weak or nonexistent ID3 tags, which is the important metadata you mp3 player uses to identify and organize your music. I’ve been playing with two free tools that make cleaning up your tags a lot easier. Both can also help you rename files using a consistent naming scheme, and even organize them into logical folders.
The first is MusicBrainz Picard. This handy cross-platform tool (written in Python for run-anywhere goodness) will use an online database to try to fix your library’s ID3 tags. It isn’t perfect, but it works remarkably well. You can either leave alone or manually fix any files it isn’t sure about from within the program.
Picard can also rename files based on a user-defined scheme (the default scheme results in long file names that include artist, album, song title and track number. I shortened mine to just use artist and song title separated with a dash. The user interface is a little confusing, but it’s not that hard to get the hang of.
I used Picard on a small folder of 150 old MP3 files with tags in pretty bad shape, and it did a great job of getting them cleaned up. I also had it rename them into a standard ‘artist – title’ format, which works best for the way I use my music. I also used the program on a similarly sized folder of files I had on my 1st generation iPod Shuffle years ago. They were all AAC files (.m4a extension), and Picard handled them without any trouble.
Another great tool is Tagscanner. It doesn’t automatically fix tags, but it does make manually editing large numbers of tags as painless as possible. And Tagscan will also rename files and organize them into folders for you based on info in the ID3 tags. The interface isn’t always intuitive, but once you get the hang of it there are a lot of useful options.
Both tools are a great for helping to get large libraries of music files organized and cleaning up the ID3 metadata. Just keep in mind that renaming your files and moving them around will probably make iTunes, Songbird, Windows Media or whatever media player they may already be imported into very unhappy, and may foul up your carefully constructed playlists.
