10 ms·

Mp3tag – Universal Tag Editor

391 points by accrual 2y ago

mmastrac 2y ago
That is a blast from the past. MP3tag is older than Web 2.0, Twitter, Facebook and is still actively maintained. https://web.archive.org/web/20010502171211/http://www.mp3tag.de/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010502171211/http://www.mp3tag... My workflow back in the day was mainly thrift store CD to AudioGrabber. I still have a few CDs that only exist in high-bitrate MP3 format after losing the physical disk. Lately I've been using MusicBrainz Picard to re-organize all of these ancient rips and then automedia to add parity. I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day and I'm afraid to lose my older music collection.
- qbane 2y ago
  I remembered that taking care of metadata of 1000+ mp3 music and syncing them between music players and backing up with CD-RWs were time filler. They still are, but I enjoyed doing so. Digital garden in web 1.0 era I could say.
  - epiccoleman 2y ago
    I was so proud of my meticulously tagged mp3 collection, and even took the time to add album art to everything. I always wanted mp3s tagged with the original album they came from, even if they were from a greatest hits CD or something. (Looking back, this wasn't quite the right mindset, as sometimes the versions on a greatest hits CD or similar will be slightly different than the "real" album version, but it was my collection!)
    - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
      I maintain mine. It's the only way to get guaranteed gapless playback in the modern era.
- disposition2 2y ago
  If you haven’t already looked in to it, beets might be a solution for you https://beets.io/ https://beets.io/
  - res0nat0r 2y ago
    I highly recommend Musicbrainz Picard: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ It will match against the Musicbrainz database and will acoustically ID your files, so the tags can be completely wrong and it can ID the song from it's sound fingerprint. Just dump folders of albums into the client, it will group and sort things and ID them. It works great.
    - mmastrac 2y ago
      It's a miraculous project. I have something like 300+ albums from 170+ artists and it tooks me only a few days to cleanly retag everything, with about 99% of the albums just working.
    - selvin 2y ago
      Musicbrainz Picard: highly recommended
    - deadbunny 2y ago
      I'll 2nd Picard. Been using it for years (and contributing to musicbrains for years).
    - xvilka 2y ago
      I wish there had been something like MusicBrainz but for movies, they now have BookBrainz[1] so that would have covered most aspects of digital content. [1] https://bookbrainz.org/ https://bookbrainz.org/
    - xvilka 2y ago
      I only wish it wasn't written in Python - writing good GUI apps is way too hard with it, also the lack of static typing makes development of anything beyond simple scripts a potential minefield.
- pkulak 2y ago
  Spotify does this thing for me where, no matter what you do, after an hour or so of listening you find yourself hearing the same 50 or so songs, over and over and over until you go mad. I still pay for it, and use it a bit, but playing my own collection is so much nicer.
  - eddd-ddde 2y ago
    I'm a fan of YouTube music's algorithm. I don't even have playlists. I just like songs that I enjoy, and whenever I need music I click something in the homepage and enjoy old and new songs that YouTube thinks I will like.
  - cvdub 2y ago
    That’s why I disable all of Spotify’s smart playlist and auto play features. When my playlist/album ends I want to select something new, not be spoon fed whatever everyone else is listening to!
  - 9dev 2y ago
    Same for me, I could never understand the hype around their suggestions. Even random playlists like „coffee house music“ (which I exclusively turn on when friends are over) seem to be personalised to me - so much so that they pretty much immediately veer off into heavy rock or other stuff that I may have come across, but that definitely isn’t good as a chill backdrop. And even the much-praised weekly playlist is hit or miss - sometimes it’s weeks with abhorring stuff, then for once I get a good one with two to three songs I actually like.
    - bobsmooth 2y ago
      Spotify has introduced me to many new genres but the algo has gotten worse over time.
    - trallnag 2y ago
      Don't get me started on the weekly playlist. Spotify refuses to accept the fact that I don't speak Ukrainian. Yet a big chunk of the Playlist consists out of Ukrainian music. Probably Spotify is not able to differentiate between Ukrainian and Russian, which I listen to a lot
- sandreas 2y ago
  My workflow is 1. Buying used and reasonably priced original music CDs 2. Ripping them with EAC[1] and an external LG BH16NS55 to FLAC format (takes 120 seconds per CD - this drive is FAST and ACCURATE) 3. Auto-import the ripped FLACs into my beets.io database via cronjob (which also unifies the metadata automatically in 99% of the cases) 4. Inplace-convert the FLACs to 192kbps mp3 via `beet convert` 5. Archiving the converted perfectly tagged FLACs to Bluray discs, as soon as the archive size hits 25GB 6. Point a self-hosted Navidrome instance and a Windows VM with iTunes to the beets folder 7. Use Substreamer App with Navidrome's smart playlists[2] and "favoriting" on my Android phone / iPhone as well as iTunes syncing my iPod Nano 7 via smart playlists Works absolutely flawless and is less work than I expected. Since I automated everything possible, the only manual thing I need to do is the BUYING, the RIPPING and the Bluray ARCHIVING part. 1: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/ https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/ 2: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/1417 https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/1417
  - mmastrac 2y ago
    > 5. Archiving the converted perfectly tagged FLACs to Bluray discs, as soon as the archive size hits 25GB Do you have a rec for any long-life BR discs?
    - sandreas 2y ago
      I use regular Verbatim 25GB disks. Since I keep the original CDs and usually use the Mp3s to listen, this is only a part of my 3-2-1 backup strategy. Nothing meant to be 200 years archival proof :-) However, I never use anything but Verbatim, never had a bad experience with it.
      - accrual 2y ago
        Very cool archival setup! Funny you say that about Verbatim. I have a several old burned discs from the 2000s and 2010s where the dye has degraded and is no longer readable, but I have one specific blue Verbatim disc my childhood friend burned for me in the late 90s, and it still reads today!
- jgalt212 2y ago
  > automedia to add parity. What do you mean by this?
  - callumgare 2y ago
    I’m guessing they’re referring to this: https://github.com/mmastrac/automedia https://github.com/mmastrac/automedia
- komali2 2y ago
  I love MusicBrainz Picard but the UI doesn't seem to allow me to mass-manage my TB collection of music. Just crashes after trying to load it all into RAM for 20 minutes or something. I'm sure there's a CLI or something that can accomplish what I'm trying to do though.
  - herewulf 2y ago
    Try beets[1]. It's likely the CLI answer you're looking for. [1]: https://beets.io https://beets.io
- autoexec 2y ago
  > Lately I've been using MusicBrainz Picard to re-organize all of these ancient rips and then automedia to add parity. I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day Spotify doesn't even have to disappear, it just has to lose access to the songs you care about or raise their prices to the point where they are unfair, or degrade their service in other ways until it's not worth using. Personally, I'm paranoid about using internet based services to fetch metadata for my local media collection. I imagine their servers log those requests, each filename, the metadata pulled, IPs, and timestamps, and that they keep that data around for at least some length of time. Not sure how many sell that data, but what I'm listening to isn't really anyone else's business and I don't want the RIAA or anyone else to use that information as evidence against me somehow or coming around asking for proof of purchase for every MP3 they got from those logs.
- squarefoot 2y ago
  > I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day and I'm afraid to lose my older music collection. Services eventually disappear. Not many people recall about Vitaminic, a gem of the early 2K that along MySpace gave countless unknown artists and bands the opportunity to put their music online, then one day poof! and it was gone with all its content. I had saved a few quite interesting tracks on my hard drive and attempted to search for the artists in the hope they moved elsewhere, but no way: they were gone forever. So, screw online services: I'm not going to waste any energy in something whose kill switch is in someone else's hand.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    If the artists didn't own their own copyrights, there's a good chance that their stuff is available somewhere else by now. There are many companies out there that do nothing but put your music onto spotify and youtube for exposure; anything owned by a label is probably there.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- salynchnew 2y ago
  Fun fact is that I have at least one CD where there was an audio track misprint (one track repeated). I didn't actually notice until I ripped it and used Picard to analyze the tracks. I also once found two tracks where Spotify's own data was wrong (wrong audio files associated with the album/track names). After failing in my attempts to escalate it through Spotify support several times, I ended up having to reach out to Glenn MacDonald on Twitter to get it fixed.
wismut 2y ago
I spent the better half of my teenage days carefully tagging my music library with this.
- SamBam 2y ago
  I know. I really miss my old iTunes library. I had the genres and other metadata just the way I liked them. In my quest to find an offline MP3 player for my kid, I spent a bunch of time looking at models, but none of them give you the ability to sort (and shuffle) by artist, album, and genre the way the old iPods did.
- noman-land 2y ago
  I still consider a well tagged library to be a badge of honor
  - looping8 2y ago
    It's a sign of dedication and how much time someone could have before social media and/or becoming old
Venn1 2y ago
EasyTAG is a serviceable cross-platform alternative.
- thriftwy 2y ago
  EasyTAG is great in the sense that it has sufficient set of knobs to digest all kinds of MP3 tags seen in the wild, and then convert them to the preferred format.
tcsenpai 2y ago
Such a throwback. I need a Windows 2000 virtual machine now.
Springtime 2y ago
I'm glad the sole dev is able to support themselves by donations from this and now their paid Mac version. It's been an indispensable tool for batch audio tagging and the community is very helpful.
- UberFly 2y ago
  So true. Whenever I need to use it I go and look for an update first and am always relieved (and amazed) that it's still going 20 year later. Best example of software done right.
billfor 2y ago
Media Monkey is great also if you have a large collection. I use the ratings and occasion tags to organize my collection. I like how the meta data is part of the mp3 so you take it wherever your mp3 goes. I guess it’s not economically viable to have a streaming service to allow such flexible customization. mp3gain from 2005 is another indispensable part of a large mp3 collection.
- distances 2y ago
  > mp3gain from 2005 is another indispensable part of a large mp3 collection. Do you use it for portable mp3 players? Wondering why mp3gain instead of ReplayGain capable player, seems wrong to edit the music data itself instead of just tagging the gain values.
  - billfor 2y ago
    mp3gain is at the frame level. Sonos in particular does not honor ReplayGain. So the workflow is to adjust the volume with mp3gain, then re-analyze those levels and set the ReplayGain. That way it plays on devices that don't honor Replay Gain. Sonos sucks for local mp3s - it's the only way to get the volume to come out the same for everything.
    - distances 2y ago
      Yep, probably the best way if you need to use ReplayGain unaware players.
    - iggldiggl 2y ago
      > So the workflow is to adjust the volume with mp3gain, then re-analyze those levels and set the ReplayGain Doesn't that already happen automatically when you bake the adjustment into the file using mp3gain? Also small sidenote: There's also a modded version of mp3gain that supports AAC files, too, including the same workflow of optionally baking the adjustments into the AAC data itself for ReplayGain unaware-software. (https://github.com/dgilman/aacgain https://github.com/dgilman/aacgain)
noman-land 2y ago
Impeccable tagging is something to strive for. I would look at the music libraries of my friends and be disgusted by the chaos.
joeywas 2y ago
This and winamp saw lots of use on my computers back in the early 2000s. I still have spools of CDs full of mp3s i painstakingly tagged. :|
LeoPanthera 2y ago
I've been using Kid3 on my Mac: https://kid3.kde.org https://kid3.kde.org It's not a native Mac app, so it's not really ideal, but it does work very well.
- 79a6ed87 2y ago
  Kid3 is wonderful! Love it, and it has both GTK and Qt frontends
  - johnvaluk 2y ago
    And a CLI you can use interactively or for automation (once you get the quoting right).
jonpurdy 2y ago
Interesting; I just discovered and used this tool a month ago. For years I've been wanting to migrate my few hundred remaining MP3 files from iTunes/Music to just store them on the file system but iTunes DB stores play count and star rating in their DB, not in the file itself. Turns out that there's no standard tag for this, but the most common (from what I searched was POPULARIMETER, where you store it in EMAIL|RATING|PLAYCOUNTER format. Email is a string (optional), rating is an int 0-255※, and playcounter as an integer. So I wrote a Python script that would read the file on disk, match it with the entry in iTunes DB, populate POPULARIMETER, then verify everything was set correctly in MP3tag. This took a few hours to do, mostly due to discovering how to do it and verifying everything worked correctly. Unfortunately the MP3 players I use now (VLC and mpv) don't support updating the POPULARIMETER field, so it'll be left as an unchanging relic from my iTunes days. ※ - 1 star → 0.2x255 = 51, 2 star → 0.4x255 = 102, etc
- verytrivial 2y ago
  Ha! Yes, play count (and reasonable if not always to my taste) tagging is about all I miss from iTune, and iTunes and Time Machine is about all I miss from Mac OS. I used to have "Smart Playlist" or whatever it was called that would randomly select say 30 songs with a play count less than 3 to put on my Shuffle to keep me out of musical ruts. I miss that.
blueboo 2y ago
Love mp3tag. And now in 2024 we can go one step further -- LLMs are the ultimate solution to finally tagging your entire collection consistently.
- highspeedbus 2y ago
  I feel uneasy every time someone casually advocates the use of LLMs for a task. Sounds dirty. Hard to explain.
internet2000 2y ago
For a Mac OS equivalent, I’m a big fan of Metadatics https://apps.apple.com/us/app/metadatics/id554883654?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/metadatics/id554883654?mt=12
- sunaookami 2y ago
  Mp3Tag exists as a native app for macOS: https://mp3tag.app/ https://mp3tag.app/
  - djkoolaide 2y ago
    I use both the Windows and macOS version almost daily (work vs home), and I'm happy to report that the macOS version is just as efficient as the Windows one when dealing with huge directories. I regularly have to deal with thousands of files at a time, and it just zips through them. One of my all-time favorite applications, no doubt.
- ashconnor 2y ago
  I always forget which software I used to tag a rip that I do once in a blue moon. I have TriTag in my bash history: TriTag https://github.com/korseby/TriTag https://github.com/korseby/TriTag
- sonar_un 2y ago
  I use metadatics frequently as well. Great program.
- cageface 2y ago
  My Mac player also supports tag editing. It’s a bit basic right now but more features are in the works: https://plastaq.com/minimoon https://plastaq.com/minimoon
- thirdsun 2y ago
  I'd like to recommend Meta: https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ Great piece of software, that has served me well for years.
AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
Man, I wish teenage me had known about this one, rather than using a pirated copy of Tag&Rename. Being able to pull tag data from Amazon was really useful, though...
- conradfr 2y ago
  I actually have a license for Tag&Rename, it's good software, but Window only.
ggm 2y ago
Genre started out useful. Five or six categories. Classical made sense. Pop made sense. Now, I have to decide if this is West Coast electro skiffle or its Canadian folk influenced digital beats. We wind up needing another tag, to do classical/pop/folk in. Also, players don't agree on artist/composer/orchestra or on movement numbering, you can't even rely on BWV. I've had multiple CD sets split by the amazing variance of back catalogue mining meaning an 11 part cd set of Chopin can match a 9 or 10 part set and a single release cd or two. The taggers are fine. The information model is a nightmare, matched only by how hard approximation of date is in EXIF
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jonathankoren 2y ago
  Genre has always been a mess. For a while Primus was a ID3Tag genre in unto themselves. In general, that type of inherently fuzzy categorical will always be a mess. I’m old enough to remember the great alt.music.industrial wars over whether Nine Inch Nails was industrial or not.[0] The problem with ID3 back when I was ripping and encoding stuff back at the turn of the century was that they were fixed length fields. Using CDDB better as a source of truth, but even it had serious inconsistency issues. Not from a data quality perspective, but from a data format perspective. It quickly became a pile of inconsistencies, particularly around artists and multiple artist albums. In the end, I ended up extending it with a better format I called eCDDB. Of course there was no one interested in fixing the format, because CDDB got sold some megacorp, and FreeDB simply ignored the obvious problems. [0] Reznor won a Country Music Award in 2019, so that settles it. He’s country.
  - ggm 2y ago
    But "old town road" by Lil Nas and Billy Ray Cyrus gets kicked off the country playlist.
    - jonathankoren 2y ago
      That’s because it’s industrial
xd1936 2y ago
I've been using Puddletag[1] on Linux as an Mp3tag replacement and it works quite well. 1. https://docs.puddletag.net/ https://docs.puddletag.net/
- beretguy 2y ago
  mp3tag works flawlessly through wine too.
- farmerbb 2y ago
  Thanks, going to try this out. Mp3tag is one of the few apps I use regularly that I've still been resorting to firing up a Windows VM for (or running it through Wine).
- aquova 2y ago
  I've always used Kid3 on Linux
- jzb 2y ago
  Kid3 has been my go-to for a long time, but lately I've been using Strawberry[1] as my all-in-one music player, organizer, and tagger. It has a built-in tag editor with MusicBrainz support and will auto-organize files. My only complaint with that is that it leaves behind old folders and files. e.g. If I have a few directories of MP3/Flac/whatever downloads with cover scans, it'll happily use the tags to organize the way I like it* but if there are "extra" files they stay put and have to be cleaned up manually. But it's really a proper Swiss Army Chainsaw for doing everything in one application. * Proper directory structure is "Artist/(YYYY) Album Name/NN-Song Title.[mp3|aac|flac]" [1] https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ -- a fork of Clementine, which was a fork of Amarok.
- squidbeak 2y ago
  It's been my stalwart for years, and I appreciate it very much. But it's nowhere near as finished a product as mp3tag, with much greater fragility. For instance, right now after the last update, which throws a python error. Mp3tag on the other hand has worked flawlessly and in every conceivable way since the dawn of time. Like foobar2000, it's one of the best pieces of software ever written.
anonymousiam 2y ago
Closed source and no Linux support.
- beretguy 2y ago
  It works flawlessly through wine.
- ape4 2y ago
  You can use the command line tool: id3tag --artist Nirvana Lithium.mp3
- chrisjj 2y ago
  > Closed source Thank goodness. Just imagine what a mess it would be with 100 cooks.
- echelon_musk 2y ago
  ExFalso / QuodLibet is a good alternative.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Neither of which is relevant.
rc_kas 2y ago
$25 dollars???!?!? no thanks
- beretguy 2y ago
  Is $11 for Spotify every month better?
- Crono 2y ago
  Its an optional donation. This is freeware ...
  - fourfun 2y ago
    Not on Mac. Absolutely worth it though
Grimeton 2y ago
[dead]
eliasson 2y ago
Apparently ID3 included some strange frames such as the Popularimeter (POPM) for storing emails and ratings! lawik goes through some om them in this post which I found entertaining. https://underjord.io/id3-specification-and-speculation.html https://underjord.io/id3-specification-and-speculation.html
- mek6800d2 2y ago
  I came across his article about a month ago and likewise enjoyed it. I was a little disappointed (but only a little) when I discovered afterwards that his suggestion of using event time codes to set off explosives on stage was actually suggested in the ID3v2 standards themselves! The fanciful ideas on the POPM frame were very interesting. The ID3v2 standards author's late 1990s, pre-massive-spam-onslaught design choice to include an email address seems kind of quaint now!
romdev 2y ago
I'm meticulous about tagging and backing up MP3s for different mixes in car stereos and other devices. One problem is that I have so many MP3s and different copies I don't know which are tagged and when they were ripped. I prefer to retain the file's modified date when I just update tags so I'll know how old the rip is - bit rates have increased a bit since last century. I wrote a Powershell script that sets the date a minute newer when it updates ID3 V1 tags so I can compare files and know that one came from 2005 and has had metadata updated since then. I haven't found a bulk tagger that does this.
- ender341341 2y ago
  You should consider just adding a `ripped on` tag, or if you're worried about it being a bad encoding then consider re-ripping from sources into a lossless format.
- distances 2y ago
  > so I'll know how old the rip is - bit rates have increased a bit since last century. It's easy to see which bitrate a track/album has, you don't need to keep dates for that? What's harder to see is what encoder was used -- modern LAME at even 128kbps is a totally different game than some 90s Xing or Fraunhofer. Better would of course be to have lossless files of the originals and mass convert to mp3 when needed, but I suppose that's a different discussion.
- Springtime 2y ago
  > I prefer to retain the file's modified date when I just update tags so I'll know how old the rip is Mp3Tag has a timestamp preservation setting. There's also the ability to run an external script/program on all selected files (via the Tools sub-menu of the context menu) or by configuring File>Export with a script. For those wanting to preserve original timestamps I'd suggest storing them into custom tags in the files themselves as a backup. Mp3Tag can be set up to do this automatically using an Action (its scripting syntax). That way one can always restore them back using a script.
toastercat 2y ago
I still use this to maintain my music library, which I then listen to with either foobar2000 or cmus.
daneel_w 2y ago
I stopped bothering with MP3s over a decade ago in favor of AAC (in .m4a) and for that I use AtomicParsley (https://github.com/wez/atomicparsley https://github.com/wez/atomicparsley) on the command line...should anyone be looking for such a tool.
mttpgn 2y ago
To modify tags on MP3 files programmatically, I have found the Mutagen library works well in Python.
fourfun 2y ago
The Discogs integration is a great feature. I’ve checked out musicbrainz but it’s no where near as complete for the music I listen to.
ww520 2y ago
Foobar2000 has a very good tag editor. I especially like how it can batch-sync the title tags from the filenames (via Properties -> Tools -> Automatically Fill Values). And the other way around to rename files using their tags (via File Operations -> Rename To). Super useful.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  It also has both musicbrainz and discogs (has albums that musicbrainz doesn't even have artists for) taggers
- noema 2y ago
  Shame that it is (basically) a Windows exclusive application.
  - ww520 2y ago
    It can run on Wine on Linux. Best of both worlds!
esafak 2y ago
I wrote one of these mp3 tag editors for personal use back in the day using C++Builder or Delphi. I can't remember which one but I remember it was a pleasant experience.
donatj 2y ago
Oh hey! There's a Mac version. I was literally looking for Mac Ape tag editor yesterday! I used this way back on Windows 2000 in high school!
anotherevan 2y ago
Have used this for years. Still use it today on Linux under WINE as I just can't find anything else that is anywhere near as good. Basically use Picard to fill in meta-data, then Mp3tag to tidy up, add the album art and tweak naming conventions to my preference when needed.
slmjkdbtl 2y ago
On macOS there's also Meta[0] which I found better than mp3tag. You can also always use builtin Music.app for organization + tagging. I've been using it (or iTunes before) to manage my local music library for 10 years now and it's the best thing of my life, a big plus is I can also sync my library to my iPhone (altho the software quality downgraded a lot since the Big Sur rewrite). I also wonder if there's a cross platform alternative: a good tagger + a good player / organizer + easy to sync to phone + a good player on phone [0] https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/
mcoliver 2y ago
Awesome app. For programmatically modifying mp3 metadata with Python I have found mutagen to be really nice. https://github.com/quodlibet/mutagen https://github.com/quodlibet/mutagen
kls0e 2y ago
Florian Heidenreich ftw!
manoweb 2y ago
What I was looking for is a tool to delete all tags from mp3s so the media players only show the file name. Directories for the band, subdues for each album and each song as a file is how I organize music, but audio players often add their own semantics to what should be a simpler concept.
- Cockbrand 2y ago
  This is trivial with the command line tool id3v2
DominikPeters 2y ago
In case someone finds it useful, I wrote a simple in-browser app for editing the chapter tags of an MP3 file (for podcasts), which can also edit some basic other tags like title and cover image: https://mp3chapters.github.io/ https://mp3chapters.github.io/ It's based on the node-id3 library, via browserify. It would likely be possible to build an in-browser batch tag editor with the same idea, which then wouldn't require installing an app.
dewey 2y ago
Great alternative for macOS: https://2manyrobots.com/yate/ https://2manyrobots.com/yate/
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Faskil 2y ago
Still the best. And totally worth it. <3
vojd 2y ago
I wrote a similar tool for Linux many years ago: https://github.com/fbngrm/DiscoPy https://github.com/fbngrm/DiscoPy
kybernetikos 2y ago
What I find frustrating is that we write these tools for each individual file format. Calibre for tagging books, this tool for tagging music, another tool for tagging images. This stuff should probably be supported directly for all kinds of files in the operating system.
- briHass 2y ago
  Windows can read/edit ID3 tags and many other types of metadata formats. It's hidden away in the details, but you can select those columns to show in a details directory view. There's certainly no nice bulk tagging functionality, however.
icecap12 2y ago
I use a tool called TheGodFather
TomMasz 2y ago
I download a lot of FLAC recordings of taper-friendly bands and Mp3tag is indispensable. I wish it could easily read the info.txt files that usually accompany the recording and assign track names but that is about it.
jccalhoun 2y ago
I've just spent some time the last few days using this to clean up my music collection. I had a ton of duplicates in different bitrates but some were already tagged how I wanted them and some weren't. The tool is great but I wish it had some kind of side-by-side mode where it was easier to compare the tags of two files.
roryokane 2y ago
On macOS, I’m happily using Meta for Mac (€25) to edit music metadata tags of individual files: https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ . I still store most of my music in iTunes (renamed to Music in later macOS versions). I’m also happy with the tag editing of iTunes, especially after installing some custom tag-editing AppleScripts from https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php and modifying some of those scripts. However, I am rethinking storing all my music in iTunes given that it can’t play Opus or FLAC files (last I checked) and it makes loud glitchy sounds when it plays an MP3 file whose sample rate is 32k instead of 44.1k. I’ve already had to give up on storing all my music files in the iTunes folder now that my entire music library doesn’t fit on my laptop’s storage. Thus, I have been using Meta more. Edit: I see another commenter also mentioned Meta and Music.app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40471849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40471849
nicoster 2y ago
I think this app really needs a backend so users can share/sync the tags (maybe based on the hash of a mp3 file)
- thirdsun 2y ago
  Dear god, no. I don't even want to think about someone else messing up my library. I think music enthusiasts are very particular about their media and library management.
dakial1 2y ago
I miss Oink’s PP and what.cd

391 points by accrual 2y ago

That is a blast from the past. MP3tag is older than Web 2.0, Twitter, Facebook and is still actively maintained. https://web.archive.org/web/20010502171211/http://www.mp3tag.de/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010502171211/http://www.mp3tag... My workflow back in the day was mainly thrift store CD to AudioGrabber. I still have a few CDs that only exist in high-bitrate MP3 format after losing the physical disk. Lately I've been using MusicBrainz Picard to re-organize all of these ancient rips and then automedia to add parity. I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day and I'm afraid to lose my older music collection.

qbane 2y ago
I remembered that taking care of metadata of 1000+ mp3 music and syncing them between music players and backing up with CD-RWs were time filler. They still are, but I enjoyed doing so. Digital garden in web 1.0 era I could say.
- epiccoleman 2y ago
  I was so proud of my meticulously tagged mp3 collection, and even took the time to add album art to everything. I always wanted mp3s tagged with the original album they came from, even if they were from a greatest hits CD or something. (Looking back, this wasn't quite the right mindset, as sometimes the versions on a greatest hits CD or similar will be slightly different than the "real" album version, but it was my collection!)
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    I maintain mine. It's the only way to get guaranteed gapless playback in the modern era.
disposition2 2y ago
If you haven’t already looked in to it, beets might be a solution for you https://beets.io/ https://beets.io/
- res0nat0r 2y ago
  I highly recommend Musicbrainz Picard: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ It will match against the Musicbrainz database and will acoustically ID your files, so the tags can be completely wrong and it can ID the song from it's sound fingerprint. Just dump folders of albums into the client, it will group and sort things and ID them. It works great.
  - mmastrac 2y ago
    It's a miraculous project. I have something like 300+ albums from 170+ artists and it tooks me only a few days to cleanly retag everything, with about 99% of the albums just working.
  - selvin 2y ago
    Musicbrainz Picard: highly recommended
  - deadbunny 2y ago
    I'll 2nd Picard. Been using it for years (and contributing to musicbrains for years).
  - xvilka 2y ago
    I wish there had been something like MusicBrainz but for movies, they now have BookBrainz[1] so that would have covered most aspects of digital content. [1] https://bookbrainz.org/ https://bookbrainz.org/
  - xvilka 2y ago
    I only wish it wasn't written in Python - writing good GUI apps is way too hard with it, also the lack of static typing makes development of anything beyond simple scripts a potential minefield.
pkulak 2y ago
Spotify does this thing for me where, no matter what you do, after an hour or so of listening you find yourself hearing the same 50 or so songs, over and over and over until you go mad. I still pay for it, and use it a bit, but playing my own collection is so much nicer.
- eddd-ddde 2y ago
  I'm a fan of YouTube music's algorithm. I don't even have playlists. I just like songs that I enjoy, and whenever I need music I click something in the homepage and enjoy old and new songs that YouTube thinks I will like.
- cvdub 2y ago
  That’s why I disable all of Spotify’s smart playlist and auto play features. When my playlist/album ends I want to select something new, not be spoon fed whatever everyone else is listening to!
- 9dev 2y ago
  Same for me, I could never understand the hype around their suggestions. Even random playlists like „coffee house music“ (which I exclusively turn on when friends are over) seem to be personalised to me - so much so that they pretty much immediately veer off into heavy rock or other stuff that I may have come across, but that definitely isn’t good as a chill backdrop. And even the much-praised weekly playlist is hit or miss - sometimes it’s weeks with abhorring stuff, then for once I get a good one with two to three songs I actually like.
  - bobsmooth 2y ago
    Spotify has introduced me to many new genres but the algo has gotten worse over time.
  - trallnag 2y ago
    Don't get me started on the weekly playlist. Spotify refuses to accept the fact that I don't speak Ukrainian. Yet a big chunk of the Playlist consists out of Ukrainian music. Probably Spotify is not able to differentiate between Ukrainian and Russian, which I listen to a lot
sandreas 2y ago
My workflow is 1. Buying used and reasonably priced original music CDs 2. Ripping them with EAC[1] and an external LG BH16NS55 to FLAC format (takes 120 seconds per CD - this drive is FAST and ACCURATE) 3. Auto-import the ripped FLACs into my beets.io database via cronjob (which also unifies the metadata automatically in 99% of the cases) 4. Inplace-convert the FLACs to 192kbps mp3 via `beet convert` 5. Archiving the converted perfectly tagged FLACs to Bluray discs, as soon as the archive size hits 25GB 6. Point a self-hosted Navidrome instance and a Windows VM with iTunes to the beets folder 7. Use Substreamer App with Navidrome's smart playlists[2] and "favoriting" on my Android phone / iPhone as well as iTunes syncing my iPod Nano 7 via smart playlists Works absolutely flawless and is less work than I expected. Since I automated everything possible, the only manual thing I need to do is the BUYING, the RIPPING and the Bluray ARCHIVING part. 1: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/ https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/ 2: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/1417 https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/1417
- mmastrac 2y ago
  > 5. Archiving the converted perfectly tagged FLACs to Bluray discs, as soon as the archive size hits 25GB Do you have a rec for any long-life BR discs?
  - sandreas 2y ago
    I use regular Verbatim 25GB disks. Since I keep the original CDs and usually use the Mp3s to listen, this is only a part of my 3-2-1 backup strategy. Nothing meant to be 200 years archival proof :-) However, I never use anything but Verbatim, never had a bad experience with it.
    - accrual 2y ago
      Very cool archival setup! Funny you say that about Verbatim. I have a several old burned discs from the 2000s and 2010s where the dye has degraded and is no longer readable, but I have one specific blue Verbatim disc my childhood friend burned for me in the late 90s, and it still reads today!
jgalt212 2y ago
> automedia to add parity. What do you mean by this?
- callumgare 2y ago
  I’m guessing they’re referring to this: https://github.com/mmastrac/automedia https://github.com/mmastrac/automedia
komali2 2y ago
I love MusicBrainz Picard but the UI doesn't seem to allow me to mass-manage my TB collection of music. Just crashes after trying to load it all into RAM for 20 minutes or something. I'm sure there's a CLI or something that can accomplish what I'm trying to do though.
- herewulf 2y ago
  Try beets[1]. It's likely the CLI answer you're looking for. [1]: https://beets.io https://beets.io
autoexec 2y ago
> Lately I've been using MusicBrainz Picard to re-organize all of these ancient rips and then automedia to add parity. I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day Spotify doesn't even have to disappear, it just has to lose access to the songs you care about or raise their prices to the point where they are unfair, or degrade their service in other ways until it's not worth using. Personally, I'm paranoid about using internet based services to fetch metadata for my local media collection. I imagine their servers log those requests, each filename, the metadata pulled, IPs, and timestamps, and that they keep that data around for at least some length of time. Not sure how many sell that data, but what I'm listening to isn't really anyone else's business and I don't want the RIAA or anyone else to use that information as evidence against me somehow or coming around asking for proof of purchase for every MP3 they got from those logs.
squarefoot 2y ago
> I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day and I'm afraid to lose my older music collection. Services eventually disappear. Not many people recall about Vitaminic, a gem of the early 2K that along MySpace gave countless unknown artists and bands the opportunity to put their music online, then one day poof! and it was gone with all its content. I had saved a few quite interesting tracks on my hard drive and attempted to search for the artists in the hope they moved elsewhere, but no way: they were gone forever. So, screw online services: I'm not going to waste any energy in something whose kill switch is in someone else's hand.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  If the artists didn't own their own copyrights, there's a good chance that their stuff is available somewhere else by now. There are many companies out there that do nothing but put your music onto spotify and youtube for exposure; anything owned by a label is probably there.
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salynchnew 2y ago
Fun fact is that I have at least one CD where there was an audio track misprint (one track repeated). I didn't actually notice until I ripped it and used Picard to analyze the tracks. I also once found two tracks where Spotify's own data was wrong (wrong audio files associated with the album/track names). After failing in my attempts to escalate it through Spotify support several times, I ended up having to reach out to Glenn MacDonald on Twitter to get it fixed.

wismut 2y ago

I spent the better half of my teenage days carefully tagging my music library with this.

SamBam 2y ago
I know. I really miss my old iTunes library. I had the genres and other metadata just the way I liked them. In my quest to find an offline MP3 player for my kid, I spent a bunch of time looking at models, but none of them give you the ability to sort (and shuffle) by artist, album, and genre the way the old iPods did.
noman-land 2y ago
I still consider a well tagged library to be a badge of honor
- looping8 2y ago
  It's a sign of dedication and how much time someone could have before social media and/or becoming old

Venn1 2y ago

EasyTAG is a serviceable cross-platform alternative.

thriftwy 2y ago
EasyTAG is great in the sense that it has sufficient set of knobs to digest all kinds of MP3 tags seen in the wild, and then convert them to the preferred format.

tcsenpai 2y ago

Such a throwback. I need a Windows 2000 virtual machine now.

Springtime 2y ago

I'm glad the sole dev is able to support themselves by donations from this and now their paid Mac version. It's been an indispensable tool for batch audio tagging and the community is very helpful.

UberFly 2y ago
So true. Whenever I need to use it I go and look for an update first and am always relieved (and amazed) that it's still going 20 year later. Best example of software done right.

billfor 2y ago

Media Monkey is great also if you have a large collection. I use the ratings and occasion tags to organize my collection. I like how the meta data is part of the mp3 so you take it wherever your mp3 goes. I guess it’s not economically viable to have a streaming service to allow such flexible customization. mp3gain from 2005 is another indispensable part of a large mp3 collection.

distances 2y ago
> mp3gain from 2005 is another indispensable part of a large mp3 collection. Do you use it for portable mp3 players? Wondering why mp3gain instead of ReplayGain capable player, seems wrong to edit the music data itself instead of just tagging the gain values.
- billfor 2y ago
  mp3gain is at the frame level. Sonos in particular does not honor ReplayGain. So the workflow is to adjust the volume with mp3gain, then re-analyze those levels and set the ReplayGain. That way it plays on devices that don't honor Replay Gain. Sonos sucks for local mp3s - it's the only way to get the volume to come out the same for everything.
  - distances 2y ago
    Yep, probably the best way if you need to use ReplayGain unaware players.
  - iggldiggl 2y ago
    > So the workflow is to adjust the volume with mp3gain, then re-analyze those levels and set the ReplayGain Doesn't that already happen automatically when you bake the adjustment into the file using mp3gain? Also small sidenote: There's also a modded version of mp3gain that supports AAC files, too, including the same workflow of optionally baking the adjustments into the AAC data itself for ReplayGain unaware-software. (https://github.com/dgilman/aacgain https://github.com/dgilman/aacgain)

noman-land 2y ago

Impeccable tagging is something to strive for. I would look at the music libraries of my friends and be disgusted by the chaos.

joeywas 2y ago

This and winamp saw lots of use on my computers back in the early 2000s. I still have spools of CDs full of mp3s i painstakingly tagged. :|

LeoPanthera 2y ago

I've been using Kid3 on my Mac: https://kid3.kde.org https://kid3.kde.org It's not a native Mac app, so it's not really ideal, but it does work very well.

79a6ed87 2y ago
Kid3 is wonderful! Love it, and it has both GTK and Qt frontends
- johnvaluk 2y ago
  And a CLI you can use interactively or for automation (once you get the quoting right).

jonpurdy 2y ago

Interesting; I just discovered and used this tool a month ago. For years I've been wanting to migrate my few hundred remaining MP3 files from iTunes/Music to just store them on the file system but iTunes DB stores play count and star rating in their DB, not in the file itself. Turns out that there's no standard tag for this, but the most common (from what I searched was POPULARIMETER, where you store it in EMAIL|RATING|PLAYCOUNTER format. Email is a string (optional), rating is an int 0-255※, and playcounter as an integer. So I wrote a Python script that would read the file on disk, match it with the entry in iTunes DB, populate POPULARIMETER, then verify everything was set correctly in MP3tag. This took a few hours to do, mostly due to discovering how to do it and verifying everything worked correctly. Unfortunately the MP3 players I use now (VLC and mpv) don't support updating the POPULARIMETER field, so it'll be left as an unchanging relic from my iTunes days. ※ - 1 star → 0.2x255 = 51, 2 star → 0.4x255 = 102, etc

verytrivial 2y ago
Ha! Yes, play count (and reasonable if not always to my taste) tagging is about all I miss from iTune, and iTunes and Time Machine is about all I miss from Mac OS. I used to have "Smart Playlist" or whatever it was called that would randomly select say 30 songs with a play count less than 3 to put on my Shuffle to keep me out of musical ruts. I miss that.

blueboo 2y ago

Love mp3tag. And now in 2024 we can go one step further -- LLMs are the ultimate solution to finally tagging your entire collection consistently.

highspeedbus 2y ago
I feel uneasy every time someone casually advocates the use of LLMs for a task. Sounds dirty. Hard to explain.

internet2000 2y ago

For a Mac OS equivalent, I’m a big fan of Metadatics https://apps.apple.com/us/app/metadatics/id554883654?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/metadatics/id554883654?mt=12

sunaookami 2y ago
Mp3Tag exists as a native app for macOS: https://mp3tag.app/ https://mp3tag.app/
- djkoolaide 2y ago
  I use both the Windows and macOS version almost daily (work vs home), and I'm happy to report that the macOS version is just as efficient as the Windows one when dealing with huge directories. I regularly have to deal with thousands of files at a time, and it just zips through them. One of my all-time favorite applications, no doubt.
ashconnor 2y ago
I always forget which software I used to tag a rip that I do once in a blue moon. I have TriTag in my bash history: TriTag https://github.com/korseby/TriTag https://github.com/korseby/TriTag
sonar_un 2y ago
I use metadatics frequently as well. Great program.
cageface 2y ago
My Mac player also supports tag editing. It’s a bit basic right now but more features are in the works: https://plastaq.com/minimoon https://plastaq.com/minimoon
thirdsun 2y ago
I'd like to recommend Meta: https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ Great piece of software, that has served me well for years.

AdmiralAsshat 2y ago

Man, I wish teenage me had known about this one, rather than using a pirated copy of Tag&Rename. Being able to pull tag data from Amazon was really useful, though...

conradfr 2y ago
I actually have a license for Tag&Rename, it's good software, but Window only.

ggm 2y ago

Genre started out useful. Five or six categories. Classical made sense. Pop made sense. Now, I have to decide if this is West Coast electro skiffle or its Canadian folk influenced digital beats. We wind up needing another tag, to do classical/pop/folk in. Also, players don't agree on artist/composer/orchestra or on movement numbering, you can't even rely on BWV. I've had multiple CD sets split by the amazing variance of back catalogue mining meaning an 11 part cd set of Chopin can match a 9 or 10 part set and a single release cd or two. The taggers are fine. The information model is a nightmare, matched only by how hard approximation of date is in EXIF

deleted 2y ago
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jonathankoren 2y ago
Genre has always been a mess. For a while Primus was a ID3Tag genre in unto themselves. In general, that type of inherently fuzzy categorical will always be a mess. I’m old enough to remember the great alt.music.industrial wars over whether Nine Inch Nails was industrial or not.[0] The problem with ID3 back when I was ripping and encoding stuff back at the turn of the century was that they were fixed length fields. Using CDDB better as a source of truth, but even it had serious inconsistency issues. Not from a data quality perspective, but from a data format perspective. It quickly became a pile of inconsistencies, particularly around artists and multiple artist albums. In the end, I ended up extending it with a better format I called eCDDB. Of course there was no one interested in fixing the format, because CDDB got sold some megacorp, and FreeDB simply ignored the obvious problems. [0] Reznor won a Country Music Award in 2019, so that settles it. He’s country.
- ggm 2y ago
  But "old town road" by Lil Nas and Billy Ray Cyrus gets kicked off the country playlist.
  - jonathankoren 2y ago
    That’s because it’s industrial

xd1936 2y ago

I've been using Puddletag[1] on Linux as an Mp3tag replacement and it works quite well. 1. https://docs.puddletag.net/ https://docs.puddletag.net/

beretguy 2y ago
mp3tag works flawlessly through wine too.
farmerbb 2y ago
Thanks, going to try this out. Mp3tag is one of the few apps I use regularly that I've still been resorting to firing up a Windows VM for (or running it through Wine).
aquova 2y ago
I've always used Kid3 on Linux
jzb 2y ago
Kid3 has been my go-to for a long time, but lately I've been using Strawberry[1] as my all-in-one music player, organizer, and tagger. It has a built-in tag editor with MusicBrainz support and will auto-organize files. My only complaint with that is that it leaves behind old folders and files. e.g. If I have a few directories of MP3/Flac/whatever downloads with cover scans, it'll happily use the tags to organize the way I like it* but if there are "extra" files they stay put and have to be cleaned up manually. But it's really a proper Swiss Army Chainsaw for doing everything in one application. * Proper directory structure is "Artist/(YYYY) Album Name/NN-Song Title.[mp3|aac|flac]" [1] https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ -- a fork of Clementine, which was a fork of Amarok.
squidbeak 2y ago
It's been my stalwart for years, and I appreciate it very much. But it's nowhere near as finished a product as mp3tag, with much greater fragility. For instance, right now after the last update, which throws a python error. Mp3tag on the other hand has worked flawlessly and in every conceivable way since the dawn of time. Like foobar2000, it's one of the best pieces of software ever written.

anonymousiam 2y ago

Closed source and no Linux support.

beretguy 2y ago
It works flawlessly through wine.
ape4 2y ago
You can use the command line tool: id3tag --artist Nirvana Lithium.mp3
chrisjj 2y ago
> Closed source Thank goodness. Just imagine what a mess it would be with 100 cooks.
echelon_musk 2y ago
ExFalso / QuodLibet is a good alternative.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
Neither of which is relevant.

rc_kas 2y ago

$25 dollars???!?!? no thanks

beretguy 2y ago
Is $11 for Spotify every month better?
Crono 2y ago
Its an optional donation. This is freeware ...
- fourfun 2y ago
  Not on Mac. Absolutely worth it though

Grimeton 2y ago

[dead]

eliasson 2y ago

Apparently ID3 included some strange frames such as the Popularimeter (POPM) for storing emails and ratings! lawik goes through some om them in this post which I found entertaining. https://underjord.io/id3-specification-and-speculation.html https://underjord.io/id3-specification-and-speculation.html

mek6800d2 2y ago
I came across his article about a month ago and likewise enjoyed it. I was a little disappointed (but only a little) when I discovered afterwards that his suggestion of using event time codes to set off explosives on stage was actually suggested in the ID3v2 standards themselves! The fanciful ideas on the POPM frame were very interesting. The ID3v2 standards author's late 1990s, pre-massive-spam-onslaught design choice to include an email address seems kind of quaint now!

romdev 2y ago

I'm meticulous about tagging and backing up MP3s for different mixes in car stereos and other devices. One problem is that I have so many MP3s and different copies I don't know which are tagged and when they were ripped. I prefer to retain the file's modified date when I just update tags so I'll know how old the rip is - bit rates have increased a bit since last century. I wrote a Powershell script that sets the date a minute newer when it updates ID3 V1 tags so I can compare files and know that one came from 2005 and has had metadata updated since then. I haven't found a bulk tagger that does this.

ender341341 2y ago
You should consider just adding a `ripped on` tag, or if you're worried about it being a bad encoding then consider re-ripping from sources into a lossless format.
distances 2y ago
> so I'll know how old the rip is - bit rates have increased a bit since last century. It's easy to see which bitrate a track/album has, you don't need to keep dates for that? What's harder to see is what encoder was used -- modern LAME at even 128kbps is a totally different game than some 90s Xing or Fraunhofer. Better would of course be to have lossless files of the originals and mass convert to mp3 when needed, but I suppose that's a different discussion.
Springtime 2y ago
> I prefer to retain the file's modified date when I just update tags so I'll know how old the rip is Mp3Tag has a timestamp preservation setting. There's also the ability to run an external script/program on all selected files (via the Tools sub-menu of the context menu) or by configuring File>Export with a script. For those wanting to preserve original timestamps I'd suggest storing them into custom tags in the files themselves as a backup. Mp3Tag can be set up to do this automatically using an Action (its scripting syntax). That way one can always restore them back using a script.

toastercat 2y ago

I still use this to maintain my music library, which I then listen to with either foobar2000 or cmus.

daneel_w 2y ago

I stopped bothering with MP3s over a decade ago in favor of AAC (in .m4a) and for that I use AtomicParsley (https://github.com/wez/atomicparsley https://github.com/wez/atomicparsley) on the command line...should anyone be looking for such a tool.

mttpgn 2y ago

To modify tags on MP3 files programmatically, I have found the Mutagen library works well in Python.

fourfun 2y ago

The Discogs integration is a great feature. I’ve checked out musicbrainz but it’s no where near as complete for the music I listen to.

ww520 2y ago

Foobar2000 has a very good tag editor. I especially like how it can batch-sync the title tags from the filenames (via Properties -> Tools -> Automatically Fill Values). And the other way around to rename files using their tags (via File Operations -> Rename To). Super useful.

TiredOfLife 2y ago
It also has both musicbrainz and discogs (has albums that musicbrainz doesn't even have artists for) taggers
noema 2y ago
Shame that it is (basically) a Windows exclusive application.
- ww520 2y ago
  It can run on Wine on Linux. Best of both worlds!

esafak 2y ago

I wrote one of these mp3 tag editors for personal use back in the day using C++Builder or Delphi. I can't remember which one but I remember it was a pleasant experience.

donatj 2y ago

Oh hey! There's a Mac version. I was literally looking for Mac Ape tag editor yesterday! I used this way back on Windows 2000 in high school!

anotherevan 2y ago

Have used this for years. Still use it today on Linux under WINE as I just can't find anything else that is anywhere near as good. Basically use Picard to fill in meta-data, then Mp3tag to tidy up, add the album art and tweak naming conventions to my preference when needed.

slmjkdbtl 2y ago

On macOS there's also Meta[0] which I found better than mp3tag. You can also always use builtin Music.app for organization + tagging. I've been using it (or iTunes before) to manage my local music library for 10 years now and it's the best thing of my life, a big plus is I can also sync my library to my iPhone (altho the software quality downgraded a lot since the Big Sur rewrite). I also wonder if there's a cross platform alternative: a good tagger + a good player / organizer + easy to sync to phone + a good player on phone [0] https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/

mcoliver 2y ago

Awesome app. For programmatically modifying mp3 metadata with Python I have found mutagen to be really nice. https://github.com/quodlibet/mutagen https://github.com/quodlibet/mutagen

kls0e 2y ago

Florian Heidenreich ftw!

manoweb 2y ago

What I was looking for is a tool to delete all tags from mp3s so the media players only show the file name. Directories for the band, subdues for each album and each song as a file is how I organize music, but audio players often add their own semantics to what should be a simpler concept.

Cockbrand 2y ago
This is trivial with the command line tool id3v2

DominikPeters 2y ago

In case someone finds it useful, I wrote a simple in-browser app for editing the chapter tags of an MP3 file (for podcasts), which can also edit some basic other tags like title and cover image: https://mp3chapters.github.io/ https://mp3chapters.github.io/ It's based on the node-id3 library, via browserify. It would likely be possible to build an in-browser batch tag editor with the same idea, which then wouldn't require installing an app.

dewey 2y ago

Great alternative for macOS: https://2manyrobots.com/yate/ https://2manyrobots.com/yate/

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Faskil 2y ago

Still the best. And totally worth it. <3

vojd 2y ago

I wrote a similar tool for Linux many years ago: https://github.com/fbngrm/DiscoPy https://github.com/fbngrm/DiscoPy

kybernetikos 2y ago

What I find frustrating is that we write these tools for each individual file format. Calibre for tagging books, this tool for tagging music, another tool for tagging images. This stuff should probably be supported directly for all kinds of files in the operating system.

briHass 2y ago
Windows can read/edit ID3 tags and many other types of metadata formats. It's hidden away in the details, but you can select those columns to show in a details directory view. There's certainly no nice bulk tagging functionality, however.

icecap12 2y ago

I use a tool called TheGodFather

TomMasz 2y ago

I download a lot of FLAC recordings of taper-friendly bands and Mp3tag is indispensable. I wish it could easily read the info.txt files that usually accompany the recording and assign track names but that is about it.

jccalhoun 2y ago

I've just spent some time the last few days using this to clean up my music collection. I had a ton of duplicates in different bitrates but some were already tagged how I wanted them and some weren't. The tool is great but I wish it had some kind of side-by-side mode where it was easier to compare the tags of two files.

roryokane 2y ago

On macOS, I’m happily using Meta for Mac (€25) to edit music metadata tags of individual files: https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ . I still store most of my music in iTunes (renamed to Music in later macOS versions). I’m also happy with the tag editing of iTunes, especially after installing some custom tag-editing AppleScripts from https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php and modifying some of those scripts. However, I am rethinking storing all my music in iTunes given that it can’t play Opus or FLAC files (last I checked) and it makes loud glitchy sounds when it plays an MP3 file whose sample rate is 32k instead of 44.1k. I’ve already had to give up on storing all my music files in the iTunes folder now that my entire music library doesn’t fit on my laptop’s storage. Thus, I have been using Meta more. Edit: I see another commenter also mentioned Meta and Music.app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40471849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40471849

nicoster 2y ago

I think this app really needs a backend so users can share/sync the tags (maybe based on the hash of a mp3 file)

thirdsun 2y ago
Dear god, no. I don't even want to think about someone else messing up my library. I think music enthusiasts are very particular about their media and library management.

dakial1 2y ago

I miss Oink’s PP and what.cd