Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Tag Your Music Files with MP3Tag


As your digital music collection grows, keeping your music organized by tagging (labeling) your music becomes more and more important. Before I began using iTunes as my digital music "organizer", I used only two programs for my music: WinAmp and MP3Tag. WinAmp was and still is an excellent music player and Mp3Tag has continued as the supreme music file tagger available. It's a small freeware (donations welcomed) app that handles tagging a small or large digital music collection with ease. It's reliable, simple to use and very powerful so if you want an application for music tagging, MP3Tag is the one.

Why MP3Tag?
First of all tagging your digital music is useful to organize everything. You tag for genre (rock, rap, 80's etc), for artist, album name etc. This will typically be done for you already if you downloaded from some online music sites, but others might not have the correct descriptions or tags for the files. It's likely you might want to customize your songs to your genre classifications. Also, if you ripped the songs from your CD's you will want to add all the tags before adding to your music player or even to iTunes. Even though every one of your MP3 players including iTunes, WinAmp, and Windows Media Player all have the capability to tag your music, you will likely want a quick, easy and powerful standalone application that will quickly do the job independently of your music player.

What does Mp3Tag do?
Mp3tag edits the tags, renames the files based on the tag information, replaces words and/or characters based on the tags and file names, imports and exports tag information, creates play lists, adds album covers and more. MP3tag has the ability to check the online freedb database and Amazon.com for tag information. One of the new features of versions 2.35 to 2.38 include the ability to search for and add the album art to the music file based on the album name.

Using MP3Tag
First download MP3Tag HERE and install it.
Select the directory with your digital music files (File-Change Directory) and select the folder with your music.
MP3Tag will then load all of your music files ready to be categorized.
From this point you simply select your file and update the title, artist, file name and any other tags you want to edit

One of the really nice features of Mp3Tag is the conversion feature. Here you can key off of the filename to create tags: Say your file names are all formatted like: amy winehouse-rehab-back to black.mp3. You can do a convert file name to tag where it adds tags in this way: artist-song name-album name. It then can populate one or more songs based on the file names. You can do the same thing in the reverse way to change the file name based on the tags. There are unlimited ways to use the convert feature including cleaning up file names, tags etc in a more automated way.

MP3Tag supports MP3, aac, flac, ape MP4, M4A, OGG Vorbis, OptimFROG (ofr)(ofs), Musepack (mpc), AAC, wma, Monkey's Audio(ape), FLAC, True Audio and a bunch of other file types. I highly recommend this free program. If you have digital music that needs to be organized, give it a try.

For the Mp3Tag Website CLICK HERE

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