Anyone know of a free software program that can automatically fill in mp3 tags from an Internet database (like CDDB)?
Apple’s iTunes, for one.
iTunes doesn’t populate the tag info automatically unless you are burning from the CD. I have several hundred mp3s already on my computer.
The problem is that CDDB has tags for albums, not songs.
Sure it does.
So far I’ve tried Windows media player and another program called Music Label. Both fill in all the tag information by searching a database based on title and artist or file name. WMP doesn’t save the info to the mp3s and ML is too buggy and doesn’t work properly.
Here’s one to try:
http://www.musicbrainz.org/introduction.html
It doesn’t run off of the CDDB info, but the Mac version that I used did a decent (85%) job of tagging unknown files.
msmith537 wrote
I stand corrected.
When I said “tag”, I was using the wrong word. A better word would’ve been “signature”. I.e. I meant that CDDB has a database that matches some ID of an album to it’s title, artist, etc. I don’t know where this ID comes from, perhaps there’s a unique number assigned by some standards body, or perhaps it’s a hash over the whole thing. But the bottom line is that this ID exists and is unique per album. Such is not the case for mp3s, where neither a unique ID nor a consistent hash exists.
I didn’t think about the idea of looking up ID3 tag parameters being looked up based on the file name.
Try MoodLogic. Reorganizing your music is one of its many features.
Tag & Rename will look up and recognize full albums from either Freedb or CDDB, based on, I’m guessing, the file size and order.
Thanks
I’m trying a shareware version of a program called Helium but I don’t recommend it. It’s unwieldy and overwrites your id fields even if it doesn’t find anything.
I like Musicmatch’s Supertagging feature. I just reformatted, so Is till just have the free version, and it is letting me use Supertagging, so looks like it’s a good option.
Apparently I lied. Somehow I missed the “Requires Plus!” window.
Someone recommended this program to me when I asked a similar question. And while it seemed to be able to fix most of my files, I couldn’t even check to see how well it worked without purchasing the program. And notes on the forums suggested that it’s not well supported.
From their FAQ:
It’s been a while since I used MoodLogic, but I didn’t have to pay for it. I just got a lot of credits from submitting my own unrecognized songs. You just have to type in the artist and title, and answer a few subjective questions about the song: is it fast or slow, happy or sad, etc.
Try Media Monkey. The free version is surprisingly powerful.