Tunes Tuner version 0.9 - public beta

Tunes Tuner isn't a tag editor, really, it's more of a tag "tweaker" (and tongue twister). It can do various text tweaks like capitalization and search & replace on your tags in iTunes.

Tunes Tuner

Leopard - still no love for id3 tags in the finder

I've been waiting for Leopard to come out in the hopes that finally we'd see support for viewing id3 tags in the finder.

No such luck.

Despite all the hoopla about coverflow and other features being added to the finder - making it more like iTunes, there isn't really an easy way to see a list of your mp3 files and tell whether or not they're tagged. Or sort them by artist, album, etc.

The closest you get is when you use "quick look". Click once on a mp3, hit the space bar and you get a window that shows the song's id3 info along with a function that allows you to play - without having to open up another app. That's pretty cool - but far from what I was hoping for.

Didn't Windoze '98 include the ability to view and sort folders by artist, album, etc?

I guess we're expected to load all our mp3s into iTunes and view the info there...

Leopard

Picard from MusicBrainz (beta)

I've been waiting for this one to come out for a while. The folks at MusicBrainz have been rewriting their tagging software so that it will work on a variety of platforms - including Mac OSX. It's still a beta, but it's worth a look.

Picard

AutoTagX v3.00 Released

One of my favorite tools for tagging has version 3 out and it's hot! This is definitely one to check out. Searches for tags using a variety of sources and then lets you pick which results are the best. Highly Recommended.

AutoTagX

Jaikoz v1.11.1 Build 1032 out now

Whole lot of ones in that version number! This update has some bug fixes. Time to take another look!



jaikoz

MPFreaker - 1.7 - New features, Same old problems

MPFreaker is out with version 1.7, but after giving this program another look, I simply can't recommend it. Why? No undo and no ability to quit without saving the changes to the files.

That's right. If MPFreaker searches through the various databases and decides that your album is called Are You Expereinced by Jimmy Hendricks - you're stuck with it.

...and we know how often freedb and other databases have typos, right?

MPFreaker

Try at your own risk.

beaTunes 1.1.6

This program certainly isn't a full-on id3 editor, but I was really surprised at the info it was able to pull up from the internet about some pretty obscure music. Sarolta Zalatnay anyone? It found a description for her pronto. It also finds bpm and fixes typos and genres. Worth checking out.

beaTunes

Corripio 0.7 - Now with plug-ins

nClass Software has just released a new version of Corripio, a freeware artwork and lyric finder. The latest version has a plug-in architecture for finding lyrics and artwork using scripts. Now if they'd add plug-in scripts for finding the correct track info from musicbrainz, freedb, etc. - that would be great. Right now they include some bare-bones tag editing support, but that's all.

Corripio

MusicBrainz Picard QT Tagger for Mac

Just finished digging around the MusicBrainz forum and noticed that they are doing a rewrite of their Picard tagger - with a new GUI toolkit that would eventually make it able to run on macintosh. Right now it's too complicated (for me) to get up and running. Any ambitious taggers out there want to give it a shot?

Check it out

AutoTagX 3.00 beta 4 Now Available

There's a new beta of AutoTagX out and my tests with it have been very positive. It's got bug fixes for the various crashes during internet searching. This version works until July 12.

AutoTagX 3.00 beta 4

TuneTagger - another automatic tag fixer

TuneTagger is an automatic id3 tag fixer and artwork download program that works on the songs you have playing in iTunes. As a song plays, TuneTagger searches for missing id3 info, lyrics and artwork - all changes are subject to your approval. (good idea!)

TuneTagger

Musorg 0.2 Version Out Now

Last time I looked at Musorg, it was just another simplistic tag editor. Version 0.2 adds bug fixes as well as multiple directory/file selection, improved FreeDB lookup and added support for additional tags like "Part of Compilation", "Album Artist" and "Disc Number".

Did I mention it's freeware? Go check it out!

Musorg

Media Rage Version 3.0 Released

Rats. Version 3.0 of Chaotic Software's Media Rage is out. Why am I complaining? Because Media Rage is blessed with one of the most annoying user interfaces of any id3 editor I've ever seen. Each time they come out with a new version, I feel compelled to take it for a test drive and see if it's any more intuitive.

One new feature may help considerably. It's called "Tool Chain" and allows you to do different functions to a file or group of files in sequence.

Media Rage 3.0

An important mp3 renamer I forgot to mention...

I've had this list of Mac mp3 tag editors up for a while and I only now realized that I've forgotten one of my fave tools for quickly renaming my mp3s from their filenames. The tool is called MP3-Info CMM and it's a freeware contextual menu add-on that lets you see info about an mp3, shows you many of the tags and also lets you rename the file using some common rename patterns. It's perfect for those single mp3 files downloaded from blogs - if they remembered to add id3 tags, of course.

Check it out.

MP3-Info

NexTune offers an iTunes alternative

I haven't tested this out yet, but this player claims to download info about your music from its database. Might have id3 tag correction, might not. But it looks like it definitely has something similar to TuneTags, which enables you to have keywords added to your music.

NexTune

jaikoz audio tagger update

They keep updating this - which is great - but I didn't find the MusicBrainz tag correction to work very well. I threw a bunch of mp3s at it and it didn't find anything.

jaikoz

AutoTagX Beta

AutoTagX, a great automatic tag finder is back from the dead! It stopped working when freedb.org changed hands, but the developer is working on a new version now and has beta releases posted on his blog. Check it out.

AutoTagX Beta Blog

iTunify Update

iTunify has been updated to 1.6, adding some essential tagging features, including creating tags from a filename and changing a filename from tag information.

Here's a list of the latest additions
- Added "Embed Artwork" feature
- Re-designed the GUI for Im-/Export Artwork
- Re-designed the GUI for Im-/Export Tags
- Added option to import tags from a track's file name
- Added option to import tags from a track's file comment
- Added option to export tags to a track's file name
- Added option to export tags to a track's file comment

This app bills itself as "the missing set of tools for iTunes". Might be time to take another look...

The Leopard and the Metadata

Sounds like a bad sci-fi short story, huh. No, I'm not dabbling in blog fiction, I'm trying to type while keeping my fingers crossed. Macworld is coming up and on January 9th, Steve will probably give us another peek at the progress on Leopard and I'm hoping that we'll see finder viewing (and sorting) support for ID3 metadata.

Right now, if you're sitting at a PC with a relatively recent version of windows (lucky you)- you can choose to see artist, album info (and more) right in your file lists. On the Mac you have to choose "Get Info" and start to reveal panels before you see that the Mac supports metadata too, it just can't show it in the main finder windows.

Why can't the Mac have this? It would make editing your ID3 tags much easier, since you could easily select just the files that need to be updated without opening them in iTunes.

I'm also surprised to see that despite the fact that there are so many finder replacement programs out there, that none of them (that I could find) supported showing and sorting files by ID3 info in their main windows.

Here's hoping Leopard takes a step forward and offers better metadata support for all files in the finder...