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...