Rinse by RealNetworks

I've never been a fan of RealNetworks. Back in the day, their audio and video streaming plug-ins sucked big time. Needless to say, I don't have so much hope for their tagging software Rinse.

The demo only allows you to "rinse" 50 songs - not much of a test of it's abilities.

Rinse

Review in MacNN: Tagalicious

Tagalicious has received a 41/2 star review on MacNN. It's got more features than the version I checked out before.

It's worth checking out if you haven't already.

The review can be found here.

tagalicious is delicious

When I see a mac mp3 tagging program that claims to do automatic tagging, I generally get a little skeptical. My major concern is that there won't be a way to preview the changes and the tags will just be added automatically - a major problem, since no tag editor with info look-up is 100% accurate.

That was the case when I first saw Tagalicious. But reading further on their website, I saw what I was hoping to find.

"Review the track info Tagalicious finds for your songs before sending the changes to iTunes."

Alright, I thought, this is worth a try.

And I've got to tell everyone out there to give it a try as well. It's really well done and very accurate. It can even find lyrics!

Tagalicious

(off topic) ipod touch - back from the dead

Here's a quick tip for those with a ipod touch that won't recharge or turn on. Leave it alone! I've had problems with my ipod touch battery draining - especially if I leave wifi on. Once I figured out that it was dead, I'd try the various key combinations to wake it up - holding down the home button and the sleep button at the same time for ten seconds - holding down the home and sleep buttons for ten seconds and then holding down the home button for a minute - holding down the home button and plugging in the usb cable, none of them worked.

I would plug the thing in and it would start to feel a little warm. But then I'd try all those techniques again and they still wouldn't work. Eventually, I decided to get a new battery.

I left the ipod touch unplugged for a couple days and then brought it to work so I could take it down to Tekserve and get a new battery. Just before I left, I decided to try plugging it in one more time - this time it started recharging!

Then a few weeks later it died again. Again, I'd leave it plugged in, hoping it would recharge. Again, I'd try every key combination I could track down online.

I was hanging out with a computer wiz friend of mine, discussing my problem. He mentioned that the ipod touch will go into a special mode when the battery is completely drained, so that the unit can be recharged.

Then a thought occurred to me...

What if there wasn't enough power to start up the unit, but too much power to have the ipod go into it's special recharging mode.

So instead of plugging it in to recharge. I left it unplugged for a day or two and voila! It started recharging after I plugged it in and held down the home and sleep keys for ten seconds.

Maybe this happened twice in a row out of luck, but it's worth a try.

Tagr is a new Tagger

Tagr is another small tagging program. It's missing some basic features, like the ability to get tags from file names. It's new, so it might be worth checking in again to see if they update it.

Tagr

MP3-Info 2.0

One of my absolute favorite utilities for fast and simple id3 editing has gotten a major upgrade. It's called MP3-Info and it's now a application rather than just a finder contextual menu add-on.

Opening the application brings up a window that offers quick access to a menu for renaming your mp3 based on it's id3 tags. It's not incredibly flexible, but the choices of ways to rename the file are those that most people (myself included) would use.

This is great for all those random mp3 files downloaded from blogs. A couple clicks and they're cleaned up.

MP3-Info 2.0

Tag&Rename on the Mac

Here's another option for adventurous souls: Tag&Rename on the mac using Darwine for OSX.

While doing a search to find some new tag editors, I came across posts describing the successful use of Darwine and Tag&Rename. I had used Tag&Rename to edit the tags on my mac using pc emulators, but the usage was always clunky and tended to freeze. Plus, I had to install windows and deal with all the pain that the windows os brings with it. (That's why I have a mac, right?)

This time installing darwine and getting Tag&Rename up and running was much faster. I simply installed a Darwine build for OSX, found here and then downloaded the installer for Tag&Rename here.

So far it does a great job at those mass tagging jobs I always end up doing to get all my tags and file names consistent. I tried to drag and drop an image from the mac to apply the album art, but that didn't work.

I'd be curious to hear other folk's experience with this option.

FixTunes

FixTunes is another one of these "automatic" tag fixing utilities. I've yet to test this one, but, as with all these tag "fixers", I'm a little bit nervous, since I looked through the site and there doesn't appear to be an undo.

FixTunes

The Tagger

Here's another small scale tagger called - "The Tagger". Doesn't look terribly powerful, and the $29 price tag seems pretty steep - but hey, maybe someday it will grow up to be as powerful as Tag&Rename.

The Tagger

IEatBrainz Universal

Pierre Andrews took the IEatBrainz source code from SourceForge and has created a universal build of the automatic tagging software, IEatBrainz.

IEatBrainz uses MusicBrainz acoustic matching in a attempt to figure out a song's tags - even if there are no tags available. Great for those mystery mp3s you have laying around.

IEatBrainz Universal

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...

Wired reviews tag editors - misses some major players

Don't know if I agree with their reviews, but it's good to see the folks at Wired taking a look at tag editors.

Get Your MP3 Tags in Order

Where's tritag for the mac? Where's Tag & Rename for the PC?

qloud - keyword tagging

Here's a iTunes plugin that sounds promising - but not for editing tags. It's Qloud an iTunes plug-in that's currently in alpha for the Mac. I loaded it yesterday and it's an interesting concept that's very similar to TuneTags, but with some important differences.

QLoud lets you tag your tunes with keywords like TuneTags, but also suggests keywords based on their database of other QLoud users.

Start up the visualizer, select a song, artist or album and QLoud connects to their site to see what other users have tagged. Once the songs are tagged, you can do searches for keywords or groups of keywords to help you explore your music in a different way.

Too bad they didn't include the ability to fix your ID3 tags based on other users info. The keywords aren't even stored inside each music file, they're stored in a separate database on your hard drive. (TuneTags stores the keywords in the comments section)

Could really be fun if they get enough users adding tags.

Mac Tagging Manifesto

Every few months or so, I check various sources like versiontracker.com, mp3machine.com and osx.hyperjeff.net to look for something that the mac has been sorely lacking for years.

A decent id3 tagger for mp3 files. Not just for a few mp3 files. But for crazy large numbers of mp3s that are really messed up in unpredictable ways.

Some of the programs work for simple tagging, some of them have their own strengths, some of them are just a mess. When you compare them to a well developed PC tag editor like Tag&Rename, the Mac programs all come up short.

Here are some features that all tag editors should have, but many don't:

1. Don't mess up my files - there are some tag editors out there that claim to be "automatic" or want to use some sort of "magic" to clean your tags. Don't you believe it! My experience with tag editors of this type is that they will screw up almost as much as they fix.

2. Give me a preview - Let me see what you're going to change in the tags before you go ahead and change them. Many tag editors use codes for reading the artist, album info from the filenames. You need a preview to see if you've put in the correct markers. Also, it's important if you're going to be auto-finding album art.

3. Let me edit a bunch of files at once - Here's something that's really lacking in most mac tag editors. A tag editor like Tag&Rename lets you pour in a heap of mp3 files, reads the subdirectories of each folder, but keeps the folder hierarchy on-screen so that you can easily select whole folders to change at once. It even highlights those files that are missing tags or have other issues. This is much easier and much, much faster than dragging and dropping individual files or folders onto the program icon in the dock.

4. Look up the info for me - Here's another area that's missing from most tag editors. Tag info is on the internet - there should be an easy way to get that info and apply it to your tags. There should be an easy way to look up whole album info using freedb - even if there aren't any tags in your files and even if you don't have the complete album. AutotagX handled this pretty well, but doesn't work anymore since freedb has moved it's server.

Every few months I would scour the internet for new possible tag editing solutions. Trouble was many of them were immediately found to be useless and forgettable, so I would end up downloading the same piece of crap software over and over.

Now I have made the list you see on the right. Many of these are old and crappy, but at least I won't waste my time downloading and trying them again.

I haven't included all the PC and Lynx editors you could potentially use in emulation - I've tried that a bit, but what I really want is a real Mac tagger.

If you know of any programs I missed... please add it to the comments.