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

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?

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.