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.