Beat Your MP3 Tags Into Shape With These MediaMonkey Scripts

@djlurch: I agree with ninedosus: I only download legal mp3s from Amazon and eMusic mp3's, and they're often poorly tagged. eMusic's been getting better lately, but still not perfect.

MediaMonkey is my new favorite... been using it to rename, convert, tag and reduce bitrate for about a month... loving every bit of it...

kris259

Are you trying to give us malware? the site was caught by Chrome saying it contains malware! Sorry if this is a false alarm but I would hope you check the pages.

Well, at least he was spot on about being unpopular with his comment. You at least have to give him that.

Jacob_Grimm

@MrJenkins: Chrome told me the same thing. At least the lifehacker articles are available.

I tried to link to the script but something went awry. Here's the link: [www.mediamonkey.com]

@LethAL: MediaMonkey has a script available that lets you use MusicBrainz to auto-tag your MP3s.

@diZzyCoDeR: You must be an Apple fan boy....

just because he has 40,000 songs doesn't mean he paid a buck per song to get there. You see, a buck per song is INSANELY overpriced cause you can get music, especially if you shop used shops, for far less than this.

Hardell Ward

@djlurch: Theft? No, I don't think so. Copyright infringement? Yea, probably... but that's not theft. I know the MPAA and RIAA throw that word out a lot when talking about CI, but it's simply incorrect.

If I come over to your house, box up your CDs and take them to my house, then that's theft. If I come over to your house and make copies of all of your CDs, then that's copyright infringement. I may get sued for the later, but I can get arrested for the former.

MSB

@LethAL: MusicBrainz certainly is one of the best out there.

Helped me tag loads of tracks of which I didn't even know the artists name.

It's implementation in Amarok is also pretty decent, although I recommend the standalone client for batch re-tagging ;)

shinchan

Since my crusade against Itunes has begun a few days ago the dust has settled and Mediamonkey is the last one standing. I've steamrolled through aTunes, Songbird, Foobar, and a few other. Mediamonkey wins for its awesome tagging capabilities and its nifty library functions. It's a real shame it's ass-ugly though.

Charles Thomas Horovitz

@djlurch: I call bullshit. There's no way you've got nearly $40,000 tied up in music. Unless you drive a Lamborghini -- in which case, you have likely bought a russian bride to label your music for you.

@deanhatescoffee: ditto, this is an awesome program.. although the handling of duplicates is poopy :(

@Jeremy Ott: thanks guys for mp3tag link. i love it so far!

craig198

@djlurch:
My mp3 player only reads IDv2 tags, so when I LEGALLY purchase music I process them through mp3tag to remove the v1 tag... I also use it to format the filenames and how the tag is laid out.

cc82

Another vote for mp3tag (I've also used Picard with good results). As far as my music player goes, I've tried iTunes, Media Monkey, WMP and have always gone back to Winamp... simple layout, with lots of plugins to customize.

cc82

All I'm gonna say is
[easytag.sourceforge.net]

cddb support, picture embedding, nuff said.

Um - the only software you should ever use for tagging mp3 is Tag&Rename Fullstop.
I even use it on my mac!

@deanhatescoffee: Agreed. Media Monkey tends to falter when it comes to more obscure musicians and albums. Where Mp3Tag I have complete control.

Jeremy Ott

I use a combination of Picard and manual tagging with foobar2000 to fill in the blanks. There's a new component for fb2k that will grab MusicBrainz data.

[www.hydrogenaudio.org]

@djlurch:

Forget about unpopular, how about completely wrong? I get improperly tagged CDs all the time (or CDs that aren't tagged at all). At least 1 CD out of 5 will rip with no track titles, no album, artist, genre, etc. This is also a pretty big problem with (legally acquired) mp3 files (had this happen to me several times with Amazon's free mp3s).

A lot of times I won't have time to fill in every track title, genre, and whatnot. So I'll just fill in the artist and album and set Media Monkey on the task of filling in the blanks.

Maybe you could keep these things in mind next time you want to mount your high horse and accuse all those with screwy tags of piracy.

ninedosus

I've used both iTunes & Media Monkey. Media Monkeys ID3 editing is indeed nice, but my iTunes never recognized any of the changes, which I made a lot. Unless I missed something. Sucks

erpitt

@djlurch:
What if when you rip the cds, you manually tag the songs? Or you don't tag them at all?

Andrivious

I will be extremely unpopular with my comments (guaranteed!)

The only reason that this is such a problem is that there is so much theft and file sharing going on.

If you rip from a real CD, the CDDB will find the data for you.

I have 250GB of music (40,000 songs). All of it legally acquired. All of it properly tagged.

With today's tools, there's no excuse for improperly tagged mp3s unless you are stealing.

File sharing rebuttal in 3...2...1...

djlurch

@EnzoFX: How do you deal with Itunes' way of handling libraries? With media monkey, you move files around, add a few albums, etc. and you just rescan and all is well.

I just wish there was a program as good as Remote for the ipod to control media monkey (iMonkey sucks)

holyspidoo

oh, also, Media Monkey's UI need drastic work.

EnzoFX

I've come to really prefer iTunes, it's simple, and handles all the ID3 tags consistently, I had mixed results the good long while I used Media Monkey (mp3tag was more concise). I organize as I add, everything is perfectly and fully tagged =D

EnzoFX

Awesome! I was already in love with MediaMonkey. Finding a few scripts I wasn't aware of makes that love even deeper.

gpzbc

i still personally like mp3tag to format and clean my Mp3 tags :)

chinesealbumart01

@lorenleah:

I use Mp3tag. it worked great for Unicode songs... :)

chinesealbumart01

Second that. Media Monkey is too bloated and nearly not as great as MP3tag.

AltheaNarballs

I've been looking for anything like this for the MAC, anybody know of something similar? MusicBrainz is not the same and is more difficult for me than MediaMonkey.

yorch

@wakebordr : It supports iPod, iPod Touch, and the iPhone.

Also, everything except probably Windows Media Player is better than iTunes ;-)

AJ_Syrinx

I like using Tag & Rename.

AJ_Syrinx

Oh my god, thank you so much. I've been looking for something like this for ages. I hate going into foobar and seeing hundreds of MP3's in their own random categories.

sdper

@lorenleah:

Use Winamp. It uses audio fingerprinting and GraceNote to identify and tag music. I was pleasantly surprised that the GraceNote database has some K-pop music data. I'm sure it has J-pop and C-pop data as well.

greenbot

Media Monkey is an excellent program for managing a digital music library. I paid for the lifetime license and it has paid off much. However, you don't need the Gold version for mp3 editing and batch music format conversion between just about any format out there. There are some options to let Media Monkey organize your folder system if you don't like to do that yourself as well.

MisterBoomBoom

I was going to checkout this article when Chrome told me not to [img27.imageshack.us]

I also recommend MusicBrainz Picard.

MrJenkins

I was considering this, but I haven't decided if this is better than Itunes since I have and Ipod and like to put movies on it. What do you think?

wakebordr

Might I suggest Mp3tag.

[www.mp3tag.de]

Easy to use and great for batch editing.

@LethAL: +1

Shouldn't really be relied on as a crutch for EVERYTHING (that 8 year old untagged/badly tagged/downright mislabeled MP3 you might have stashed away on a data CD-R from 2000 when WinMX was still in play, etc.) but usually does the trick in most situations.

Jacob_Grimm

@XanderCrews: It does, it just doesn't handle them well.

Jacob_Grimm

Mind readers! I've read Lifehacker articles about MP3 tagging in the past but never got around to trying any suggestions out. I just logged on to search Lifehacker and this new article was here, waiting for me. I'm currently downloading MediaMonkey and look forward to wading through my digital tunes with it. Thanks!

Trying this right now on my 40 gig library...let you know how it goes.

@lorenleah:

I could not agree more with this!

byis

@kazemizuhi: Does songbird handle podcasts yet?

XanderCrews

Anyone know how to get Media Monkey to stop marking tracks that it plays as modified? It's making my synchronization process quite a bit slower than it needs to be.

XanderCrews

I use all of those. They're good choices. A couple other that I can't live without are Lyricator (batch lyrics search) and RegExp Find & Replace (find and fix tags based on Regular Expressions).

Okay, now how about a program that supports Unicode? It's ridiculous that I'd have to set my computer to Japanese/Chinese/etc. encoding to get a program to work correctly with foreign-language tags in this day and age.

lorenleah

Better yet, use MusicBrainz Picard. It's cross-platform, has its own database of correct tags (with sources), can download some album art (not the best, usually) and can find out what "song 1 - unknown artist.mp3" is by PUiD fingerprinting.

LethAL

Bastards, i've been using that monkey symbol as my logo for about 4 years now. Dammit. If you haven't guessed it's the outline of one of the 'Barrel Of Monkeys'.

windows only?

ihityouinthenose

@kazemizuhi: Stop thinking my exact thoughts.

Media Monkey truly is the best music management (AFAIK) application out there. Now I just wish A. Songbird could match it's functionality or B. Media Monkey could look as good as Songbird.

It's a tough world.

Can you guys recommend a good program to handle duplicate mp3's? I want something that will choose the best duplicate to keep and let me configure that somehow.

e.g. I have the same song under Artist\ and Artist. I want to delete the one in , but if it is a higher bitrate then keep it.

MrCrispy

@erpitt: I could be wrong, but I've noticed before that iTunes only "notices" changes if the file is played in iTunes. For instance, if you change info on 100 files in Media Monkey or another program then open iTunes, they won't look any different UNTIL you play each one. As each one is selected and starts playing its meta info will update. Must have something to do with iTunes storing basic info in its database. Kinda the same deal where if you delete a bunch of songs outside of iTunes then open iTunes, they'll still show up there--until you try to play them. THEN you get the error.

@MrCrispy: You can use Media Monkey to find duplicate tracks. I wouldn't want to let it pick which version to keep though. Anyone can resave a crappy 96 bit file as 320.

@XanderCrews: First make sure that it isn't modifying your tracks. Check your settings; MM3 will change your music files, for example, if you have both "Level Volume" and "Analyze Volume" selected. Also, if you have it automatically getting tag info from the web and updating your tags, that is a modification too.

Jim

J-Mac

@XanderCrews:
Options->Library->Tags & Playlists -> Modify Timestamps when updating tags

Could be the "# of times played" counter that's doing it.

greenkabbage

@lorenleah:
Mediamonkey does Unicode. Obviously it can't auto-correct tags that were tagged in Japanese/Chinese ANSI codepages. Blame the people who tagged the files before you got them ;)

+1 for mp3tag, though lately MM has been able to fill all my needs.

[www.mp3tag.de]

greenkabbage

@kazemizuhi:
Not sure if it's a decent approximation, but there is a Songbird skin here:

[www.mediamonkey.com]

greenkabbage

@diZzyCoDeR:

I joined the CD clubs lots and lots of times. I am also a former full time mobile dj.

Quite a few years ago I went through my CD collection and converted my collection. At the time I had 1,000 CDs. Each CD took one hour to rip and convert. This was before the days of CDDB or FreeDB. Doing the conversion process today would be VERY easy. I'm guessing it would take less than 10 minutes to do a CD.

For 40 hours a week for 6 weeks I ripped CDs.

djlurch

Winamp has a built in ability to auto tag music.
It works great, is easy to use, and best of all doesn't require any additional software (assuming you use Winamp for music).

GldRush98

Google Chrome suggests, "Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer! The website at tippopotamus.blogspot.com contains elements from the site reasonpad.com, which appears to host malware"

So be careful.

@Jeremy Ott: Last I checked, Media Monkey doesn't handle Unicode tags so you're out of luck if you have music in a language other than English.

I love the Monkey!!!!! iTunes obliterated my 100 GB music collection with its cryptic tagging and file folder "storage solutions" (over a year later and I am still sifting through the wreckage) so I will never use it again. MusicMatch was my secret weapon for tagging but between MP3Tag and my new best MM (Media Monkey) life is rosy all over again. Thanks for the tip Lifehacker.. I found out about MM here! J

GabriellaMite

I seem to recall iTunes doing an auto retagging at one point. It was around the time that the Genius was first introduced. iTunes chagned the names/titles/genres on a lot of my files (I know this for sure because it put in horribly wrong generes in some places i.e. Metallica = "jazz"). I can't seem to replicate that no matter what I try, though.

NinaCaecus

@pirate_prentice: Lyricator is great! Thanks. Never bothered updating my library with lyric tags because I didn't want to go through each one individually.

onlyonthursdays

@wakebordr : Mediamonkey is a great alternative for Itunes, you'll be surprised at its sync speed! But for putting videos on I use winamp with the ml_ipod plugin, and this works well.
[mlipod.sourceforge.net]

onlyonthursdays

I've been using Media Monkey for over 2 years. I have used all the others ... Tag & Rename, Picard, MP3Tag, etc., and always found them a little lacking. They did the job, but not as painlessly as Media Monkey. It was also the best substitute for The Godfather which I used to use before it was abandoned a few years back.

IMHO, what separates Media Monkey from the rest is the extensibility available through addons and scripts that are supported by the rest of the community. From a development point of view, they offer the ability to script in well known languages (VBScript and JavaScript) which is better than learning a totally new language and API to accomplish the task. From the user point of view, while the core functionality is mostly what is needed 90% of the time, the addons allow you to get the extra 10% of the way there without too much grief. And that's nice!

Though, I do not like the album art I get from Amazon, or some of the other addons that are available for MM. For art, I use Album Art Downloader to gather large art for other internet resources.

savedsoul

I get the following warning when I click on the provided link: Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer! The website at tippopotamus.blogspot.com contains elements from the site reasonpad.com, which appears to host malware – software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer. For detailed information about the problems with these elements, visit the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page for reasonpad.com. Learn more about how to protect yourself from harmful software online.

DanielleCachebag

And where's "windows only" tag???????

MurrayDeiphontes

Gotta go with Picard. Even when it couldn't figure out the finger print, all the other options were there, like folder-based extrapolation, etc... This application is the only one that managed to clean up a very messy selection of over 8000 some-odd tracks borrowed from all the garbage music applications, like iTunes and WMP. It even offers to fix file names! There is an excellent feature that is missing in all other tagging applications: it specifies, based on color, how likely picard guessed the artist/album/etc correctly, so you can judge for yourself whether or not you trust its assumptions.

rdw200169

I use foobar2000 with the MusicBrainz component for all my tagging needs. I have it bound to F7 for quick access.

mp3tag has been my go-to for a number of years, but as a recent switcher to mac, i'm wondering if anyone has suggestions on something comparable? (if not, will stick to mp3tag via fusion).

@deanhatescoffee: agreed, mp3tag gets the job done, and you stay in control...

@LethAL: How does it handle popular Korean and Japanese tracks (as they comprise 20-30% of my music library)?

@greenkabbage: Wow, that's the cleanest looking skin I've ever seen for MM. Thanks. It will be a little less painful when I'm forced to use MM.

Been using mp3tag for quite a while and I love it. Free as well. Going to try this too.

MadonnaLance

@deanhatescoffee: Ditto. After giving both MediaMonkey and MP3tag a try, I'm swayed by the latter.

@cheesebubble: it's a couple days later and after trialing MediaMonkey and a few others, I've settled on MP3tag. I thought it was easiest to navigate and use. It's great.

been trying to organize my reggae-dancehall library : i want to tag songs by their riddim, without adding the riddim's name to the song/artist/album name. What tag could I use that would be recognised by the Monkey and, lets say, Mp3tag ? they each have many different possibilities of tagging, but I can't find one that is common to both.Maybe its possible to see the script behind the tags ? if anyone has a hint on it..

LoisAmythaon

@djlurch: Well Mr. DJ, then I extend apologies, b/c that story I believe. But man, 6,000 hrs ripping CDs.. yikes.

I had this idea of a slimROM tower w/ some 20 readers and a 1TB drive to take to ppls houses and rip their music collections and tag them for them... that would have saved yo ass fo sho. =)

now, for the rest of you lot.. Aside from our friend Lurch here whose living is music, WE ARE ALL GUILTY OF MUSIC AND/OR SOFTWARE PIRACY. get over it. the world is changing and open-source is the future.