Mac OS X only: Free application Tune Instructor adds advanced ID3 tag editing for your iTunes library through a smart third-party utility. The iTunes helper boasts features like search and replace for your tags, or it can set ID3 tags from a filename or set filenames from ID3 tags. It can automatically search and embed album art or lyrics—though I ran into issues with German-language lyrics sometimes showing up rather than English. The application has a lot of potential, and works well overall. I did run into a few peculiarities when testing it, but overall it offers advanced, worthwhile ID3 editing beyond what iTunes offers by default. Tune Instructor is freeware, Mac OS X only.

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Windows only: Music application TuneUp scans your iTunes library to fill in and clean up your music's metadata, including album art. After you install it, just point it at songs in your library you want to clean up; TuneUp fingerprints and analyzes them and then provides a diagnostic overview of your missing or incorrect metadata. You can then verify and clean up all your metadata with the stroke of a button. In theory it's very similar to previously mentioned MusicBrainz, but it's an altogether fresh take with a few more features.

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It's not surprising that Google decided to make a submission to the ACCC over eBay's controversial plan to make PayPal the sole payment method available on the site. It's not surprising that Google asked that its name was kept off the public version of its submission. And sadly, it's not surprising that -- as a great story at AuctionBytes reveals -- an Australian eBay user, David Bromage, managed to deduce Google's involvement by looking at metadata attached to the PDF file. But is it possible to avoid those kinds of problems?

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Windows only: Freeware application MP3-Check examines your music library to weed out files that are missing important metadata or those that don't match certain criteria. iTunes built-in duplicate finder is pretty limited, but MP3-Check similarly weeds out MP3s using criteria like bit rate, sample rate, and gain volume. As an added bonus, MP3-Check handles huge directories of MP3s with aplomb, and when you find files that don't meet your standards, you can launch your favourite metadata editor and set things straight. MP3-Check is freeware, Windows only, requires .NET 2.0.

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Blogger Dennis Best, who previously schooled us about the value of built-in Getting Things Done apps, expands on his all-inside-the-Mac thinking by noting a simple way to organise every email message, document, iCal event, or other file. Add the ° character (Shift-Option-8 on Mac keyboards) directly in front of any word you want to track with, and both Spotlight (and, of course, Quicksilver) can quickly catch and sort your keywords for you. Guest poster Nick Santilli suggested a similar metada system using the "&" character, but Dennis' idea tags files by adding only a single, non-intrusive step you can do right inside the text.

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Linux only: Tired of seeing your songs show up as "01.mp3" in your music player? It's due to bad metadata tags on your music files, a frequent side effect of music sharing services and hasty CD rips. Former editor Rick Broida showed us how to tame our music libraries into shape with Windows programs, but Linux users have a nice option as well. Desktop utility Ex Falso fixes MP3, Ogg Vorbis and other files manually or based on filenames, and includes a feature to quickly set track numbers. Ex Falso is a free download available in many Linux repositories (search for the package exfalso), requires the GStreamer 0.10, PyGTK, GTK+ 2.8, Mutagen 1.9, and Python 2.4 packages, and is also available as a source download.

With the popularity of sites like del.icio.us and YouTube, tagging has become (for better or sometimes worse) a standard feature of nearly every site on the internet, and virtually everyone has a pretty fair idea what tagging is and how to use tags online. But the latest operating systems from Apple and Microsoft also have tagging built into their filesystems, meaning that the same basic tagging ideas available online are also available for the files on your hard drive. It sounds like an excellent idea in theory, but it doesn't seem as though offline tagging is taking hold. So we're wondering:

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