Mac/Windows: If you’re not too keen on buying movies from the iTunes Store but would like to organise your movies in a program like iTunes, MetaX will save you the time of manually tagging everything by fetching metadata from the net. More »
We know we’ve got a month or so to wait before the iPad officially appears in Australia, we know local carriers will offer plans at unspecified prices, and we know iBooks won’t initially be sold through the Australian operation. However, that might not be such a loss, given that Apple’s bookstore uses the same broad categorisation scheme it applies to its other online retailing operations. More »
Most of us have spent years building up our digital music libraries, along with tons of missing, mismatched and incorrect tags on your music over that time. Here’s a step-by-step guide for organising your entire library, once and for all. More »
A well tagged MP3 collection makes everything from organisation to playback easier. Keep reading for a closer look at your fellow readers’ favourite tools for cleaning up their MP3 tags in this week’s Hive Five. Photo by Darin Barry. More »
Windows only: Every time you save a Microsoft word doc, Word embeds gobs of potentially embarrassing metadata in your document, meaning that when you send a document off to someone else, you may be sending more than you intended. Free application Doc Scrubber analyses Microsoft Word documents for hidden data, scrubs the document of any metadata you tell it to, and then creates a new clean file. Doc Scrubber can scrub whole folders at a time and offers a lot of control over what it scrubs and how it does it. If you do a lot of work in Word—especially with sensitive material—Doc Scrubber could come in very handy.
Doc Scrubber [via gHacks]Windows users have been enjoying music metadata cleaner TuneUp since we first posted about it, but now TuneUp’s ready for your Mac. It’s currently an invite-only beta, so if you’re interested, send an email to lifehacker@tuneupmedia.com with a message containing your name and only your name. They’ll send an invite back your way sometime today. While you’re at it, check out previously mentioned GimmeSomeTune. UPDATE: Looks like we reached our invite quota. If you didn’t make the cut, you’ve been added to TuneUp’s email list and will be alerted when it’s officially available.
Windows only: Microsoft Pro Photo Tools is a full-featured metadata editor for your digital photographs. The app supports pictures saved in RAW format along with JPEG and TIFF, and editing your metadata works the same no matter what your default file type is. Apart from extensive run of the mill metadata editing, Microsoft Pro Photo Tools’ marquee feature is geotagging, which can add location information to your photos in a number of ways. Once geotagged, you can view any of your images on a Windows Live map. Microsoft Pro Photo Tools is freeware, requires .NET 3.0 and Windows validation (blech). If you’ve already got a favourite metadata editor for your photos, let’s hear about it in the comments.
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. Tune Instructor [via Cool OSX Apps]
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.
