I have spent an embarrassing amount of my life editing mp3 tags on my mac. I have read through articles here on LH, used maybe 5 different utilities to supposedly make it faster/easier/etc, and nothing has proved faster than manual adjustment in Itunes (which is not that fast). Anyone have processes or sofware ideas for the Mac that have saved them a whole bunch of time on this?

chuckeroo

Although a classic on Lifehacker, not everyone may know about MusicBrainz. In short, it's a ginormus database that can identify music.
With the new version of the Picard tool, it has become much easier to "tag" files. If you're lucky, it's a drag, wait, check and save -- with lots of metadata, like release year, publisher and so on. It can move and auto-rename your files also. Given some of your files don't have any naming or the naming differs to wildely, this might be a faster alternative to 'manual' tagging programs.
[musicbrainz.org] works for Lin&Win

Greetings
xeen

xeen

@CHUCKEROO: Only filling out the artist, album, and track name fields speeds up the process a lot. Genre is often hard to define and other details aren't as useful when you're sorting.

@XEEN: I love picard for singles, but it splits up my albums. It will tag half the songs as being from the original cut and half the songs as being from the 20th anniversary edition so it looks like I have incomplete rips of both.

@everyone: This program looks neat. Easytag does the same job so try it too.

nighttimestereo

I've yet to find a Linux tag editor as good as MP3TAG on Windows, in the sense that I can edit a whole group of MP3s at a time spreadsheet-style, so I use wine to run that on Ubuntu.

brianary

@brianary: MP3TAG seems to run fine under Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 with wine 0.9.46)

nighttimestereo

@brianary,

Easytag of course, in any good ubuntu repo ! Or here :
[easytag.sourceforge.net]

You can do anything that MP3TAG does (included renaming scritps) and even more. MP3TAG can't handle big collections (more than 20'000 titles), I didn't find easytag's limit (my collection has today 65'000 titles)

Alterne

WRT the MusicBrainz suggestion, I think users who are interested in Jazz and Classical music will find it less than helpful. MusicBrainz shares ID3's bias for modern popular music, with the predominant model of singer-songwriters, and without much interest in soloists, etc.

I can just *barely* manage to cram the information I want about my Jazz and Classical tracks into ID3v2 tags, but I find that many of the existing tools do not support the tags I want well. Most of the GUI tools support only the conventional pop music tags, and are not user-configurable enough to extend to the ones needed for jazz and classical.

Then, of course, there's spoken word, and my old radio shows.

I find there's still no substitute for command-line tools that will let me address *all* the tags.

rpg

I swear by this app, but if you just use it for mp3s, you're missing the best feature: the fact that this (and it's accompanying media player, Quod Libet) are two of the few apps that truly support vorbiscomment tags.

In other words, rather than having numerous tags like "so-and-so and their friend" I have
artist=So-and-So
artist=Friend
genre=Rock/Pop
style=Indie
style=Lo-Fi

or in the case of my Mozart collection
composer=Mozart
opus=KV 255
key=C minor
tempo=Allegro

Highly, highly recommended.

hewhocutsdown

As a classical music fan, I hope there's a GUI tool that can do a better job in tagging.

wildeny

RPG, I hope you are submitting your painstaking edits back to Musicbrainz and/or Free DB.

The bias is just that there are more pop-oriented people who contribute to these databases. It's all volunteer work.

kvenlander