We often listen to songs in digital formats such as MP3, as they are small and convenient. Since many MP3 files often come with incorrect or missing song information (tags), organizing them in a playlist is a tedious experience – duplicates, inconsistencies in artist or song names, etc. The problem is further compounded when your music library is huge – searching the web for song information individually becomes a chore. Here are some tips on how to obtain tag information and album art for your songs.
1. How to obtain album information and art from the Internet
MediaMonkey is a freeware all-in-one media player. It has an automatic MP3 tagging and album art lookup function which will automatically search sites like Amazon.com for song information such as artist name, song title, track number and more. It can do this automatically for all songs in a same album, so you won’t have to edit them individually.
2. How to tag songs with forgotten names
At some point we might have an MP3 file lying around the computer with absolutely no song information in its tags or filename, and its tune wasn’t able to evoke a memory of its title nor artist when played. Picard by Musicbrainz solves this by using a highly accurate ‘acoustic fingerprinting’ technology. Just click on scan and the program will generate a fingerprint of your music file, matches it with one in its database, and automatically rename your nameless song.
3. How to massively tag or obtain song information for your MP3s
Want to change the artist name of your entire Beethoven collection from “Beethoven, Ludwig van” to "Ludwig van Beethoven"? MP3tag does mass renaming and tagging for common song information using a rather straightforward interface. The software is also hooked up to song information databases such as freedb.org and Amazon.com, so you can search for missing song information and tag them on the fly. This program can also embed album art images.
4. How to accurately search for album art and covers
With physical CDs being replaced by digital files, the album art feature in MP3s allow us to “see” the music we hear – a loose reminder of flipping through CD covers back in the days. AllCDCovers is a website with a huge collection of album art and cover images, which can be downlaoded and embedded into music files using software such as MP3Tag.
5. How to automatically tag songs while ripping CD tracks into MP3s
With the advent of the iPod and portable media players, there is no longer a need to carry CDs around. Those who want to convert their existing CD collections into MP3s will find it convenient to have a program that does both conversion and tagging. Audiograbber is a powerful alternative to Windows Media Player and iTunes which can encode CD tracks into a variety of formats while obtaining CD information from freedb.org, so that no CD rip goes untagged.
This has been a guest post by Chan HH, if you wish to write a piece for this blog, do drop me a line.
What programs do you use to organize your music library? Tell us in the comments!
Nice Article,
but wished there were more information for Mac User. Tagging with iTunes is no fun.
Your article was really helpful for me in organising my music collections effectively. Thanks!
Cool list James. Leveling music can be added to the list with MediaMonkey “Analyze Volume” function.
You left out winamp’s auto tag plug in…
Cool list!
@Rush: Thanks for the tip!
Or you could just use iTunes, which has all of the above mentioned functions.
@Francesco: iTunes doesn’t do a lot of these things with your existing music collection. These tools do a much better job :)
So instead of taking 30 seconds on itunes we should just download many clunky platforms that then have to have songs uploaded to them and then changed accordingly and then uploaded back to itunes. You can do pretty much everything there on itunes and it isnt difficult to bodge your way round these exceptions on itunes if there isnt a button specially designed. Just learn how to use that one awesome programme.
@Charlie: iTunes only does a good job of sorting out your music collection if you start adding CDs directly to it. If you are talking about an existing Mp3 collection, or adding songs you have downloaded it cannot do all those things mentioned above.
Thank you for these tips.
Lol at the Freaky Friday and High School Musical OSTs in the top pic. Fail.
Gimmesometune is a simple addin for iTunes on the Mac that does a lot automatically. Every time you play a song it fetches the album art and lyrics and inserts saves them in the mp3 or aac file.
James Yeang: I’m going to have to disagree. iTunes can’t replace Picard but it does do everything else mentioned here.
1. Use Picard.
2. This is Picard.
3. Select multiple tracks, then right-click -> Info.
4. Right-click -> Get Album Artwork (if the ITMS doesn’t have that album, you can drag an image straight from your browser into iTunes)
5. iTunes does this automatically.
These programs might be handy if for some reason you detest or can’t use iTunes.
MediaMonkey is a limited version. There is a paid version with no limitations. All the extra “advanced” features are available in iTunes (and practically every other MP3 player) for free.
AllCDCovers is a good idea but their website sucks.
Lastly, and most importantly, only Picard works on anything other than Windows. (OK, fair cop. iTunes doesn’t work on Linux but Amarok does and I have iTunes everywhere else.)
It should also be mentioned that you CAN get iTunes for Windows without getting it bundled with Quicktime but it’s not obvious on the website. I wish Apple wouldn’t do that. It’s unseemly.
Thanks for your input Dave, To be frank – my program of choice would be: TuneUp. It’s paid software – but it does the job incredibly well.
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I use a mac and there are a few I’ve come up with:
TuneUp- This generally works really well. It syncs directly with iTunes. You put in your music 100 songs at a time and it will tell you who it is by, what its called, what album it is from, and the album artwork. It also tells you how confident it is about what it has just told you. Some of the “Likely Matches” are usually wrong, so you will want to read through what it tells you before you hit save. Generally speaking though I find it does a good job.
SongGenie- I tried this out and found it to be just terrible- maybe thats just me, but it couldn’t find most songs in my collection. I wouldn’t even consider my music collection to be rare or unique or anything.
FixTunes- I’ve never actually tried this one, but it might be worth looking into.
AutoRate- This one is pretty neat too- it analyses your iTunes library and automatically rates every song. Usually pretty acurate, and it does half stars which is neat.
iClip Lyrics- This is a great one, but needs a better solution for batch proccessing. If you keep it open in the background while you play songs in iTunes, it will add the lyrics to iTunes. You can’t drag and drop songs though so you basically have to play through every song. It also has trouble finding lyrics for less common songs. It still beats adding song lyrics manually though.
Interesting idea. When I started using TuneUp, I just did all my music. Now I can go in once a month and fix up anything since the last date. You idea is easier to keep track of though.
yo this is all good and everything but use tune-up companion. it works with itunes and changes names/ searches album art. however, it doesnt rename the original files..
TuneUp – I just bought this to cleanup my 15,000 song library. It sucks! Very slow. Complex. Not well integrated with iTunes. I’d recommend avoiding it!
You have to clean up 500 songs at a time for optimum speed..
Nice article. I have some alternatives for you though. IMO for tagging, Tag&Rename is far better than MP3Tag in both interface and features. For covers, AllCDCovers can be an option but you gotta have MuvUnderCover (integrated Google Images search, custom Cover art size, Drag & Drop, etc…), the best Cover search software, period. Tune Up is good with missing tags but you can’t trust it all the way. So, some manual cleaning is still needed after running a batch in Tune Up.
I’ve been a heavy user of MP3 cleaning software because I have a huge library of music and often times get promos from labels before release. So, a lot of them comes with missing artwork and info. Quite frankly anybody saying iTunes can do what all the combining software mentioned above has not been in deep MP3 cleaning land, cause iTunes CAN’T.
For people who like me gets a lot of singles and would like to have the corresponding covers or at least a custom: check out coverlandia.blogspot.com and musiccoverart.blogspot.com
I do it all manually, because I have a ridiculous amount of time on my hands. Of course a lot of my stuff is Polish and doesn’t show up in programs like that too.