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I have a ton of MP3s, but their ID tags are not filled in. Going in manually to populate them is simply too much work.

I was wondering if there is a way to populate them automatically. Perhaps by feeding the MP3s to Shazam or Midori or something like. I am not above writing some code to make it happen, if someone can suggest a way.

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MusicBrainz Picard

For something different check out MusicBrainz Picard.

It's cool because it will identify MP3's based on a 'audio fingerprint' compared to their database, so you can figure out songs that are missing all tags, or that are mis-tagged.

I haven't found anything else that works quite like it.

That plus a decent tag editor/renamer/organizer (ie: Tag & Rename, or EasyTag) and you're set..

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Just FYI: Picard can rename files as well. – Sathya♦ Jan 13 '10 at 18:13
Nice, it's been a while since I used it (it was still in alpha), since then I've just made sure I didn't let my tagging lapse on new MP3s. :) – techie007 Jan 13 '10 at 18:14
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Unfortunately does not do the trick. A good number of songs are karaoke style, without voice, thus the fingerprint does not match. – AngryHacker Jan 13 '10 at 19:04
Excellent, Picard identified some classical pieces I had from about 10 years ago. Without lyrics to google I thought I would never find out the artist. – Liam Feb 15 '10 at 11:32
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picard does also have a slightly annoying tendancy to 'prefer' compilations. – Journeyman Geek Feb 28 '10 at 4:18
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up vote 10 down vote

I'm using those two programs for all my tagging needs, MP3tag is my first choice, EasyTAG for its support for FLAC/APE.

Mp3tag

Mp3tag is a powerful and yet easy-to-use tool to edit metadata of common audio formats where it supports ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, iTunes MP4, WMA, Vorbis Comments and APE Tags.

It can rename files based on the tag information, replace characters or words in tags and filenames, import/export tag information, create playlists and more.

Mp3tag supports online database lookups from, e.g., Amazon, Discogs, or freedb, allowing you to automatically gather proper tags and cover art for your music library. Rename files based on the tag information and import tags from filenames.

Mp3tag is freeware.

EasyTAG

EasyTAG - Tag editor for MP3, Ogg Vorbis files and more:

  • View, edit, write tags of MP3, MP2 files (ID3 tag with pictures), FLAC files (FLAC Vorbis tag), Ogg Vorbis files (Ogg Vorbis tag), MP4/AAC (MP4/AAC tag), MusePack, Monkey's Audio files and WavPack files (APE tag),
  • Can edit more tag fields : Title, Artist, Album, Disc Album, Year, Track Number, Genre, Comment, Composer, Original Artist/Performer, Copyright, URL, Encoder name and attached Picture,
  • ...
  • Auto tagging: parse filename and directory to automatically complete the fields (using masks),
  • Ability to rename files and directories from the tag (using masks) or by loading a text file,
  • Ability to process fields of tag and file name (convert letters into uppercase, downcase, ...),
  • CDDB support using Freedb.org and Gnudb.org servers (manual and automatic search),

EasyTAG is open source freeware.

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Nice parsing support. – AngryHacker Jan 13 '10 at 19:04
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MediaMonkey

MediaMonkey has various batch renaming and retagging options including lookup from the internet.

Identify Tracks

Automatically identify tracks that are missing information, whose tags are not synchronized, or that are duplicated elsewhere.

Fix Tags with Automatic Lookup and Tagging of album art and other track information from Amazon.

Lookup CD information on Freedb or via CD-TEXT, and find missing track details through music-related sites such as Allmusic.

Feature taken from this page.

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up vote 3 down vote

Foobar2000

Foobar2000, besides being a fabulous audio player, has these features:

  • advanced scripting capabilities to tag mp3 and rename files (title formatting and many useful way to use it)
  • freedb.org native query
  • dicogs.com query with foo_discogs
  • musicbrainz query with foo_musicbrainz (but doesn't support fingerprint, I hope it will come)

Additionaly you could launch any application or URL using the title formatting as arguments with foo_run and there are also plugins to retrieve album/artist pictures, lyrics and last.fm artist biographies.

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Winamp

I've had a good experience using Winamp for this process, I did try some of the others but wasn't get the results I expected.

There's a blog post walk through on how to use it here.

But basically in the Media Library having loaded your MP3s right click and go:

Send to > Auto Tag

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up vote 1 down vote

Songbird

Tagging is extremely easy for me... I can use Songbird to...

  1. find all non tagged songs (by genre)
  2. find all songs given tags I don't use (by genre)

Apply tags to all these files is pretty simple.

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up vote 1 down vote

beets

Beets is similar to Picard, in that it automatically looks up correct tags for files in the MusicBrainz database, but it works on the command line. If you're an advanced user comfortable with the terminal, you might appreciate beets' flexibility. Like Picard and Foobar, it supports very flexible directory and file naming schemes.

The beets screencast is a good introduction.

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