An MP3 tagging problem

June 29, 2009 7:16 PM

I have several mp3s where the Title tag contains no spaces. For example, if the song is "Tangled Up In Blue", the title tag in the mp3 is "tangledupinblue". Is there any tagging software that will sort through these files and insert spaces between the words?
posted by Proginoskes to computers & internet (12 comments total)

I've used MusicBrainz in the past with fair success.
posted by chrisamiller at 7:19 PM on June 29

seconding musicbrainz.
posted by enfa at 7:20 PM on June 29

I'm not aware of anything to do this, but maybe it exists. You might try googling for "text segmentation" or "word segmentation" which is what this problem is called in, for example, languages where multiple characters make up a word. It seems hard!

That said, is there a reason that a solution like musicbrainz won't work? It seems much easier to get high quality metadata based on identifying the audio in an online database than trying to work to improve bad initial metadata in the ID3 tags.
posted by pbh at 7:21 PM on June 29

Any cddb or freedb tagger will find the tags based on the files themselves, not their current names.
posted by rhizome at 7:23 PM on June 29

Give mp3tag a try. It's a pretty robust app for tagging and music-file manipulation.
posted by snwod at 7:28 PM on June 29

Seconding mp3tag.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 7:33 PM on June 29

I should mention that many of the mp3s were been ripped directly from vinyl. I don't know if that eliminates the cddb/freedb suggestion (I'd been under the impression that both required a cd). So far, I've been using mp3tag for my other tagging needs, but I didn't think there was a way of inserting spaces between the words.

I've never used Musicbrainz. Will it still be an option given that many of the files weren't ripped from cd?
posted by Proginoskes at 7:55 PM on June 29

something like mp3tag will likely try to find out from the filename and any other metadata you might have in the file anyway. it's pretty smart that way, i'd give it a try.
posted by rhizome at 8:35 PM on June 29

If musicbrainz doesn't work (which is what I came in here to suggest), then you can use something like Media Monkey.

If you've got things ripped from vinyl then I'll assume you have complete albums. You can select all of the songs from that album and edit the properties so you have the correct album name associated with them. Then search the web for that album and you should have it correct the tag names.
posted by theichibun at 8:36 PM on June 29

theichibun: Unfortunately, most don't have complete albums.
posted by Proginoskes at 9:11 PM on June 29

Even so, you can still go that method. It just might miss more often. But if you know what you're looking for it shouldn't be a problem.
posted by theichibun at 5:36 AM on June 30

Easytag does this brilliantly, but it's linux. Since there's no mention of linux, this probably won't help you.

Tag and Rename might be the trick on windows for you.
posted by mcstayinskool at 7:05 AM on June 30