Company that fixes wonky mp3 tags?

July 9, 2013 10:24 PM

I have a lot of mp3s, and the metadata is alll over the place. I just gave up years ago attempting to organize the mess, and make liberal use of shuffle. Is there a company that will fix these?

It's a motley collection of music going back to the napster years. I have a long commute, and I want to listen to my music. Drives me crazy that everything is so mislabeled from various attempts to fix the actual metadata. A good number of songs are hilariously mislabeled.

Cell reception is spotty during commute + work, so I can't go with streaming. Have an old ipod classic that works. I just don't have the time or patience to do this manually. Price is flexible. Does a service/company like this exist?

posted by shinyshiny to Technology (6 answers total)

There are web services that will do this for music on your computer. If you get a Musicbrainz client, it might not cost any money (just time) because I think some of the clients are open-source and free. But you'd have to do that from whatever computer your iPod is synced to, if it is.

The time would be for the algorithm to grind through, not your personal time. It's not 100%, but it's pretty good.
posted by immlass at 10:33 PM on July 9, 2013

If you upload all of it to Google Play Music, it should recognize and fix the tags on most of it, then you can earmark certain albums/songs to be stored on your device for "offline" listening. It's all free.
posted by bizwank at 10:41 PM on July 9, 2013 [1 favorite]

MusicBrainz Picard does exactly this, and it's free.
posted by Suddenly, elf ass at 11:39 PM on July 9, 2013

Fixing your meta-data is only really one way of improving the organization of your music. If you want to go further then applications such as beaTunes (for Mac or PC, commercial licence) will work out some useful additional stuff - such as the BPM, key, mood and lyrics for each of your tracks. This is useful if you want to experiment with harmonic mixing - something that is fun to try even if you are not a DJ. Here is a review.
posted by rongorongo at 5:14 AM on July 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

Winamp has an Auto-Tag feature that will fix/fill in metadata, but its accuracy depends on how badly mislabeled the music files are to start with. I've found that its very good for filling in incomplete data (track #, album title, etc.), but if you have stuff that is genuineley mislabeled (wrong artist and song title) it won't work as well. Its free and very easy to use though, so you could try it out on a small subset of what you have to see how accurate it is.
posted by parallellines at 7:44 AM on July 10, 2013

You might also try TuneUp, I've had good success with them.
posted by oblique red at 1:47 PM on July 10, 2013