Best program to automate adding ID3s/album art to untagged MP3s?

January 24, 2006 1:58 PM

Can anyone share recommendations for software or "least-effort-techniques" for adding ID3 tags and album art to large sets of unsorted, untagged MP3s?

Finally got an video iPod, and am now trying to be meticulous about getting album art and proper metatags for my music (LOVE being able to see album art). Currently using "Tag & Rename", which works pretty well, with a few limitations. It requires a LOT of manual interaction and can only be done an album at a time. Still, I've gotten a "process" down for new rips/downloads which is relatively straightforward.

Here's the problem: I just ran across a spindle of MP3s from the Napster-heyday. This music is often tagged only in the title or the containing folder, and is sometimes misnamed or misspelled. Few metatags and DEFINITELY no album art.

While I like most of the music on these discs and would love to jump-start my collection using this stuff I probably spent a year collecting and pruning, I'm torn by my need to "tag" everything properly and not start adding "junky" files to the iPod. Trouble is, to do this right I could literally spend weeks attempting to create order from this chaos.

The knee-jerk answer might be to dump everything and try to buy or re-download better versions, but since these are mostly "singles", tagging them using T&R would be nearly as time-consuming.

I've heard of programs like MusicMatch which supposedly will ID a song by "digital signature" and can tag it appropriately. Does anyone have any experience with programs like this (or know of anything that works better/faster/cheaper)?

posted by stuckie to computers & internet (17 comments total)

Easytag is a great tagger, but doesn't use "digital signatures" AFAIK. However, I did tag 80 gigs of music in something like 10 hours.
posted by adamwolf at 2:07 PM on January 24, 2006

Musicbrainz is the one that uses digital signatures. It's free.

(It does get things wrong quite often though, so you have to double-check the results.)
posted by smackfu at 2:13 PM on January 24, 2006

Wow! Suggestions coming in so quickly already!

Just wanted to clarify that one of the factors I'm looking for is the ability to gather/embed album art (for the iPod video screen). Without that, I'd need to run everything through ANOTHER system to take care of that part...

Thanks again!
posted by stuckie at 2:22 PM on January 24, 2006

Here's my MP3 workflow:

1. MP3Gain to normalize volume (works great, and is apparently "lossless").

2. MP3Tag to manually edit ID tags and change filenames.

3. Import to iTunes.

4. Amazon/Google to find and drag/drop Art.

I have gotten this down to quite the science and I searched for months to find a more automated way to do it to no avail. The key is to just do a couple hours a night while watching TV/ listening to music and you'll be done in no time.

I just noticed that the new version of MP3Tag has some album art functionality, so that may save you some effort if it works as well as the rest of the program.
posted by Rock Steady at 2:56 PM on January 24, 2006

You and me both.
Album art is part of the v2 ID3 format, and it's a bit of a bitch.
I'd rename the files first and then update the album art.
A bit of googling, and I turned up this little beauty.
ymmv. I've never tried it, etc.
posted by seanyboy at 2:58 PM on January 24, 2006

The Album Cover Art Downloader that seanyboy mentions is indeed helpful. It can get the album cover art from a number of sources such as Amazon, Walmart, Buy.com, and also just a Yahoo image search (which has been surprisingly helpful in getting the cover art for some more obscure albums that didn't turn up at the online stores). In theory you're supposed to be able to turn it loose on a whole directory structure of mp3s and have it get images for them all at once. In practice it's got a few bugs and will probably choke at some point if you're trying to get a ton of stuff at once.
posted by shinji_ikari at 3:32 PM on January 24, 2006

I'll second mp3tag. I did try several of these tagging tools, but mp3tag seems to be the most reliable and useful program. I did use it to correct tags on my more than 6000 files.
posted by m.openmind at 3:50 PM on January 24, 2006

Tag&rename has en excellent feature where you can download album info from either freedb.org or amazon. It's amazing, but in order to do so you would have to be able to seperate into albums. It's an amazing program, however. If you use the Amazon option it also takes care of album covers.
posted by charmston at 4:22 PM on January 24, 2006

Sorry, I should really read full posts. I just love T&R, and got excited when I saw that nobody had said anything about it.
posted by charmston at 4:23 PM on January 24, 2006

I also had this tremendous project of tagging properly my cd collection (300 gbs) that I ripped to cd-r's back in 1999. Over the summer I used tag & RENAME and it was solid but very laborious, often very slow and crashed a lot.
I tried practically every thing download.com had to download and the only one I found that actually is superfast and easier to work with was Media Monkey. You can set your template for tagging (ie: underscores, capital letters etc ) and grabbing art is quick, but many times I had to dip into the AMG database for the right artwork.

So in my opinion Media Monkey is free and number 1 for me, and tag & rename would be equal if not for the crashing and hanging I experienced and it's costs like 20 bucks to boot.
But I still keep a lookout for a superior tagger and haven't found a third program to reccommend. I still have about 100gigs to go.

Incindentally YMMV, Musicbrainz was absolutely useless for me-- I threw so much stuff at it and got so many negatives and false positives.
If I had an anonymous song, I would rather transcribe a line or two of the lyrics and google fu it and have better success.
posted by stavx at 5:09 PM on January 24, 2006

Media Center has a customizable filename->tag importer/renamer that with custom fields almost, but not quite, reaches regex levels. Sometimes I find myself roundtripping filename->tag->filename a few times, using some dummy fields, to get everything sorted.
posted by meehawl at 5:52 PM on January 24, 2006

I spent a lot of time just editing things one album/single at a time in iTunes. Pain in the ass, yes, but if you're picky enough to do it you won't be happy until you're done.

Logging in to allmusic.com allows you to search by song, looking for song length to make sure that version X was actually on album Y. Try hard to avoid this, because once you hit that level of anal the next thing you know you're using a wav editor to break long downloaded mix sets into individual tracks and it's all downhill from there, productivity-wise.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:19 PM on January 24, 2006

There was a related thread on slashdot today. I bet some of the comments will be useful (and maybe a little familiar).
posted by popechunk at 6:39 PM on January 24, 2006

MusicBrainz does do cover art, by the way.
posted by mbrubeck at 8:42 PM on January 24, 2006

For album art, I recommend a program with the unsurprising name of iTunes Art Importer. It does what it says.

I used it in a similar circumstance, and I was happy with it. It pulled up the most likely choices for every track I had, assigned each one a cover tentatively, and then let me confirm. This was about a year ago, and I think it's been improved since.

You will need to have the mp3s tagged with the correct album name (at a minimum) first, though.
posted by booksandlibretti at 9:01 PM on January 24, 2006

I second the MediaMonkey suggestion.
The best thing about it is that you can view songs by which tag they are missing. So you simply view all your songs without Album Art (or any other tag) and away you go.

Combine that with auto album art and tag look up from amazon and you are good to go.
posted by gfroese at 11:26 AM on January 26, 2006

Many people keep talking about Albums.
I've never bought/liked full albums; always went the Napster way because that way I get the song I liked, and not put money into a CD-album that has 10 songs I don't like, and just one that I love.

And finally, I've amassed a great collection. Tracks from all over the place.
In this case, the musicbrainz' fingerprinting thing is good, but it's not reliable. Out of 1000 songs, it got the job done for 400, but the other 600? They still sit in my "Unclassified" list.


Is there anything, any software at all, to which I feed my F: drive that holds all music and tell it to get to work? And what's work? Checking all naming schemes/tags, and if the file isn't named right... it looks up Amazon, CDDB, FreeDB, Google, Yahoo, Allmusic, etc for tags, and finally when it gets a hardcore match... it tags my .mp3 and renames it in a naming convention I'd like to see it in?

Is there anything like it?
posted by Devileyezz at 2:42 PM on April 14, 2006