MP3 Tag Help in OS X

March 17, 2007 12:38 PM

Anyone know of an applet that creates MP3 tag info from file names for Mac OS X?

We just made the switch from Windows to Mac, and have only hit one snag. My SO has his entire MP3 collection sorted by file name (i.e. "Artist - Song.mp3") without any meaningful tags or metadata. Now that the PCs are gone, he's realized that iTunes doesn't care for his old naming system. I'm not up yet on Mac software so don't have any solutions at hand and haven't found anything through searches. Any suggestions from Mac-types for an applet that can create the MP3 tag info from his file names (in Mac OS X) would be greatly, greatly appreciated.

posted by gyrom to computers & internet (5 answers total)

id3tool is a command-line tool for editing ID3 tags in MP3 files. The link takes you to a OS X port of id3tool.

You could write a script in any number of languages (e.g. AppleScript, Perl) to pull out the filename, parse the Artist and Song information into variables, and feed this into id3tool to edit the file's ID3 metadata.

Your script would either work on a per-file basis, or scan a folder and build a list of MP3 files to work on.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:53 PM on March 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

I use the program MP3 ID3X for this kind of stuff.
posted by nowonmai at 1:21 PM on March 17, 2007

What you might like more is IEatBrainz from musicbrainz that scans the mp3s for an audio fingerprint and then writes the correct tags.
posted by filmgeek at 1:40 PM on March 17, 2007

It's not a free product, but Media Rage beats everything hands down for this kind of task. I've done tagging-from-filename with it as well as rename-from-tags, and had great luck using it to fix up other people's poorly named / poorly tagged collections.

"Artist - Song.mp3" is pretty minimal information, though. You're going to have a lot of manual work ahead of you (and/or babysitting iEatBrainz) to get that to expand to the proper and correct "Album - 0Track - Artist - Song.mp3" for tagging use.
posted by majick at 2:45 PM on March 17, 2007

IEatBrainz was a labour intensive waste of time for me. I wouldn't recommend it for anything besides tracks where you have no clue who the artist/song is.
posted by furtive at 10:43 AM on March 18, 2007