Comments on: MP3 Tag Help in OS X

Question: MP3 Tag Help in OS X

gyrom — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:38:16 -0800

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.

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:53:15 -0800

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.

By: nowonmai

nowonmai — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 13:21:49 -0800

I use the program MP3 ID3X for this kind of stuff.

By: filmgeek

filmgeek — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 13:40:57 -0800

What you might like more is IEatBrainz from musicbrainz that scans the mp3s for an audio fingerprint and then writes the correct tags.

By: majick

majick — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 14:45:01 -0800

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.

By: furtive

furtive — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 10:43:42 -0800

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.