Automatic song identification/tagging?

December 19, 2009 2:07 PM

Any programs that can analyze and tag individual MP3 files that have NO metadata? I have a pile of untagged files, and so far no joy.

I have a big, fat, messy pile of files, and would love a head-start on getting them tagged and filed. It seems there are some programs that are geared to ALBUMS, but I don't really care about album info as much as I am in accurate artist/title. There are iPhone apps that can listen and identify songs through the mic.. I have to believe there is a desktop program that would do this by the batch.

PLEASE HELP! Thanks!

posted by mojoworkin to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

Best answer: MusicBrainz helped me tag hundreds of mp3s with no previous metadata when I was trying to organize my music collection. There were some false positives and mistagged files but in general it does a very good job.
posted by Memo at 2:17 PM on December 19, 2009

Have you tried Picard? Technically, it is album-oriented, but that doesn't really matter too much. You should be able to give it your pile of files and it will automatically sort and tag them. I use it all the time for this sort of thing.
posted by pwicks at 2:19 PM on December 19, 2009

Try Musicbrainz. Might be a little slow, but it should be able to do the trick.
posted by rhizome at 2:19 PM on December 19, 2009

I've been pleased with TuneUp. It has to attach to iTunes, but gets most of the songs i've run through it right. Costs $ though.
posted by frwagon at 2:23 PM on December 19, 2009

Picard is part of Musicbrainz. Give it a shot, it does a great job and it's free.
posted by mattholomew at 6:26 PM on December 19, 2009

MP3 Tag Tools will work if you have the track info in the file name. It's also a good general tag cleanup tool.
posted by irisclara at 12:51 AM on December 20, 2009

I've been using TuneUp. It seems to work fairly well, but it seems to fail on a lot of my more obscure indie music.

TuneUp can only reliably accept 500 songs at a time though, so if you have a vast quantity, you'll have to process them in batches.
posted by TheOtherSide at 6:50 AM on December 20, 2009

Response by poster: Thank you so much, everybody. Will give the brainz a look.

Ron
posted by mojoworkin at 7:14 PM on December 20, 2009