What's a good, free, ID3 tag editor?

January 9, 2004 4:01 AM

What's a good, free, ID3 tag editor? I have 6GB of mp3s, and at the moment, most are stored like this: Artist/Album/## - Title.mp3, and have good tags, except for 500 or so which are dumped in a folder called Misc, and are tagged and named at random. What I want to do is change all of the first group to Artist/Album/Artist - ## - Title.mp3, and all of the second group to Misc/Artist - Title.mp3. Any suggestions?
posted by Orange Goblin to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

This list contains most of the good ones. I've used TagScanner and The Godfather, and both work well for the kind of thing you want to do.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 4:47 AM on January 9, 2004

I used to use TagScanner, then I found ID3-TagIt, which I liked better. (I found it via OnlyTheBestFreeware.com, which is a really good site, where they only list their single favorite program for every category.)

But after looking at that screenshot for The Godfather, I may have to check that out. It looks really powerful.
posted by llamateur at 6:24 AM on January 9, 2004

I'm a fan of Mp3/Tag Studio. The free version shows a banner ad, but it doesn't install any evil spyware. I think I'll also check out the others to see if they're as powerful -- while mp3/ts hasn't let me down it's nice to try other tools.
posted by zsazsa at 6:35 AM on January 9, 2004

MusicBrainz to recognize your files and Tag&Rename to mass modify names and tags.
posted by MzB at 6:59 AM on January 9, 2004

I should add that Tag&Rename is not free, but I think you could finish the job in 30 days.
posted by MzB at 7:00 AM on January 9, 2004

If you've got a Mac, then MP3 Rage is the best swiss army knife around for tagging music files.
posted by mkultra at 7:16 AM on January 9, 2004

I second the suggestion for MusicBrainz. Every time I recommend it to people they look at the page and go "Eh, I already have an ID3 tag editor." They don't get it. It is an AMAZING program, the type of thing that computers were designed for.

I had over 1000 MP3s in a single folder, a lot of which were mislabled. MusicBrainz scanned them, recognized them, automatically changed the ID3 tags, and sorted them into Artist/Album/ folders, all with nothing more than a single click (not one click per song, but one CLICK) or two.
posted by bondcliff at 7:20 AM on January 9, 2004 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I've tried most of the apps suggested, and I've gone for Tag&Rename. I must say MusicBrainz seemed very poor - the first album I tried it on, Audioslave's self titled debut, was a complete failure - it didn't recognise a single song, and took about 3 minutes to do so.
posted by Orange Goblin at 8:03 AM on January 9, 2004

Open source option - mp3 Tag Tools 1.2. Have been using it for a year and a half, no complaints.
posted by Aaorn at 10:41 AM on January 9, 2004