Auto tagging MP3s based on a textfile

August 16, 2007 5:48 PM

MP3 tagging: I have hundreds and hundreds of songs tagged with the title like this: Stairway_To_Heaven. In a Word file, fixing this is trivial, and I could save that to a txt file. Is there tagging software that will rename by pulling from a text file? Windows only, please.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

I use TagRunner, which works well for me, while a coworker swears by FixTunes.
posted by rokusan at 6:12 PM on August 16, 2007

Tag&Rename is the best tool for manipulating tags and filenames for mp3s I've ever used (and the canonical answer for this kind of question), and will do it (and much else) directly rather than through the intermediate step of a text file. (Not sure if you're married to the idea of using the text file, so I mention it.)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:22 PM on August 16, 2007

In most programming or scripting languages you could make it happen with a text file and a command-line id3 tag tool.
posted by meta_eli at 6:58 PM on August 16, 2007

Actually, even if you don't know a programming lanugage, you could probably get clever enough with the find/replace to generate a .BAT file in Word that would call the command-line tool for each file.

Just remember to save in MS-DOS .TXT format.
posted by meta_eli at 7:06 PM on August 16, 2007

mp3tag will also do this. In fact, if all you want to do is replace underscores with spaces in your tags, mp3tag can do that too. Also can rename the actual file based on the tag values (however you like).
posted by tksh at 7:09 PM on August 16, 2007

Seconding Mp3tag, I can't recommend this program enough. It's the ultimate swiss-army tagger.
posted by ktrey at 7:51 PM on August 16, 2007

Apparently Tag&Rename is freely downloadable only on a trial basis. (I just downloaded it, and read the license.)

I've used mp3tag, and I like it. It comes with rules that'll replace underscores with spaces in both the filename and the tags. And it's easy to add more rules to do whatever. It's free.
posted by philomathoholic at 12:56 AM on August 17, 2007

If you want to play with DOS batch commands, there's a way to use FOR to loop through the results of another command (which could be TYPE, to elicit your text file) and run commands against it.

Or you could do something sneaky and use Wordpad to search/replace with REN and then save the file as .bat :)

How to search/replace special characters? Copy them (place the cursor at the beginning of a line, hold shift, tap the left arrow so the cursor moves to the end of the previous line, hit Ctrl-C) and paste into the dialog box.
posted by Myself at 4:05 AM on August 17, 2007

Apparently Tag&Rename is freely downloadable only on a trial basis.

And? ssFlanders did not specify 'free'.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:12 AM on August 17, 2007