[HN Gopher] Mp3tag - The Universal Tag Editor
___________________________________________________________________
Mp3tag - The Universal Tag Editor
Author : accrual
Score : 177 points
Date : 2024-05-24 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mp3tag.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mp3tag.de)
| mmastrac wrote:
| That is a blast from the past. MP3tag is older than Web 2.0,
| Twitter, Facebook and is still actively maintained.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20010502171211/http://www.mp3tag...
|
| My workflow back in the day was mainly thrift store CD to
| AudioGrabber. I still have a few CDs that only exist in high-
| bitrate MP3 format after losing the physical disk.
|
| Lately I've been using MusicBrainz Picard to re-organize all of
| these ancient rips and then automedia to add parity. I'm still
| paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day and I'm afraid to
| lose my older music collection.
| qbane wrote:
| I remembered that taking care of metadata of 1000+ mp3 music
| and syncing them between music players and backing up with CD-
| RWs were time filler. They still are, but I enjoyed doing so.
| Digital garden in web 1.0 era I could say.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I was so proud of my meticulously tagged mp3 collection, and
| even took the time to add album art to everything. I always
| wanted mp3s tagged with the original album they came from,
| even if they were from a greatest hits CD or something.
| (Looking back, this wasn't quite the right mindset, as
| sometimes the versions on a greatest hits CD or similar will
| be slightly different than the "real" album version, but it
| was my collection!)
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I maintain mine. It's the only way to get guaranteed
| gapless playback in the modern era.
| disposition2 wrote:
| If you haven't already looked in to it, beets might be a
| solution for you
|
| https://beets.io/
| res0nat0r wrote:
| I highly recommend Musicbrainz Picard:
| https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
|
| It will match against the Musicbrainz database and will
| acoustically ID your files, so the tags can be completely
| wrong and it can ID the song from it's sound fingerprint.
| Just dump folders of albums into the client, it will group
| and sort things and ID them. It works great.
| mmastrac wrote:
| It's a miraculous project. I have something like 300+
| albums from 170+ artists and it tooks me only a few days to
| cleanly retag everything, with about 99% of the albums just
| working.
| selvin wrote:
| Musicbrainz Picard: highly recommended
| pkulak wrote:
| Spotify does this thing for me where, no matter what you do,
| after an hour or so of listening you find yourself hearing the
| same 50 or so songs, over and over and over until you go mad. I
| still pay for it, and use it a bit, but playing my own
| collection is so much nicer.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| I'm a fan of YouTube music's algorithm. I don't even have
| playlists. I just like songs that I enjoy, and whenever I
| need music I click something in the homepage and enjoy old
| and new songs that YouTube thinks I will like.
| cvdub wrote:
| That's why I disable all of Spotify's smart playlist and auto
| play features. When my playlist/album ends I want to select
| something new, not be spoon fed whatever everyone else is
| listening to!
| 9dev wrote:
| Same for me, I could never understand the hype around their
| suggestions. Even random playlists like ,,coffee house music"
| (which I exclusively turn on when friends are over) seem to
| be personalised to me - so much so that they pretty much
| immediately veer off into heavy rock or other stuff that I
| may have come across, but that definitely isn't good as a
| chill backdrop.
|
| And even the much-praised weekly playlist is hit or miss -
| sometimes it's weeks with abhorring stuff, then for once I
| get a good one with two to three songs I actually like.
| trallnag wrote:
| Don't get me started on the weekly playlist. Spotify
| refuses to accept the fact that I don't speak Ukrainian.
| Yet a big chunk of the Playlist consists out of Ukrainian
| music. Probably Spotify is not able to differentiate
| between Ukrainian and Russian, which I listen to a lot
| 7bit wrote:
| I found so many great new Songs (ProgMetal and similar)
| through Spotify, but the quality of recommended Songs
| really deckined gor me in the past two years.
| sandreas wrote:
| My workflow is
|
| 1. Buying used and reasonably priced original music CDs
|
| 2. Ripping them with EAC[1] and an external LG BH16NS55 to FLAC
| format (takes 120 seconds per CD - this drive is FAST and
| ACCURATE)
|
| 3. Auto-import the ripped FLACs into my beets.io database via
| cronjob (which also unifies the metadata automatically in 99%
| of the cases)
|
| 4. Inplace-convert the FLACs to 192kbps mp3 via `beet convert`
|
| 5. Archiving the converted perfectly tagged FLACs to Bluray
| discs, as soon as the archive size hits 25GB
|
| 6. Point a self-hosted Navidrome instance and a Windows VM with
| iTunes to the beets folder
|
| 7. Use Substreamer App with Navidrome's smart playlists[2] and
| "favoriting" on my Android phone / iPhone as well as iTunes
| syncing my iPod Nano 7 via smart playlists
|
| Works absolutely flawless and is less work than I expected.
| Since I automated everything possible, the only manual thing I
| need to do is the BUYING, the RIPPING and the Bluray ARCHIVING
| part.
|
| 1: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/
|
| 2: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/1417
| mmastrac wrote:
| > 5. Archiving the converted perfectly tagged FLACs to Bluray
| discs, as soon as the archive size hits 25GB
|
| Do you have a rec for any long-life BR discs?
| sandreas wrote:
| I use regular Verbatim 25GB disks. Since I keep the
| original CDs and usually use the Mp3s to listen, this is
| only a part of my 3-2-1 backup strategy. Nothing meant to
| be 200 years archival proof :-)
|
| However, I never use anything but Verbatim, never had a bad
| experience with it.
| accrual wrote:
| Very cool archival setup! Funny you say that about
| Verbatim. I have a several old burned discs from the
| 2000s and 2010s where the dye has degraded and is no
| longer readable, but I have one specific blue Verbatim
| disc my childhood friend burned for me in the late 90s,
| and it still reads today!
| sandreas wrote:
| > and it still reads today!
|
| Exactly my experience. Verbatim is worth the additional
| cost in my opinion. I mainly do the archival as a
| hobby... not sure I ever gonna need it :-) However, I'm
| pretty scared of ransomware these days, so I tried to
| make my setup as ransomware proof as possible and zfs-
| auto-snapshot + self burned blurays with the most
| important data seemed like a good idea :-)
| wismut wrote:
| I spent the better half of my teenage days carefully tagging my
| music library with this.
| SamBam wrote:
| I know. I really miss my old iTunes library. I had the genres
| and other metadata just the way I liked them.
|
| In my quest to find an offline MP3 player for my kid, I spent a
| bunch of time looking at models, but none of them give you the
| ability to sort (and shuffle) by artist, album, _and genre_ the
| way the old iPods did.
| noman-land wrote:
| I still consider a well tagged library to be a badge of honor
| looping8 wrote:
| It's a sign of dedication and how much time someone could
| have before social media and/or becoming old
| Venn1 wrote:
| EasyTAG is a serviceable cross-platform alternative.
| thriftwy wrote:
| EasyTAG is great in the sense that it has sufficient set of
| knobs to digest all kinds of MP3 tags seen in the wild, and
| then convert them to the preferred format.
| tcsenpai wrote:
| Such a throwback. I need a Windows 2000 virtual machine now.
| Springtime wrote:
| I'm glad the sole dev is able to support themselves by donations
| from this and now their paid Mac version. It's been an
| indispensable tool for batch audio tagging and the community is
| very helpful.
| UberFly wrote:
| So true. Whenever I need to use it I go and look for an update
| first and am always relieved (and amazed) that it's still going
| 20 year later. Best example of software done right.
| billfor wrote:
| Media Monkey is great also if you have a large collection. I use
| the ratings and occasion tags to organize my collection. I like
| how the meta data is part of the mp3 so you take it wherever your
| mp3 goes. I guess it's not economically viable to have a
| streaming service to allow such flexible customization. mp3gain
| from 2005 is another indispensable part of a large mp3
| collection.
| noman-land wrote:
| Impeccable tagging is something to strive for. I would look at
| the music libraries of my friends and be disgusted by the chaos.
| joeywas wrote:
| This and winamp saw lots of use on my computers back in the early
| 2000s. I still have spools of CDs full of mp3s i painstakingly
| tagged. :|
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I've been using Kid3 on my Mac: https://kid3.kde.org
|
| It's not a native Mac app, so it's not really ideal, but it does
| work very well.
| 79a6ed87 wrote:
| Kid3 is wonderful! Love it, and it has both GTK and Qt
| frontends
| jonpurdy wrote:
| Interesting; I just discovered and used this tool a month ago.
| For years I've been wanting to migrate my few hundred remaining
| MP3 files from iTunes/Music to just store them on the file system
| but iTunes DB stores play count and star rating in their DB, not
| in the file itself.
|
| Turns out that there's no standard tag for this, but the most
| common (from what I searched was POPULARIMETER, where you store
| it in EMAIL|RATING|PLAYCOUNTER format. Email is a string
| (optional), rating is an int 0-255*, and playcounter as an
| integer.
|
| So I wrote a Python script that would read the file on disk,
| match it with the entry in iTunes DB, populate POPULARIMETER,
| then verify everything was set correctly in MP3tag.
|
| This took a few hours to do, mostly due to discovering how to do
| it and verifying everything worked correctly. Unfortunately the
| MP3 players I use now (VLC and mpv) don't support updating the
| POPULARIMETER field, so it'll be left as an unchanging relic from
| my iTunes days.
|
| * - 1 star - 0.2x255 = 51, 2 star - 0.4x255 = 102, etc
| verytrivial wrote:
| Ha! Yes, play count (and reasonable if not always to my taste)
| tagging is about all I miss from iTune, and iTunes and Time
| Machine is about all I miss from Mac OS. I used to have "Smart
| Playlist" or whatever it was called that would randomly select
| say 30 songs with a play count less than 3 to put on my Shuffle
| to keep me out of musical ruts. I miss that.
| blueboo wrote:
| Love mp3tag. And now in 2024 we can go one step further -- LLMs
| are the ultimate solution to finally tagging your entire
| collection consistently.
| internet2000 wrote:
| For a Mac OS equivalent, I'm a big fan of Metadatics
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/metadatics/id554883654?mt=12
| sunaookami wrote:
| Mp3Tag exists as a native app for macOS: https://mp3tag.app/
| djkoolaide wrote:
| I use both the Windows and macOS version almost daily (work
| vs home), and I'm happy to report that the macOS version is
| just as efficient as the Windows one when dealing with huge
| directories. I regularly have to deal with thousands of files
| at a time, and it just zips through them. One of my all-time
| favorite applications, no doubt.
| ashconnor wrote:
| I always forget which software I used to tag a rip that I do
| once in a blue moon.
|
| I have TriTag in my bash history:
|
| TriTag https://github.com/korseby/TriTag
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Man, I wish teenage me had known about this one, rather than
| using a pirated copy of Tag&Rename.
|
| Being able to pull tag data from Amazon was _really_ useful,
| though...
| conradfr wrote:
| I actually have a license for Tag&Rename, it's good software,
| but Window only.
| ggm wrote:
| Genre started out useful. Five or six categories. Classical made
| sense. Pop made sense.
|
| Now, I have to decide if this is West Coast electro skiffle or
| its Canadian folk influenced digital beats.
|
| We wind up needing another tag, to do classical/pop/folk in.
|
| Also, players don't agree on artist/composer/orchestra or on
| movement numbering, you can't even rely on BWV. I've had multiple
| CD sets split by the amazing variance of back catalogue mining
| meaning an 11 part cd set of Chopin can match a 9 or 10 part set
| and a single release cd or two.
|
| The taggers are fine. The information model is a nightmare,
| matched only by how hard approximation of date is in EXIF
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Genre has always been a mess. For a while Primus was a ID3Tag
| genre in unto themselves. In general, that type of inherently
| fuzzy categorical will always be a mess. I'm old enough to
| remember the great alt.music.industrial wars over whether Nine
| Inch Nails was industrial or not.[0]
|
| The problem with ID3 back when I was ripping and encoding stuff
| back at the turn of the century was that they were fixed length
| fields. Using CDDB better as a source of truth, but even it had
| serious inconsistency issues. Not from a data quality
| perspective, but from a data format perspective. It quickly
| became a pile of inconsistencies, particularly around artists
| and multiple artist albums. In the end, I ended up extending it
| with a better format I called eCDDB. Of course there was no one
| interested in fixing the format, because CDDB got sold some
| megacorp, and FreeDB simply ignored the obvious problems.
|
| [0] Reznor won a Country Music Award in 2019, so that settles
| it. He's country.
| ggm wrote:
| But "old town road" by Lil Nas and Billy Ray Cyrus gets
| kicked off the country playlist.
| xd1936 wrote:
| I've been using Puddletag[1] on Linux as an Mp3tag replacement
| and it works quite well.
|
| 1. https://docs.puddletag.net/
| beretguy wrote:
| mp3tag works flawlessly through wine too.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Closed source and no Linux support.
| ape4 wrote:
| You can use the command line tool: id3tag
| --artist Nirvana Lithium.mp3
| beretguy wrote:
| It works flawlessly through wine.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > Closed source
|
| Thank goodness. Just imagine what a mess it would be with 100
| cooks.
| rc_kas wrote:
| $25 dollars???!?!?
|
| no thanks
| beretguy wrote:
| Is $11 for Spotify every month better?
| Crono wrote:
| Its an optional donation. This is freeware ...
| fourfun wrote:
| Not on Mac. Absolutely worth it though
| eliasson wrote:
| Apparently ID3 included some strange frames such as the
| Popularimeter (POPM) for storing emails and ratings! lawik goes
| through some om them in this post which I found entertaining.
|
| https://underjord.io/id3-specification-and-speculation.html
| romdev wrote:
| I'm meticulous about tagging and backing up MP3s for different
| mixes in car stereos and other devices. One problem is that I
| have so many MP3s and different copies I don't know which are
| tagged and when they were ripped. I prefer to retain the file's
| modified date when I just update tags so I'll know how old the
| rip is - bit rates have increased a bit since last century.
|
| I wrote a Powershell script that sets the date a minute newer
| when it updates ID3 V1 tags so I can compare files and know that
| one came from 2005 and has had metadata updated since then. I
| haven't found a bulk tagger that does this.
| ender341341 wrote:
| You should consider just adding a `ripped on` tag, or if you're
| worried about it being a bad encoding then consider re-ripping
| from sources into a lossless format.
| keb_ wrote:
| I still use this to maintain my music library, which I then
| listen to with either foobar2000 or cmus.
| daneel_w wrote:
| I stopped bothering with MP3s over a decade ago in favor of AAC
| (in .m4a) and for that I use AtomicParsley
| (https://github.com/wez/atomicparsley) on the command
| line...should anyone be looking for such a tool.
| mttpgn wrote:
| To modify tags on MP3 files programmatically, I have found the
| Mutagen library works well in Python.
| fourfun wrote:
| The Discogs integration is a great feature. I've checked out
| musicbrainz but it's no where near as complete for the music I
| listen to.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-05-24 23:00 UTC)