[HN Gopher] Mp3tag - Universal Tag Editor
___________________________________________________________________
Mp3tag - Universal Tag Editor
Author : accrual
Score : 363 points
Date : 2024-05-24 18:15 UTC (1 days 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
| deadbunny wrote:
| I'll 2nd Picard. Been using it for years (and contributing
| to musicbrains for years).
| xvilka wrote:
| I wish there had been something like MusicBrainz but for
| movies, they now have BookBrainz[1] so that would have
| covered most aspects of digital content.
|
| [1] https://bookbrainz.org/
| xvilka wrote:
| I only wish it wasn't written in Python - writing good GUI
| apps is way too hard with it, also the lack of static
| typing makes development of anything beyond simple scripts
| a potential minefield.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
|
| For songs that have covers, it will ID the song as any of a
| number of similar covers. I just tried to use it to tag
| something from the Grease 2007 revival soundtrack (which,
| as of this writing, doesn't exist in Musicbrainz), and it
| happily identified it as the same song from the 1994
| revival, which is wrong. This makes me hesitant to use it
| to identify songs if I don't already know what the
| identification should be.
| 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
| toyg wrote:
| Considering sanctions, Ukrainians are probably the
| largest Spotify consumers of Russian content right now,
| and obviously will listen to Ukrainian content too. So
| their engine probably goes "oh you like Russian stuff, so
| chances are you're Ukrainian, here's some Ukrainian stuff
| for you".
| 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.
| squarefoot wrote:
| If you like Prog Rock and Metal, you may like those two
| online radios. I've discovered some interesting bands
| thanks to them:
|
| https://www.progulus.com
|
| https://radioarg.com/tmb/
| carstenhag wrote:
| Well, it does have some nice features. It autocreates
| playlists of my girlfriends and my music. And playlists of
| different genres I listen to. And playlists by release year
| of genres that I like. And playlists of songs I used to
| listen to some years ago.
|
| Totally separate from the "song radio" playlists what you
| probably mean
| 9dev wrote:
| No, I mean the regular old playlists, like, road trip
| indie, the shower playlist, late night jazz, what have
| you. The stuff with cover images and descriptions that
| looks totally curated. Those are at least enriched with
| music you listen to, if not downright generated
| individually.
|
| And it's awful. Like I'm stuck in an echo chamber. I want
| to find _new_ music!
| a_dabbler wrote:
| I find YouTube Musics Discover Mix good for music
| discovery, I guess with the downside that you need to
| actively use YT Music a bit to feed the algorithm.
| Spotify has a tendency to suggest stuff that is
| overwhelmingly popular but YT Music isn't afraid to throw
| in something a lot more obscure that the overlaps with
| the artists or genres you listen to.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Spotify has introduced me to many new genres but the algo
| has gotten worse over time.
| hollandheese wrote:
| Plexamp. Does the same kind of thing but with your own
| collection.
| mortos wrote:
| Maybe it's the settings I have enabled but typically
| Plexamp will move from one album to the next. Maybe because
| I typically play an album at a time?
| 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 :-)
| Jerrrrry wrote:
| Verbatim is, was, has, and always will be, the gold
| standard.
| m463 wrote:
| Years ago I tried archiving to optical media and after a
| few short years, things were failing. Like all the things.
|
| I am of the opinion that (multiple) hard disks might be the
| most recoverable. I might be wrong.
| sandreas wrote:
| Na you don't. Of course I keep a HDD copy on my Backup-
| Server, I just mentioned the Bluray thing, because I try
| to keep my 24/7 System as clean as possible.
| gpspake wrote:
| Why bother with MP3s in this day and age? I have a whole
| little flowchart like this too but one thing I'll mention is
| that I use cueripper with eac as a fallback. When I end up
| using EAC I run the result through cuetools to get the
| verification log and store it with the original rip in a sort
| of source directory. Then I split the single cue file to
| individual flac tracks (I convert them from wave if I had to
| use EAC) and tag them all/add images etc. the final
| destination is media monkey and an iPod running Rock box. I
| keep a spreadsheet with every CD and the rip results and
| whether metadata has been applied and whether it's been moved
| over to the iPod.
| sandreas wrote:
| Great choice... I use Mp3 because its pretty much the works
| for everything format. Works on USB-Sticks for my car, the
| old Radio in the Kitchen, etc.
|
| CueRipper looks nice, maybe I'll evaluate, but for now my
| workflow is totally fine.
|
| The good part is, that if I one day choose to get rid of
| the MP3s, all I have to do is reimport my FLAC archive (of
| course I have a Hardisk-Version of the Bluray backup) and
| I'm done. With `beet convert` I can choose every other
| compressed format or quality and just need to wait a few
| hours to "recompile" my whole collection.
| Moru wrote:
| I use MP3 because it works on just about everything I own.
| Nothing is more annoying than when you have nicely prepared
| a USB stick with travel music and in the car nothing works
| and the computer is 500 km away.
|
| This is why most people bother with MP3 still, we don't
| care that there is something more recent. Or rather, we do
| care but have no use for it yet. Not always is the new
| thing better than the old for your use case.
| jim180 wrote:
| Many moons ago I decided to rip everything to AAC, until
| one day I brought cd full of mp4 files to my dad's
| car...and realized that none of them could be played.
|
| After that, it's just mp3 (and flac)
| karmakaze wrote:
| I would use 320kbps mp3s. At this point the space savings
| from 192kbps isn't worth anything and it's one of those
| things you wish you'd thought through so you won't have to do
| these steps again.
| russelg wrote:
| Or V0 is acceptable as well. 192 is crazy...
| sandreas wrote:
| I'm not an audiophile. For me 192kbps is good enough at
| the time, but I get your Point. Space should not be a
| problem these days and why not go as good as possible.
| Maybe I'll change that in the future.
|
| Like I described above I keep the FLAC Archive on a
| Harddisk, so if any day I decide to change my library
| format (e.g. to AAC to use FLAC), it is like one rsync,
| one import and one convert.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Always use V0. 192 is not good enough for many things,
| 320 is a waste of space.
| sandreas wrote:
| I'm gonna consider this for the future, thank you
| Projectiboga wrote:
| I saw a study once, and it found 224kbps LAME mp3 worked
| for all types of music. So that is what I've always done.
| glitchc wrote:
| What about the metadata? Do you listen to whole CDs at a
| time? I find that adding the tags for each song takes more
| time than all of the other steps you mentioned. Of course I
| use Mp3tag for that, but still, would be nice to auto
| populate somehow.
| Pxtl wrote:
| What metadata do you mean? Like the regular ID3 tags? Most
| tools so a decent job finding those on online DBs. I use
| musicbrainz Picard personally.
| glitchc wrote:
| Track titles, contributing artists, year of issue,
| genre(s), that sort of data. Once filled in, say in EAC,
| it carries over mostly to other tools.
| sandreas wrote:
| beets corrects all the metadata in a very automagic and
| decent way. If you never tried, it's open source software
| and totally free. It takes some time to configure and get
| used to, but it is worth it.
| sandreas wrote:
| EAC (Exact Audio Copy) has a Metadata provider, which
| matches the audio CDs and pulls data from different
| sources.
|
| That said, beet (beets.io) is much more convinient /
| accurate / easy to use and once it is configured properly.
| EAC has partly inserted the most important metadata stuff
| (artist, album, etc.) after ripping. So I use a cronjob,
| that runs `beet import` with "ignore if no match is found",
| that fully automates the process of embedding the metadata
| (also cover, lyrics and so on).
|
| Works really well and I don't need to perform ONE mnaual
| step. Although Mp3Tag is a great tool (and I mean really
| great), doing all the tagging manually costs just too much
| time.
| wwalexander wrote:
| With a setup this bespoke, why not transcode to Opus or AAC
| or MP3 VBR?
| maybe_pablo wrote:
| I do something similar to OP but do the final transcoding
| to HE-AAC VBR 64kbps (ffmpeg params `-c:a aac_at -profile:a
| 4 -b:a 64k -aac_at_mode 2`). The tracks sound more than
| acceptable to me and this way I can easily store my entire
| collection (+80k tracks) into my iPhone. Modern codecs are
| wonderfully efficient.
| sandreas wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your params... This is nice, maybe
| that's something I should consider. I need to test wether
| my car supports aac. My ipod does and kitchen radio is
| not that important.
|
| You should See my audio books workflow with m4b-tool and
| audiobookshelf, which is probably even better ;)
|
| Did you know ffmpeg has a non free Encoder (libfdk_AAC)
| thats sounds slightly better?
| maybe_pablo wrote:
| No problem, please do share any interesting part of your
| workflow if you have the time!
|
| > Did you know ffmpeg has a non free Encoder (libfdk_AAC)
| thats sounds slightly better?
|
| Ah yes. I'm not sure it sounds better than the
| audiotoolbox encoder though, at least it is reported that
| it doesn't here:
| https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC#aac_at although
| the hydrogenaudio source of this claim seems to be down,
| is still readable on the web archive at https://web.archi
| ve.org/web/20240407200855/https://wiki.hydr...
| sandreas wrote:
| I'm desperately trying to publish a blog article about
| this topic for half a year now :-)
|
| Maybe I'll never get it done, there is so much to
| cover... from
|
| - what I know about iPods
|
| - why modern Android Phones still can't compete in my
| opinion
|
| - why the Apple Earpods can't change volume on Android
| devices and vice versa
| (https://tinymicros.com/wiki/Apple_iPod_Remote_Protocol)
|
| - how you can harvest Earpods remote to create a durable
| good sounding headset using the right pinout
|
| - that OneMore seems to have implemented the Apple Remote
| Protocol without anyone noticing
|
| - why I wrote my own command line cross platform audio
| tagger (https://github.com/sandreas/tone)
|
| - why I self-host my audio stuff
|
| - and why nobody seems to care about an audio everything
| solution (music, audio books, podcasts, etc.)
|
| So, let's hope I'll find the time :-)
| sandreas wrote:
| That's a choice I made years ago. Maybe today I would
| change this, but I did not feel the pain to reencode my
| whole library yet. Maybe in the future. At least I know I
| can do it very easily by just reimporting the FLACs and
| change one config switch in beets :-)
|
| Opus is more exotic and does not work on all my players
| though (e.g. my car or kitchen radio)
| wwalexander wrote:
| That is the beauty of a lossless archive :) makes sense
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Thank you for this. I am trying to figure out what it is I
| want to do with my collection.
|
| EAC doesn't seem like it would have anything set up for an
| autoloader like the Nimbie, but dbpoweramp _does_ ; on the
| other hand, the major music-sharing groups seem to prefer
| EAC.
|
| Sadly, there's nothing out there that will be relatively
| accurate and precise when it comes to extracting beats per
| minute, key, and the nebulous "energy" characteristics. I
| would love to have those.
|
| I think I will also have to work to do things like pushing
| lyrics and artwork into the FLACs, seeing what metadata
| "makes it" in the re-encoding to something like a 320kbps
| MP3.
| sandreas wrote:
| I use EAC, because I made this choice a while ago, but
| there are some other tools around, that can even better
| automate the process of ripping to flac.
|
| Speaking of metadata: Beets does this pretty well. You
| should try it, even if it takes a few hours to get used to
| it. There are a few good youtube tutorials.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Part of the consideration is that I would eventually like
| to get into the music sharing scene (I have fought this
| for a very very long time) and there's considerations of
| which tools and which source of metadata complicating my
| decisions. Which is the "preferred" among which group?
|
| Beets sounds like it should be part of the mix, but so
| does MusicBrainz Picard.
| dajonker wrote:
| Have you tried "Mixed in Key" for detection of BPM and key?
| I used this a long time ago for EDM and for that it works
| great. I don't know if it works reasonably well for other
| genres.
| toastedwedge wrote:
| How did you get EAC working exactly? I tried to use it on
| numerous occasions and each time it would randomly freeze or
| repeatedly show a dialog box (I forget what it was now,
| something about tips maybe) until I closed the software. Even
| while I did nothing the boxes kept appearing. This would
| cause it to overlay itself endlessly in a loop.
| sandreas wrote:
| There is a pretty good tutorial linked in my article:
|
| https://captainrookie.com/how-to-setup-exact-audio-copy-
| for-...
| toastedwedge wrote:
| My apologies, I misspoke. It's the program itself that,
| without my intervention, will go haywire, regardless of
| whether I've followed a guide or started from scratch. I
| seem to be the only one with this particular problem, so
| I never knew how to fix it.
| sandreas wrote:
| I'd recommend to setup a fresh Windows 10 VM, install all
| the available upgrades, create a snapshot and then follow
| the linked guide.
|
| The Optical Drive can be passed through to the VM.
|
| If you still get errors, it's probably a hardware issue.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > automedia to add parity.
|
| What do you mean by this?
| callumgare wrote:
| I'm guessing they're referring to this:
| https://github.com/mmastrac/automedia
| komali2 wrote:
| I love MusicBrainz Picard but the UI doesn't seem to allow me
| to mass-manage my TB collection of music. Just crashes after
| trying to load it all into RAM for 20 minutes or something.
|
| I'm sure there's a CLI or something that can accomplish what
| I'm trying to do though.
| herewulf wrote:
| Try beets[1]. It's likely the CLI answer you're looking for.
|
| [1]: https://beets.io
| autoexec wrote:
| > 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
|
| Spotify doesn't even have to disappear, it just has to lose
| access to the songs you care about or raise their prices to the
| point where they are unfair, or degrade their service in other
| ways until it's not worth using.
|
| Personally, I'm paranoid about using internet based services to
| fetch metadata for my local media collection. I imagine their
| servers log those requests, each filename, the metadata pulled,
| IPs, and timestamps, and that they keep that data around for at
| least some length of time. Not sure how many sell that data,
| but what I'm listening to isn't really anyone else's business
| and I don't want the RIAA or anyone else to use that
| information as evidence against me somehow or coming around
| asking for proof of purchase for every MP3 they got from those
| logs.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day and
| I'm afraid to lose my older music collection.
|
| Services eventually disappear. Not many people recall about
| Vitaminic, a gem of the early 2K that along MySpace gave
| countless unknown artists and bands the opportunity to put
| their music online, then one day _poof!_ and it was gone with
| all its content. I had saved a few quite interesting tracks on
| my hard drive and attempted to search for the artists in the
| hope they moved elsewhere, but no way: they were gone forever.
| So, screw online services: I 'm not going to waste any energy
| in something whose kill switch is in someone else's hand.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| If the artists didn't own their own copyrights, there's a
| good chance that their stuff is available somewhere else by
| now. There are many companies out there that do nothing but
| put your music onto spotify and youtube for exposure;
| anything owned by a label is probably there.
| 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.
| distances wrote:
| > mp3gain from 2005 is another indispensable part of a large
| mp3 collection.
|
| Do you use it for portable mp3 players? Wondering why mp3gain
| instead of ReplayGain capable player, seems wrong to edit the
| music data itself instead of just tagging the gain values.
| billfor wrote:
| mp3gain is at the frame level. Sonos in particular does not
| honor ReplayGain. So the workflow is to adjust the volume
| with mp3gain, then re-analyze those levels and set the
| ReplayGain. That way it plays on devices that don't honor
| Replay Gain. Sonos sucks for local mp3s - it's the only way
| to get the volume to come out the same for everything.
| distances wrote:
| Yep, probably the best way if you need to use ReplayGain
| unaware players.
| 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
| johnvaluk wrote:
| And a CLI you can use interactively or for automation (once
| you get the quoting right).
| 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.
| highspeedbus wrote:
| I feel uneasy every time someone casually advocates the use of
| LLMs for a task. Sounds dirty.
|
| Hard to explain.
| 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
| sonar_un wrote:
| I use metadatics frequently as well. Great program.
| cageface wrote:
| My Mac player also supports tag editing. It's a bit basic right
| now but more features are in the works:
|
| https://plastaq.com/minimoon
| 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.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| That's because it's industrial
| ggm wrote:
| You win. It's not going in my folk or classical playlist.
| For at least another 50 years, anyway.
| amlib wrote:
| About 10 years ago I went on a massive retagging of my
| library and decided to use the "Grouping" tag as a high level
| genre tag, while the actual "Genre" would contain all the
| messy/impossible to normalize subgenres. This was a
| suggestion I picked up from some article I read back then and
| seemed like a good idea, plus it was supported by a tagging
| plugin in MusicBrainz Picard. There were problems with mp3s
| that used older tagging formats and it was ultimately
| resolved by upgrading those to a newer version of id3. But
| what ultimately broke the deal was that most players had
| spotty or no support at all for the "Grouping" tag. Pretty
| much nothing wants to use the "Grouping" tag as a genre
| filter, if they even acknowledge its existence at all.
|
| What made it even more frustrating was that I already had to
| restrict (and still do) to players that properly support
| "Album artist" tags if I want sensible
| filtering/searching/listing of albums that have multiple
| artists credited or is a compilation of songs from different
| artists. So I was left with a paltry selection of players
| that properly supported everything I wanted (and didn't
| suck), couldn't even setup a subsonic server (although that
| had other issues too..), and NO SINGLE android app could deal
| with it.
|
| I eventually had to revert all this nonsense and use the
| "Genre" tag as god (apparently) intended.
|
| So moral of the day, (or TL;DR) don't do weird shit with
| tags.
| ggm wrote:
| Gold response. Plex basically says "stick to an
| artist/album directory hierarchy and do composer somehow
| which doesn't conflict and Album-Artist sort tag reading is
| your friend but if you fuck it up I AM COMING AT YOU LIKE
| AN ANGRY GOOSE WITH A KNIFE" and so I dropped into line.
|
| When I do smart search on original album issue year like
| "60s" I find I get hit by amazing truths about what was
| contemporaneous music.
|
| "Switched on Bach" alongside "the Beatles" and "the song of
| the green berets" as well as Charles' Aznavour and Mingus,
| Terry Riley, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Keith Jarret, the Hollies,
| and Rogers & Hammertime (sorry -stein) It was a mixed up
| musical period. Thank God the fab four split up before the
| 70s.
|
| Len Deighton's spy hero listens to Stockhausen and Miles.
| defrost wrote:
| > It was a mixed up musical period
|
| eg: Pierre Henry - _Psyche Rock_ (1967):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDmqyjiF_NA
| skydhash wrote:
| I manage my collection as physical CDs. My current format
| for files and folder is "{album artist} - {year} -
| {album}/[Disc {disc #}/]{track #} {title}.ext". I mostly
| listen as albums, not playlists. This gave me enough
| information to locate music both using the filesystem and a
| library manager. I do have extra tags (I'm using beets to
| manage the collection), but I don't really bother with
| them.
|
| I don't bother with genre tags. And if my main collection
| grows enough to require them (currently ~500 albums), I
| think I will just be creating playlists.
|
| As for album artist, every player I came across could
| support it (except Rhythmbox I think). I currently have
| Navidrome, MPD, and Doppler (Mac) pointed at the same
| collection. Swinsian (Mac) does support the grouping tag.
| jzb wrote:
| "The taggers are fine. The information model is a nightmare"
|
| *Truth*. I find it really frustrating to only be able to assign
| _one_ genre and _one_ grouping to a song or album. Rating is
| another one. A 0-5 system is woefully insufficient to rate
| music. (If I had my way, it would adopt Robert Christgau 's
| grading system[1] that runs from "Dud" to "A+"...)
|
| [1] https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-cg90/grades-90s.php
| 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.
| farmerbb wrote:
| Thanks, going to try this out. Mp3tag is one of the few apps I
| use regularly that I've still been resorting to firing up a
| Windows VM for (or running it through Wine).
| aquova wrote:
| I've always used Kid3 on Linux
| jzb wrote:
| Kid3 has been my go-to for a long time, but lately I've been
| using Strawberry[1] as my all-in-one music player, organizer,
| and tagger.
|
| It has a built-in tag editor with MusicBrainz support and will
| auto-organize files. My only complaint with that is that it
| leaves behind old folders and files. _e.g._ If I have a few
| directories of MP3 /Flac/whatever downloads with cover scans,
| it'll happily use the tags to organize the way I like it* but
| if there are "extra" files they stay put and have to be cleaned
| up manually.
|
| But it's really a proper Swiss Army Chainsaw for doing
| everything in one application.
|
| * Proper directory structure is "Artist/(YYYY) Album Name/NN-
| Song Title.[mp3|aac|flac]"
|
| [1] https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ -- a fork of
| Clementine, which was a fork of Amarok.
| squidbeak wrote:
| It's been my stalwart for years, and I appreciate it very much.
| But it's nowhere near as finished a product as mp3tag, with
| much greater fragility. For instance, right now after the last
| update, which throws a python error. Mp3tag on the other hand
| has worked flawlessly and in every conceivable way since the
| dawn of time. Like foobar2000, it's one of the best pieces of
| software ever written.
| 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.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| ExFalso / QuodLibet is a good alternative.
| 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
| mek6800d2 wrote:
| I came across his article about a month ago and likewise
| enjoyed it. I was a little disappointed (but only a little)
| when I discovered afterwards that his suggestion of using event
| time codes to set off explosives on stage was actually
| suggested in the ID3v2 standards themselves!
|
| The fanciful ideas on the POPM frame were very interesting. The
| ID3v2 standards author's late 1990s, pre-massive-spam-onslaught
| design choice to include an email address seems kind of quaint
| now!
| 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.
| distances wrote:
| > so I'll know how old the rip is - bit rates have increased a
| bit since last century.
|
| It's easy to see which bitrate a track/album has, you don't
| need to keep dates for that? What's harder to see is what
| encoder was used -- modern LAME at even 128kbps is a totally
| different game than some 90s Xing or Fraunhofer.
|
| Better would of course be to have lossless files of the
| originals and mass convert to mp3 when needed, but I suppose
| that's a different discussion.
| Springtime wrote:
| _> I prefer to retain the file 's modified date when I just
| update tags so I'll know how old the rip is_
|
| Mp3Tag has a timestamp preservation setting. There's also the
| ability to run an external script/program on all selected files
| (via the _Tools_ sub-menu of the context menu) or by
| configuring _File >Export_ with a script.
|
| For those wanting to preserve original timestamps I'd suggest
| storing them into custom tags in the files themselves as a
| backup. Mp3Tag can be set up to do this automatically using an
| Action (its scripting syntax). That way one can always restore
| them back using a script.
| 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.
| ww520 wrote:
| Foobar2000 has a very good tag editor. I especially like how it
| can batch-sync the title tags from the filenames (via Properties
| -> Tools -> Automatically Fill Values). And the other way around
| to rename files using their tags (via File Operations -> Rename
| To). Super useful.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| It also has both musicbrainz and discogs (has albums that
| musicbrainz doesn't even have artists for) taggers
| noema wrote:
| Shame that it is (basically) a Windows exclusive application.
| esafak wrote:
| I wrote one of these mp3 tag editors for personal use back in the
| day using C++Builder or Delphi. I can't remember which one but I
| remember it was a pleasant experience.
| donatj wrote:
| Oh hey! There's a Mac version. I was literally looking for Mac
| Ape tag editor yesterday!
|
| I used this way back on Windows 2000 in high school!
| anotherevan wrote:
| Have used this for years. Still use it today on Linux under WINE
| as I just can't find anything else that is anywhere near as good.
|
| Basically use Picard to fill in meta-data, then Mp3tag to tidy
| up, add the album art and tweak naming conventions to my
| preference when needed.
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| On macOS there's also Meta[0] which I found better than mp3tag.
|
| You can also always use builtin Music.app for organization +
| tagging. I've been using it (or iTunes before) to manage my local
| music library for 10 years now and it's the best thing of my
| life, a big plus is I can also sync my library to my iPhone
| (altho the software quality downgraded a lot since the Big Sur
| rewrite). I also wonder if there's a cross platform alternative:
| a good tagger + a good player / organizer + easy to sync to phone
| + a good player on phone
|
| [0] https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/
| mcoliver wrote:
| Awesome app. For programmatically modifying mp3 metadata with
| Python I have found mutagen to be really nice.
| https://github.com/quodlibet/mutagen
| kls0e wrote:
| Florian Heidenreich ftw!
| manoweb wrote:
| What I was looking for is a tool to delete all tags from mp3s so
| the media players only show the file name. Directories for the
| band, subdues for each album and each song as a file is how I
| organize music, but audio players often add their own semantics
| to what should be a simpler concept.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| This is trivial with the command line tool _id3v2_
| DominikPeters wrote:
| In case someone finds it useful, I wrote a simple in-browser app
| for editing the chapter tags of an MP3 file (for podcasts), which
| can also edit some basic other tags like title and cover image:
| https://mp3chapters.github.io/ It's based on the node-id3
| library, via browserify. It would likely be possible to build an
| in-browser batch tag editor with the same idea, which then
| wouldn't require installing an app.
| dewey wrote:
| Great alternative for macOS: https://2manyrobots.com/yate/
| Faskil wrote:
| Still the best. And totally worth it. <3
| vojd wrote:
| I wrote a similar tool for Linux many years ago:
| https://github.com/fbngrm/DiscoPy
| kybernetikos wrote:
| What I find frustrating is that we write these tools for each
| individual file format. Calibre for tagging books, this tool for
| tagging music, another tool for tagging images. This stuff should
| probably be supported directly for all kinds of files in the
| operating system.
| briHass wrote:
| Windows can read/edit ID3 tags and many other types of metadata
| formats. It's hidden away in the details, but you can select
| those columns to show in a details directory view.
|
| There's certainly no nice bulk tagging functionality, however.
| icecap12 wrote:
| I use a tool called TheGodFather
| TomMasz wrote:
| I download a lot of FLAC recordings of taper-friendly bands and
| Mp3tag is indispensable. I wish it could easily read the info.txt
| files that usually accompany the recording and assign track names
| but that is about it.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I've just spent some time the last few days using this to clean
| up my music collection. I had a ton of duplicates in different
| bitrates but some were already tagged how I wanted them and some
| weren't. The tool is great but I wish it had some kind of side-
| by-side mode where it was easier to compare the tags of two
| files.
| roryokane wrote:
| On macOS, I'm happily using Meta for Mac (EUR25) to edit music
| metadata tags of individual files:
| https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/ .
|
| I still store most of my music in iTunes (renamed to Music in
| later macOS versions). I'm also happy with the tag editing of
| iTunes, especially after installing some custom tag-editing
| AppleScripts from https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php and
| modifying some of those scripts.
|
| However, I am rethinking storing all my music in iTunes given
| that it can't play Opus or FLAC files (last I checked) and it
| makes loud glitchy sounds when it plays an MP3 file whose sample
| rate is 32k instead of 44.1k. I've already had to give up on
| storing all my music files in the iTunes folder now that my
| entire music library doesn't fit on my laptop's storage. Thus, I
| have been using Meta more.
|
| Edit: I see another commenter also mentioned Meta and Music.app:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40471849
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