One of the goodies I received from Santa was the new CD album by the Eagles and as always, when I get a new CD, I make a private MP3 backup copy on the computer using CDex. But one of the really annoying things about having a MP3 copy is that each song comes out on the computer as “audiotrack1.mp3″, “audiotrack2.mp3″, etc. Even if you manually rename the song title in Windows Explorer, it still comes out in media players as “audiotrack1.mp3″ or “untitled1.mp3″ as below:
So if you listen to your albums on your MP3 player, you’ll end up with mis-named songs which makes it virtually impossible to find what you’re looking for. The key is to be able to edit the “ID3 tags” of the file which will change the name of the MP3 file to whatever you want it to be. If you use iTunes and an iPod, changing the ID3 tags is very easy. But there isn’t an easy way to change the tags inside Windows Explorer - until today when I found the freeware ID3 tag editor program Audioshell.
Audioshell is a shell program which integrates into Windows Explorer and allows you to edit your ID3 tags quickly and easily (you can edit tags by track or by groups). You can even upload cover art to each MP3 file.
First of all, download and install Audioshell. Then select the MP3 file to be edited and right-click with the mouse. Select “Properties”. You’ll now see two new tabs in the properties section. The one you need is the Audioshell Tag Editor :
Change the required fields to what you want it to be, upload your cover art (if you want to) then press OK. When you play the song, it will now show the song title properly :
The Tag Editor also has a comments section so you can theoretically tag each song to find it again quickly.
Does anyone know of any Audioshell alternatives? I really like Audioshell and its simplicity but if anyone else has any other suggestions, I would love to hear them.
Filed Under: Cool Software Apps ¦ Windows
Tags: explorer, How-To, id3, mp3, music, music manager, tagging
Mark,
I’m a very big fan of MP3tagger myself (especially if you have a lot of files that are sorted in folders - it’s integration into the windows menu is very helpful) but lately I have found myself using Winamp 5.5 for tagging purposes. If you add your MP3s to the winamp playlist, you can select them all and right-click and send them to Auto-tag which is usually very accurate and will put in information that you may not even know (composer and the like). Give it a look if you are so inclined.
JV
Oops. I should have written mp3tag rather than tagger. Here’s the link in case anyone is interested:
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
hmmm.. are you sure you’re using CDEX correctly?
Prior to making the mp3s, you can use the one of the buttons on the right (on the main cdex app) to download album information from some remote server.
All the song details will show up, and subsequently the mp3 files will be generated with tags intact.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I frequently edit mp3 tags from Windows Explorer. Right click on the mp3 file, go to Properties, Summary and select Advanced. You can edit many of the ID3 tags from this window. You can’t add album art, but most other things. You probably know this, but the filename of the track is not the same thing as the title of the track. If you don’t have a Title it will use the filename as the title on an mp3 player. If you add a Title using the method above, the mp3 player will show the correct title, rather than the filename, for the song.
Thanks, didn’t know about it.
If you want a music player and tagger all in one, you can also try MediaMonkey. It provides hassle free volume leveling too.
[...] John wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIf you want a music player and tagger all in one, you can also try MediaMonkey. It provides hassle free volume leveling too. [...]
[...] mis-named MP3 file on your computer and you want to see what the file really is without playing it. If the ID3 tags are inserted, then InfoTags can read them for you [...]
[...] might also want to check out Mark’s MakeUse f review of Audioshell which is also a MP3 tag [...]
you can try with mp3 tag editor….