Remove MP3 ID3 Music Tags With ID3 Tag Remover
At the moment, I am cleaning up my MP3 music library and while looking through my U2 music collection, I realised I had made a big mistake while editing the ID3 tags for one of the albums.
For those of you who don’t know, the ID3 tags are meta data that you insert into the file including the song name, the artist that sings the song, the name of the album, album art, etc.
Now I wasn’t inclined to sit there and start writing the ID3 tags from scratch so I jumped onto Google and took a quick look to see if there was a small program that would instantly remove the ID3 tags in one go (yeah I know, I can be really lazy sometimes).
After searching for a couple of minutes, it seems there is such a program – ID3 Kill (sounds like a James Bond gadget!). It is a portable USB app so it requires no installation. Even better Moneypenny!
So, first I went to the MP3 folder in question on my computer. Note how the MP3’s currently have all their ID3 tags intact.
Then I fired up ID3 Kill and this is what I found :
It’s extremely simple to use. Using the top yellow button, just navigate to the music folder where you want to remove the ID3 tags. Then tick the boxes for what you want killed. When everything looks peachy, click “GO” and let the app get on with its work.
It moves at lightning speed and when it’s finished, you’ll get a notification like this :
If you then go to the folder in question, you’ll see all the ID3 tags stripped and zapped, bagged and…well…untagged.
Weighing in at 175KB, this is a nice portable app to keep around if you need to nuke those ID3 music tags in a flash. It certainly beats having to delete and edit your tags one by one if you have an error with one of your music albums which is tedious!
Do you know of any other ID3 removal / clean up apps?
(By) Mark O'Neill is the managing editor of MakeUseOf.
I use MP3tag.
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
Been using it forever and it really has fantastic capabilities. Playing around with getting and removing it all is amazing.
This one should be tops!
remove ALL tags to adjust only one error in one tag? It seems overkilll IMHO. Any tag editor who supports multiple selections could handle it, even explorer…
It wasn’t an error in one tag – it was an error in ALL the tags for that album. So I decided to just wipe the tags and start again. Some people might consider it overkill but I like things to be neat and tidy. If something is a mess, I prefer just to wipe the whole lot and start again.
I agree it’s overkill because guess what, you’ll have to tag them again eventually (at least I would, I hate untagged music).
With MediaMonkey (or any other music manager I would imagine) you could just find the RIGHT tag info and apply it: POOF! Deleted and corrected in one go!
“wipe the tags and start again” would seem like more work. Just use Media Monkey and auto-tag from the web.
i’m with Shubby… use MP3tag.
it’s free, you can add rules (such as add 0 to track number 1-9, edit filename according to title, artist etc..)
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
I have been using Tag & Rename for years – does the job for me
Never remove “tags.” This is how you find your stuff! Techies want to take over the roll of librarians who have done this, aka cataloging, for centuries. If you don’t want to fill them out, find a program to auto populate them not kill them!
I can relate to what Mark is saying as I do exactly the same thing… It may seem like an overkill or long winded way of going about this process to many of you.., but to us/me it ensures that everything is kept “neat and tidy” i.e. content.., format.., etc…
MP3 Book Helper.
Terrible name, great app.
I have used a combination of Musicbrainz Picard Tagger (http://musicbrainz.org/) and foobar2000 with the discogs database for a long time now. Picard Tagger is for re-tagging – not for wiping, although you can ask it to wipe and then re-write.
compare it
Mp3Speaker-s.com
My question is why would you want to remove this info?
I am trying to find an app that fills all that info in for me.
mate..
that wuldnt be an mp3 format in that case
delete all text
then think of very long number
then you practically got a mp2 or some thing thats what i think… ill find out for you though
cheers mate
Hey Mark…For the same reasons of cleanliness, and making it easy for my mum to listen to a book, this was just what I needed. Thanks!
A little old but you could use TagScanner to find the tags and redo them. Removing the tags is asking for trouble since every mp3 jukebox type program (iTunes, J. River Media Center, Windows Media Player/Center) relies on them for putting your data into its catalog. More information other than ‘track data’ is stored in tags, such as volume adjustments, play count, rating, and killing them only cripples the players ability to perform as you ask it to.
Great tip, Mark! And as you seem to be a Winamp user, you can correct your wrong tags with Winamp Auto Tagger. Regards!
Thanks Mark. I like that it’s portable too. All I needed to do was put some MP3s in order by file name in my mp3 player and the tags were screwing with it. This was a good quick fix.
Thanks for this information. I use a crappy Emerson flash player (17.00) for the gym because I’ve broken better or had it stolen so losing/breaking this cheap thing is not upsetting. Only problem is that it won’t play over 128KPS and tags freak it out. Thanks for the recommendation because I had been removing them manually.