TuneUp Companion

TuneUp Companion has one major advantage over all the other solutions: it uses Gracenote CDDB database – which is considered to be one of the largest and most comprehensive out there.

TuneUp uses a technology similar to MusicBrainz, ‘FileID’ to fingerprint the song even without the proper filename – retrieving accurate metadata. Depending on the server-load, an album doesn’t take more than 15-30 seconds to fix. My experience with TuneUp was extremely positive – it only failed on an old classical compilation out of 253 albums.

In addition to fixing your music tags and songs, TuneUp also downloads high-resolution album art and integrates with YouTube to provide related videos to the song you’re listening; eBay and Amazon for merchandise and Ticketmaster/StubHub for concert tickets.

The ‘Never miss another show’ tab provides concert dates and prices for artists in your library, a very useful feature for any music fan.

It’s definitely the most comprehensive solution – and easy to use. TuneUp is available for Mac and Windows and works by interfacing with your iTunes Music Library. Even if you don’t use iTunes to manage your music day-to-day, you can download it, fix your music then import it in your preferred application.

MusicBrainz Picard

MusicBrainz, a non-profit corporation, picks up where Gracenote left off, as an open-source, freely available database of CD information or metadata. Picard takes advantage of this database with an intuitive barebones interface and a similar fingerprinting technology that aims to match the tracks as best as possible from the acoustic scan rather than on file sizes or names. The Scan takes a little more time than TuneUp but not significantly.

Picard supports plugins – although I had a hard time finding any notable ones – and does automatically download and save album art if it’s in the database. However, don’t expect album art on anything other than popular titles.

At heart I am an open source fan – and I always try to use it when I have a choice. That being said, I encountered a bug that undermined the functionality of the program for some albums. For example a ‘Jet’ album, properly tagged, had tracks indentified from two separate albums with the same correct name. Saving the information would split the tracks into different folders appearing twice in iTunes. This happened multiple times for quite popular recordings from Coldplay and The Killers.

MusicBrainz is a very exciting project and definitely deserves a second chance from users after this weird bug is corrected. If you’re willing to spend some time manually assigning names for misbehaving albums, it’s a good application. You can get MusicBrainz for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Mp3Tag

Mp3Tag is free, although it’s not open source. It uses the FreeDB database as its primary solution which is noticeably lower quality than MusicBrainz, but it also integrates with the Amazon catalog, which is quite large and boasts largely high quality album art. It’s a bit of work to get everything right but it’s worth it considering the price – free.

A nice feature I found in Mp3Tag allows you to automatically rename the filenames according to tags, useful when browsing the library directly from the file system.

Unfortunately, Mp3Tag is only available for Windows.

iTunes Store File Validator

Skip past the messy interface and you’ve got a marvelous little tool with features like Reverse Scrobble to update the play count within iTunes from Last.fm, embed album art in songs, automatically clean empty folders, set EQ automatically based on genre, and more nifty actions.

Additionally it scans your library and assesses whether your songs are iTunes Store quality – checks for all the important indicators and then creates and easy to use report. Download it from here.

I also approached FixTunes, an application similar to TuneUp, that instead of using Gracenote, piggy backs on multiple free databases like freeDB, Amazon and MusicBrainz to create its own database and then charge for its software. The worst part is that it doesn’t seem to have a fingerprinting technology and instead relies on the tags you already have – which is inherently prone to mistakes. I dropped FixTunes from this article because numerous comments were unfavorable and I personally had  my share of weird Chinese song titles, frequent crashes and fairly popular albums poorly recognized.

Conclusion

Using features from all the software above, you can manage to have a true collector quality music library: complete with correct metadata, album art and normalized filenames.

If you’ve got any suggestions for other great software that I missed – let me know in the comments; I’ll take a look at it and include it for the readers.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Remove MP3 ID3 Music Tags With ID3 Tag Remover (18)
• How to Improve Your iTunes Experience (Part 1) [Mac Only] (39)
• How to Edit Your Music ID3 Tags with Audioshell (13)
• The BIG Book of iTunes [Free PDF Download] (49)
• Synchronize MP3s To Non-Apple Devices with doubleTwist [Mac] (0)

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?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• How to Edit Your Music ID3 Tags with Audioshell (13)
• 4 Easy Ways Fix Music Tags & Organize Music Library (25)
• Manage your iPod with SharePod (15)
• How to Improve Your iTunes Experience (Part 1) [Mac Only] (39)
• Top 5 Free Media Players For Windows (57)

It works along the same principles as the HTML “alt” tag. After installing InfoTags, just move your mouse over the desired file and it will tell you the first few lines of what is inside :

It is also useful if you have say a 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 :

It would be nice if the program extended support to other file formats such as PDF but in its present form, I am finding InfoTags extremely useful for navigating through the hundreds of Notepad files in my hard-drive.

(By) Mark O’Neill is a freelance writer, proofreader and blogger. Visit his blog at BetterThanTherapy

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Windows Registry Tweaks (Part 2) (8)
• Speed up file Copy’n Paste with Piky Basket (9)
• Some non-Registry Windows tweaks (7)
• Replace Windows Explorer With A More Powerful Alternative (19)
• More non-Registry Windows Tweaks (3)

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.

Download Audioshell.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Remove MP3 ID3 Music Tags With ID3 Tag Remover (18)
• 4 Easy Ways Fix Music Tags & Organize Music Library (25)
• Organize and Tag your Music Library with Mp3tag (5)
• How to Improve Your iTunes Experience (Part 1) [Mac Only] (39)
• Get Information on your Text Files with InfoTags (2)