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ID3 Tagger Software

If you are anything like me with your mp3 collection, you will know about the incredible time consuming act of track tagging. With any large collection - say over several hundred songs, it can become difficult to keep track of files unless you have some system of naming and organising the files. I have constructed a piece of software from scratch to do just the above and I present it here and here alone for you all to test.

I copied the majority of my audio CDs before going to university to counter any possible theft and also to save on space in my room. With this, and other music I had on my PC, I had around 2000 songs. As my collection gained in size, to the 6003 files that I currently have, I realised that many songs were all over my computer in different locations, and due to bad ID3 track tagging, the also showed up as nonsense on my mp3 play-list. Anyone that has tried to clean up their collection will know this is a life endingly tedious task! I decided to create a piece of software to open a folder of MP3s and clean up the track tags or filenames. Saving you all from the boring programming speak, the software has developed as I added more and more features.

Before I get into the features, I should confess that this is still in development and can contain bugs (like most freeware does!). Having said that, I am happy to load my entire music collection into the program without fear of screwing it all up and loosing my valuable collection! I have released it as a Beta so that you can test it, and let me know what you love and hate about it. I wanted to share this with other people that had the same problems. We all find tracks downloaded from the net with the most random filenames (Metallica-01-KillEmAll-Hit The Lights[DaCrew2003.mp3) perhaps that was a little over the top, but you understand the situation.

Software does exist that can perform an online CDDB (CD Database) check, but this requires you to trust the judgement of other peoples tagging styles and name your song properly. Having tried this myself, it was fine to a level, but didn't organise files into a sensible folder scheme.

My judgement is this: An audio file should have a complete ID3 tag with the artist name, track title, album name, year and track number. This file should then be in a folder with the other songs from that album (or single). This then sits in a folder from that particular artist. The software allows you to select a large number of tracks, and perform modifications to the filenames, file locations, and track tags.

For those who want to help test this out, I would be most grateful for any comments or suggestions you have. You can either PM me via the forum to speak directly, but it's best to add a post to this forum topic which I have setup to talk about the software specifically.

This is a brief guide on how to get started. Again, the finished software will have a complete manual included (if I can find the time to actually write one)

ID3 Tracker Software Download [336KB]

After downloading the software, you may or may not need the .NET framework package. Newer PCs may already have this installed, but you may have to manually install it from the Microsoft website. The file is about 23MB so it’s really a broadband only job. Here is the link (correct at time of print) to the file:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=262D25E3-F589-4842-8157-034D1E7CF3A3&displaylang=en

Assuming all is now well and good, you should see the following screen.

Click Load MP3 Directory (and select if you want to include subfolders in the listing) and this will open a folder of music.

This then lists all of the music in that folder (and subfolders) and shows you the file details (name, size etc) the ID3v1 tag and the MPEG info (ID3v2 doesn’t work yet!).

From the above image you can see how it has organised my music. After I had opened up the folder of music, I went through and checked to see if the filename or the ID3 tag made much sense. Often, I found the filename to be nonsense, but the ID3 tag was sensible. The software allows you to rename a file from the ID3 title tag and vice-versa. After doing this with all of the files, say for one artist, I was then ready to perform some bulk operations. Selecting all of one album and then setting the genre, date, album name, artist name could be done in one click after entering the relevant data into the ID3v1 boxes in the top right.

From this point with sensibly named files and track tags, I could then use the software to sort my big list of files into new folders. I originally had all my files in one big folder and the software would create a folder called (hed) PE for example, and then fill that with a folder for each album. Into this it then puts the songs from each album.

I can imagine that this may seem a little dangerous, but I can assure you that I have made it difficult to delete files or folders of music. Having said that, you can’t delete file at all (yet). The worst thing you can do is a mass rename of your songs so be a little careful.

Right, this I know has been a very short and rough guide, but since things are still changing and being tweaked, it seemed silly to go into great detail. To add to my points earlier about bits not working, I am aware that:

The MP3 player (to preview songs), Smart Tag buttons and ID3v2 tagging all don’t work. This is purely because I haven’t written the code for them yet, but I will get around to it.

If any serious crashes occur (which they really shouldn’t) please let me know what you clicked and what you had loaded etc. If you find that a specific file causes problems, then try and play that file in Media Player or Winamp etc and verify that it’s not just the mp3. If it does turn out to be my software, please send me the mp3 to my usual e-mail address.

Update: I’m wiling to release the source code if anyone is interested in updating this to a more functional version?