One of the most challenging aspects of having a large music collection is being able to manage tag labelling.

If your tags are not labelled properly, it's almost impossible to organise them well. TagScanner is a powerful TAG editor with batch functions and special features that allows you to export playlists to HTML or Excel worksheets. What's most useful about this program though is the fact that it can edit huge numbers of tags at the same time and not just that, but it can import tag information from Amazon or Freedb. The information that's retrieved can sometimes be hit or miss in accuracy but it saves a hell of a lot of time. You can generate tag information from file and folder names and it can edit a wide range of music formats including MP3, OGG, Musepack, Monkey's Audio, FLAC, AAC, OptimFROG, SPEEX, WavePack, TrueAudio, WMA, MP4 files. In terms of tagging, it's also pretty impressive supporting ID3 1.0/1.1/2.2/2.3/2.4 tags, APE v1 and v2 tags, Vorbis Comments, WMA tags and MP4(iTunes) metadata. The player is basic but it does allow you to create playlists and export them for reference which is useful for showing others your collection.

A very powerful tag editor that will surely save you time although you may find that automatically retrieved tags are not 100% accurate.

Download TagScanner 5.0.525 in Softonic

Zortam MP3 Media Studio is an all-in-one MP3 application that contains an MP3 organizer for performing a range of tasks quickly and easily. Features of the program include searching and cataloging MP3 files into an MP3 library, and editing ID3v1 and ID3v2.3 tags (ID3 Tag Editor).

The program can also be used for converting audio CD to MP3 and WAV format (CD Ripper) using CDDB (Internet Compact Disc Database), complete with support for ID3v1 and ID3v2.4 tags. You can normalize your MP3s (Mp3 Normalizer), search for song lyrics from the internet (Lyrics Finder), and preform a batch lyrics and cover picture update from the internet.

Zortam also facilitates converting WAV to MP3 files and vice versa (WAV/Mp3 Converter), managing M3u playlists (Playlist manager), renaming files using ID3 tags (Mp3 Renamer), searching for duplicate MP3 files, (Find Duplicate MP3s),and listening to MP3's using your favorite player.

Download Zortam Mp3 Media Studio 8.30 in Softonic

The idea behind Tag Clinic is simple; a program that will make editing or reformatting your MP3 tags a quick and painless experience. In truth though, what you get is an excellent solution that has been so packed with features that at times it is unnecessarily complex to use.

Although it’s far from bloated in terms of the strain it puts on your processor Tag Clinic loses points for the sheer quantity of options that are presented to the user on the main interface. The design of the interface does you no favors either and the glut of buttons littering the three-windowed menu only serves to confuse you.

Once you finally manage to find the directory containing your music you can begin to experience the powerful features of Tag Clinic. There is a huge number of options for interacting with tags, the most advanced of which must be the auto-extract feature, which will look at the file name and use any details from it to fill in the ID3 tag information for titles, artists, albums and tracks. Formatting the text is also a breeze with options to capitalize the first letters or eliminate any spaces from between words.

Although this is a program for editing tags, it seems to be incomplete because of the lack of an internal player and if you want to preview files you must open your default player. We would also like very much to see some kind of CDDB integration that would pull relevant information about albums from the internet repository.

With its direct editing of tag entries, Tag Clinic does offer a very efficient way to edit your music library’s details; However it could do with a major interface re-design and a few more MP3-relevant features to make the experience that bit more user- friendly.

Download Tag Clinic 4.3.7.2 in Softonic

You can quickly change the tags, make other operations above musical files and Mp3 Tag Assistant also supports batch operations. You will also be able to make the filenames the way you want them, create playlists and filelists, find information about songs from Internet, copy the changed files to the folders with your favorite music and more. The program has some unique features for editing large file lists. The program makes it possible to maximally automate the process of editing tags and other operations with music files.

Download Mp3 Tag Assistant Professional 2.91 in Softonic

aTunes is a fully-featured audio player and organizer, with some ripping and encoding tools included. It's written in Java programming language (Java 5) and has a wide array of features-

aTunes is compatible with Mp3 and Ogg formats and reads ID3v1, ID3v1.1 and ID3v2 tags.
Amongst other highlights are:

• Tag editor
• Show pictures of song: pictures inside ID3v2 tag, or in the same folder.
• Load / save play list in m3u format.
• Navigate through songs sorted by tag information or by folder.
• Filters for fast find what you want.
• Songs, albums or artists can be marked as favorites, and viewed through a special view.
• Full view with all controls.

It also features a Cd ripper tool, using cdda2wav, lame and oggenc. Just put an audio cd on your computer, and select "Import CD" in the "Tools" menu. You can select which tracks rip, and get track names from OpenStrands. Tracks are ripped at default quality. For Windows users, binaries are included. For other OS, binaries must be installed.

Download aTunes 1.9.0 in Softonic

Most of us who own an MP3 player or play digital music on a computer will admit that it’s possible to get a little precious over your audio collection. There’s something very satisfying about having a hoard of music with the correct track and album names for each song. Not only does it look a lot cleaner in your player, but it makes it a darn sight easier to organize your collection and manage playlists. Ensuring that all the tags in your audio files are correct can be a thankless task, but there’s plenty of software around that will make a much quicker job of it.

mp3Tag is one of the better tag editors around, allowing you to edit the metadata (the information about a track’s name, size, album name, artwork, etc.) with a good degree of autonomy. The app lets you rename files based on this tag information, replace characters or words from tags and filenames, import/export tag information, and create playlists. It carries out its dutiesdoes the job very well too. For instance, the program has a much cleaner interface than many of its rivals and is smaller to boot, making it very quick and responsive.

If you find that you have a lot of different audio formats on your machine that you want to keep in check then mp3Tag is perfect. It supports virtually every major audio file type, so you can edit tags for Ogg, Musepack, and AAC/MP4, besides just MP3s. tThe program isn't just a tagger, as it also includes cutting and joining functions that perform pretty well.

Perhaps the biggest boon though is the inclusion of a link-up with the online FreeDB database to import tags from the appropriate album, spelling a swift end to those MP3 albums you get with track names like ‘track01’, ‘track02’, ‘track03’, etc.) While the data returned from the FreeDB is sometimes erroneous, it’s generally pretty good (though probably not quite as quick as the import tool in Tag&Rename).

It’s fair to say that mp3Tag is one of the clear leaders in its field, and considering it’s a freeware app, it’s well worth downloading if you want to clean- up your music collection. Tag editing is very quick and once you’ve given your audio the mp3Tag treatment, you should find it so much easier to organize your tracks.

Download mp3Tag 2.41 in Softonic

With more and more multimedia content filling your hard drive, it’s increasingly important to have some way of managing it all. Teen Spirit is an all-in-one media player and organizer that aims to do exactly this with a focus on usability. A highly user-friendly interface and one click access to album information make this a great application, particularly for music lovers.

If you use Windows Media Player to manage your audiovisual collection then you’ll certainly find Teen Spirit a breath of fresh air. Although the look is not quite so slick and polished, the system for obtaining extra information about a track, album or artist is far better. Teen Spirit works by assigning tags to your music files which are then used to search for the appropriate lyrics and other associated information from several databases including All Music, Net Covers and of course, Google. By casting the net so wide, Teen Spirit tends to return much more extensive results than Windows Media Player. However, be careful with the tags. If they are not specific enough, Teen Spirit tends to retrieve completely the wrong information. Another useful feature is that it stores all this information locally so that you don’t need an internet connection to view album info once you’ve retrieved it for the first time.

You can create multiple music collections by simply adding the folder paths that contain your MP3 files, search through your collections and sort the file list in several ways. Teen Spirit also keeps track of the files you play, lets you review statistics and generates a personal hitlist based on which songs you listen to most. You can also do all the other usual things such as rename files, create playlists and edit ID3 tags. However, you can’t customise the interface in any significant way – there are no new skins for example – and you can’t drag and drop music from one playlist to another very easily. Teen Spirit also lacks an equaliser of any kind although the developers say they are working on a DJ function which will hopefully incorporate one.

However, Teen Spirit performs far less impressively with video files. There’s no info retrieval feature for these and the playing controls are limited. In fact, we found that although it clearly separates your videos from your music, you’re probably better using an external application with more features for video playback.

Teen Spirit is a great application for those who have huge music collections and feel their current music player doesn’t give them enough album info or doesn’t organise files very well. Seeing the right album covers and reading the artist bios really brings your music alive so even if you’re happy with your current music player, you might find you get more out of your collection with Teen Spirit.

Download Teen Spirit 0.93 in Softonic

Have you found that you've never really fallen in love with iTunes or any of the other major media players?

If so then you might find Jajuk a breath of fresh air. Firstly, this program is based on Java which I don't usually like but because the program does such a good organising job, it's worth tolerating the occasionally lags and sluggishness. The program is very flexible in that it can handle music in all sorts of formats including MP3, OGG Vorbis, AU, AIFF, WAV and SPEEX audio formats. The probelm is that this is no simple organiser of music - it's very specialized and quite technical meaning that you'll spend a good few hours just getting to grips with it's main features. On the plus side, it is remarkably fast intuitive in the way it organises your music into different genres, bands and titles. I particularly liked the ambiance manager which allows you to make playlists based on genres of music to suit your moods. There's also a basic but functional DJ tool which includes a configurable crossfader for some super slick mixing and editing of your favourite tracks.

A very exciting alternative to iTunes although it's maybe a little too bloated with features for it's own good.

Download Jajuk 1.5.2 in Softonic

Pistonsoft BPM Detector analyses your MP3 collection to determinate the bitrates of each song. Beats per minute (BPM) is a unit typically used as either a measure of tempo in music, or a measure of one's heart rate. A rate of 60 BPM means that one beat will occur every second. The idea is that, the higher BPM a song has, the faster it should be. Hip-hop typically uses a BPM tempo of 80-100, while house music is faster: 110-140 BPM. Jungle music goes even faster: 160-185. Gabba and Speedcore exceed 200 BPM.

This information should come handy, not only to DJs having to choose the right song on the fly but also to home users. They may want in fact to play slow songs after coming back home from a tiring day, or they may prefer something more energetic as the soundtrack for their spring cleaning!

The program automatically analyses selected files and saves the beat per minute information to the music file's ID3 tag so that you'll be able to know the song's BPM with every player you use. I'm not sure about the efficiency of BPM in order to decide what a fast or a slow music is though. Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, for example, had a BPM rate of zero while Quien Fuera by Silvio Rodriguez received a rating of 150.75. Personally, I would use the latter for relaxing moments and the former when I need to listen to something faster.

The idea of an application that can understand the type of songs we have and classify them accordingly is great but I don't think we have achieved that level with this application.

Download Pistonsoft BPM Detector 1.0 in Softonic

Anapod Explorer is composed of Anapod Explorer itself, Anapod CopyGear, and Anapod PhotoSync. Anapod offers iPod management through full Windows Explorer integration under My Computer, easy drag-and-drop iPod transfer and iPod backup, PDA function support, photo and video transfer, web page interface access to your iPod through a built-in web server, powerful search and reporting capabilities using a built-in SQL database, and much more, all in one compact package.

Download Anapod Explorer 9.0.5 in Softonic

Tag&Rename is a music organizer that easily handles all popular digital audio formats. No matter what music compressor you prefer, you can keep your music collection organized with Tag&Rename since it is the only tag editor and organizer which has full native support for most formats.

Tag&Rename supports many additional tag fields including lyrics, cover art, rating, mood, disc number, classical music fields (Composer, Conductor, etc.), file related URLs and so on. With Tag&Rename, you can automatically fix and complete file tags using online freedb database, load titles and cover art from amazon.com, get tags data from file names and its folders structures, rename your music files and folders according to its music information in a batch, create play lists, export files information to CSV, HTML, XML and text formats and more. Tag&Rename supports many files and tags standards in an easy and intuitive way, so you can work with music metadata and not have to think about files codecs and tags versions - Tag&Rename does it all.

Download Tag&Rename 3.4.6 in Softonic

What is Media Catalog Studio? It is a program that can manage catalogs of all multimedia files in your collection, no matter whether it's on your hard drive, CD Rom, DVD, floppy disk or portable Flash-device.

Once you have connected a device with the files to the computer, indicating the file's locations, the program will remember all the information on MP3, WMA, MP4, MPC, APE, OGG, AAC, FLAC, WAV, AVI, MPEG, WMV, Video and Audio CD files. This information will be stored in the database and you won't need to call to all your friends or search all shelves, looking for the necessary disk.

Media Catalog Studio will remind you of its location, supplementing the information on artists and albums. You will discover all power of work with the database supplied with the user-friendly interface. You can ask for any parameter from your catalog in any order: artists, albums, tracks, genres, bitrates, ratings, moods and more. You can easily find the track providing a word from the lyrics or the title or some additional information - file size and its frequency. Searching for duplicates by file names, their internal information and tags will help to sort out your media collection.

Media Catalog Studio has a handy tag editor that will enable to add normal description to your catalog. To easily make new playlists, a temporary list is available where you can place files from all the catalogs on your computer without having to care for their location. Last but not least, you can just use it in order to listen to the music.

Download Media Catalog Studio 5.8 in Softonic

Got a music collection with hundreds of poorly labeled mp3 files? Like having complete information about your music files – album, performer, genre, lyrics, year of release, and so on? Hate editing tags manually?

mp3Tag is a tag processor for MP3, WMA, OGG, APE, AAC, MPP/MPC/MP+, MP4/M4a files with great features, like an automated search for lyrics and pictures (album covers); tags import from Amazon and FreeDB. Another important advantage is the automatic tag filling option, which works great for mp3 albums that come without tags and meaningless file names, like 01.mp3, 02.mp3, 03.mp3, etc. The program takes the track lengths and compares this information with FreeDB data to find the appropriate album to import tags from. After confirmation the information is stored in the tags and if required can be used to rename the files.

mp3Tag allows the users to view and edit tag information, save lyrics and pictures inside MP3, M4a or WMA-files, view technical information about music files and delete unused MP3-tags.The program is capable of changing one or more tag fields simultaneously (including multiple files), generating WinAmp and Windows Media Player playlists, exporting tag information, renaming groups of files according to their tag data and much more. And special feature for iPod lovers – m4a tag editor!

Download maniactools mp3Tag 5.9 in Softonic

InfoTag Magic displays an informative tip on your screen when you hover your mouse over MP3 and plain text files.

Although Windows already includes a similar function for MP3 files, InfoTag Magic adds more detail to the displayed tip, which enables you to get a more exact preview of the track's ID tags without having to use an external tag editor or music player.

The good thing about InfoTag Magic is that it doesn't work only with MP3 files. The program also displays the same kind of tips for plain text files (that includes TXT, INI, LOG and other formats), which comes in very handy when trying to find a certain text file.

On the downside, I missed the possibility of having some basic configuration options where to select which sort of data I want to be displayed on those tips.

With InfoTag Magic you can see text snippets with interesting information every time you hover your mouse over an MP3 or text file.

Download Infotag Magic 1.0 beta 5 in Softonic

The social music website, Last.fm has become a firm favourite with music fans the world over because of the way it lets users discover music which the site deems likely to interest them. Because of this popularity, software developers have been quick to try to produce applications which make use of the website's open database - making for an interesting mixture of traditional offline and web-based software.

Local.fm is one of the more popular 3rd party applications developed to get some Last.fm style functionality on your PC. It works by scanning your music library and using the Last.fm database to create playlists of songs stored on your computer, using the 'Similar Tracks', 'Most Tagged Tracks' and 'User Tagged Tracks' queries. Enter your chosen track's details, or a Last.fm username and tag and Local.fm scans your music library to see which songs are available locally to create a playlist.

Unfortunately, while Local.fm is a novel and interesting idea, it has several downsides which limit its usefulness. Firstly, the playlist function is only compatible with Winamp or Windows Media Player, which is a great shame for iTunes users. The user interface, though not particularly complex, wasn't always completely clear and could definitely be improved by features like autofill.

The aspect of the program which needs to be changed most is its dependence on artist and track information being tagged in a way which exactly matches the Last.fm library. Even though I'd just spent a lot of time fixing the tags on my music library, I returned plenty of 'song not found' errors for tracks which are certainly present in the folders I've determined. A more fuzzy approach to song matching would probably fix this problem.

Local.fm is an interesting idea which is let down by several technical issues. While it's not perfect yet, it's definitely one to watch.

Download Local.fm 1.4.0.4 in Softonic

iTunes includes a feature which allows the user to automatically download album artwork for selected tracks but this is not a feature which ever feels like it has been properly implemented. At various times, without warning, users experience the error 609: basically that for some reason, iTunes couldn't download what the user wanted. With a complete lack of assistance in the Apple support forums, the company has left the door open for yet another 3rd party fix.

The aptly named FixTunes deals with the 'artwork not found' error, as well as fixing pretty much any tagging error that's afflicting your music library. Simply start-up iTunes and FixTunes, select the tracks you want to find artwork or information for (or just select your whole library) and set FixTunes to work, downloading all the required info with the minimum of fuss. Check the data and then click 'Fix' to apply it to your library.

FixTunes is particularly useful because it does away with the hassle and work which other 'simple' tag-fixing programs always seem to entail. Using a database of over 4 million songs, along with a clever percentage-based accuracy measure, it will only fix what it's certain about, leaving you to decide for anything below a certain threshold. In testing, we found zero false-positives and a reassuring number of 'not identifieds' which just needed a small change to the detected data, and all without typing a word.

An essential, easy to use tool for anyone looking to fix the artwork or tags in a large iTunes library.

Download FixTunes 4.6 in Softonic

Sharepod is a Windows program which copies music to/from your iPod and shares music with non-iPod friends). It offers the following features:

• Copy songs and playlists from your iPod to your PC
• Copy songs from a PC to your iPod - you don't need iTunes to add music to your iPod anymore!
• Completely customizable organization of copied files - choose your own folder and filename structure
• Integration with iTunes - once you have copied music to your PC, easily add it to your iTunes library
• Built-in Media Player
• Search by Title, Artist, Album, Genre (or any combination)
• Create Winamp-style playlists from the music on your iPod so you can listen to it without needing to copy the mp3 files to your computer.
• iPod Network File Sharing - If you are on a network, (e.g. at work/university) and you enable the feature, other users can run your copy of SharePod from their own computers, and download music directly from your iPod!
• No messy install/uninstall process - SharePod is just a couple of files

Download Sharepod 3.6.3 in Softonic

Some days you feel like listening to the most hardcore music in your playlist, but some other days you may just want to listen to some peaceful songs.

With Moody, you'll be able to adjust your playlist to those different states of mind and create song selections accordingly. The program, which works as a plug-in for iTunes, displays a small interface with a color chart where you only need to click on the color that better represents the feelings you experience with any given song.

Then, based on this color categorization, the program creates iTunes playlists that suit different moods: happiness, melancholy, sadness, etc. Plus, you can use it to manage iTunes controls (play, stop, previous and next track) from its interface.

Moody works generally fine. Just remember to run iTunes before launching it. Also, I missed having some kind of message when I click a color that doesn't have any song linked to it yet.

With Moody you can easily create iTunes playlists that fit your particular mood on different days.

Download Moody 1.0 in Softonic

Sometimes, the most popular apps are not always the best choice. For instance iTunes, which may be too big a download for someone who just wants to manage the songs stored in their iPod. If this is your case, take a look at this little app.

Its name is Yamipod, an acronym that summarizes this program’s main function perfectly well: Yet Another Manager for iPod. That’s it. Without even needing to install it on your system, Yamipod will take care of your iPod content management, providing you with a clean interface and simple, easy-to-use tools.

Once you copy the program to your PC, you can run it straight away, although it won’t really work until you plug in your iPod. Yamipod will then scan its contents and list all your MP3 folders and files on its interface. Also, the program does not launch automatically when you connect the iPod to your PC, which may be a nuisance for some but certainly a relief for others. I prefer to take control over when and why my software starts up.

Yamipod’s simple interface displays a list with all the songs stored in the iPod and allows you to perform different managing tasks. For instance, you can browse through your music by artist or album, check the playlists you’ve created or view extended information about each song. You can even listen to music with the built-in player. However, we should note that we had some problems testing this as the player didn’t seem to work properly.

Perhaps the most interesting function is the possibility to copy both MP3 and AAC files to and from the iPod, which makes it very easy to update your music library. If you want to copy music to your PC from the iPod, select the songs and click on the “Copy song to...” option in the context menu. To copy them back to the iPod, just drag and drop the files from the Windows Explorer onto the program’s interface.

Finally, another very interesting tool is the “Remove duplicates” utility. No matter how careful you are, you’ll end up having duplicate songs in your iPod, especially if it’s a large one. Yamipod will find them by comparing ID tag data and file sizes, showing a list of possible candidates before actually deleting them.

Yamipod is certainly no serious competition for iTunes but still, it’s a very interesting option for those of us who own an iPod and need a simple, neat and easy-to-use file manager.

Download YamiPod 1.7 in Softonic

Melomania is one of the handiest music organizer programs for Windows, which allows you to catalog music collection of any kind, from vinyls to MP3s, and provides you with a quantity of facilities to manage music database, including:

Automatic adding the digital tracks

No manual input of track titles and related information required. Media Scanner will get all necessary information for you right from tags of media files.

Information loading from Internet

Internet Finder allows you to find and download the comprehensive information about your music items with possibility to save any part of it to music database.

Lent media tracking

You can share your music items with friends and neighbours without worry to forget what and to whom you have lent.

Handy navigation

From usual for web browsers Back/Forward buttons and window switching tabs to more specific "bread crumbs" - all of these features were made especially for your convenience.

Instant and accurate search

Melomania searches for music items by any part of their names in seconds. Even huge music databases are processed by search instantly.

Download Melomania 1.79 in Softonic