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.

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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.

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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 TagScanner 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 retrieved by TagScanner 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, TagScanner is 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 function in TagScanner is basic but it does allow you to create playlists and export them for reference which is useful for showing others your collection.

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

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ID3KILL will take any folder of music files, find ID3 tags and eliminate them. It will also clean up M3U playlists, which is really useful if you're importing a folder to iTunes and don't want the tracks duplicated.

ID3KILL is good at removing these tags, but offers no way to re-write them, which is unfortunate. It is useful for removing old versions of tags though, and it is very quick, lightweight and efficient. ID3KILL is also really small, and doesn't require installation, so it won't have any impact on your system performance and can be ran from a USB drive.

While it is pretty basic, if you want to remove ID3 tags from your music files this is a really easy way to to do it, making ID3KILL a useful tool for people cleaning up their digital music collections.

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Tags are the meta-information that is added to a file so the song name and artist etc will show up in your music player. With Reezaa MP3 Tag Editor you can edit this information, individually, or more usefully in batches. Batch editing is useful, as it mean you only need to enter artist and album titles once. You can save data in tag formats ID3v1.1 and IDv2.x, which to be honest is more than you need! Most players support ID3 now. You can also associate lyrics and a picture with your music.

Reezaa MP3 Tag Editor offers you all the tag editing you might want and more, but its major fault is that you can quite easily do this in most media players today. Apple's iTunes for example has excellent tag editing, and is more intuitive than here. Nevertheless, if for some reason you want to do batch edits on tags for music files, Reezaa MP3 Tag Editor is a pretty good option.

Most media players do this too, but Reezaa MP3 Tag Editor still does a good job of tag labeling and editing.

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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.

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If you only use MP3 files and iTunes, the tag editor in that program is absolutely fine. However, if you use lossless formats, or any not supported by iTunes, TagScanner Portable will be really useful.

There are a few ways to edit your tags. You can choose the type of tag for a start, and retrieve data from four online sources. There are Amazon, Discogs, Tracktype.org and FreeDB, meaning TagScanner Portable will find info for pretty much any musical release you want. You can use these to auto tag your files, or you can group edit files, adding album titles, year of release, album covers and even lyrics.

TagScanner Portable can also export your files lists in many formats, from suitable for Excel to m3u playlist files you can use in audio players. It really is a very comprehensive application, and it suffers a bit from complication. TagScanner Portable has an intimidatingly complex interface!

TagScanner Portable will satisfy all your tag-related needs as it's packed full of useful feature, but it's not the most intuitive application you'll find

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This excellent tag editor includes all the tools you need to rename audio files, create or edit tags and exchange data between one and the other. The program analyzes your music folders and displays their content on its interface, enabling you to work right in this list. It also includes a built-in player, but it doesn't work.

Although Audio Tagging Tools is a bit confusing at the beginning, you'll find that editing tags is really easy. What's more, can be done with several files simultaneously, which saves a lot of time. The program also features statistics about your music collection and the possibility to generate HTML reports.

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MP3 Diags is a complete audio editor that analyzes your music collection, detecting and repairing the most common problems, such as flipped bit in audio, broken or unsupported streams, wrong or missing tags, normalization issues, and character encoding issues.

MP3 Diags features a slightly complex interface that can take some time to get used to, especially since the program doesn't include any kind of help – you'll have to visit the official forum for support. All you have to do is set the folder where your music is stored and MP3 Diags will scan its contents. By the way: you'll probably want to create a backup copy of your music before letting MP3 Diags apply any changes - just in case.

Once your music has been analyzed, you'll see a list with the results, including all scanned files and the problems found on each of them, marked with bullet points. Simply hover on any bullet point to see what they mean. MP3 Diags includes four preset lists of fixes to be applied to your files in batches, but you can also choose any of them individually in a list under the hammer-shaped icon. Both the tag editor and normalizing app are featured as separate tools.

Used with caution and patience, MP3 Diags enables you to repair many different issues in your music library.

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However, going through your collection one-by-one, changing the tags is a time consuming a painstaking process. That's why I was pleased to discover PicardTagger which does the job for you. It basically automatically tags your MP3s with information about most well known albums.

The only things it doesn't retrieve are the artwork or genre information which is difficult to calculate with some music types anyway. The process couldn't be any easier. Once installed, make sure that 'Audio Fingerprinting' is selected and you simply drag yourMP3s into the 'New Files Folder' of the PicardTagger interface. To organise your collection, simply click on the 'Cluster' icon to group all the MP3s together by album.

Obviously, the more obscure your collection, the less likely that the tags it assigns are correct but it's remarkably accurate with mainstream music. I've managed to clean up hundreds of tracks which were badly tagged.

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With MetatOGGer you can tag your music library in a simple way. After the first obvious step of importing your selected folders or files, they'll all appear on the program's interface, where you need to check or uncheck those you want to work with (use the right button to do so).

MetatOGGer gives you several options to add or edit tags in your music files: use the file name or the path to create tags from them, add the tags by yourself from scratch, extract them from a database or import them from an online database – which is usually the fastest and easiest way, though it doesn't always work. Also, the program only has support for one database, while other similar tools usually work with a bunch of them.

The good thing about MetatOGGer is that you can instantly preview any changes done to the file's tags and then decide if you want to keep those changes or you'd rather discard them.

MetatOGGer features a very attractive interface with a nice design and transparency effects.

With MetatOGGer you can add or edit tags in your music files in a couple of clicks, although it works with just one online database.

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