How to: tag MP3 files automatically in Winamp

I admit it: I’m a bit picky when it comes to organization… and this applies to computer files too, especially my MP3s. I like to have my entire music collection organized in folders, one for each album, and with all files perfectly named according to artist and song title. Of course, this means they must be all properly tagged, a task that can be very time consuming regardless of what software you use. This is why I was happy to find a very simple trick in Winamp to have all your MP3 automatically tagged for you.

Whenever you see a file on your playlist that’s not properly named or is displayed simply as “track01”, do the following: right click on the playlist entry and select View file info. Then click on the Auto-Tag button and believe it or not, all tags will be magically completed in just a few seconds.

I must say this trick has worked for me every single time I’ve used it, no matter how the file was named or how much information was already included in the tags. Even in those cases when the tags were completely empty, Winamp was able to fill them in for me.

One last hint: if you want to tag several files at the same time, select all of them on your playlist with Ctrl+click, then right-click on the selection and go to Send to > Auto-Tag. They’ll be all tagged one after the other.