MP3 tagging from FreeDB with filename data

[tain]

For years I have ripped the few good songs from my CDs onto my HDD and named them manually. My format is "Artist - Track Title.mp3" None of these are arranged in album order; I just dump all the Rock songs into a folder named Rock, for example. This process always worked well since I never processed more than a few songs at a time.

But now I have quite a collection built up and want to use them in my media center.

The media center can do lots of neat stuff with music once it is properly tagged. But I have no tags. I have managed to use software like The Godfather to batch process my filename data into proper tag data. But that doesn't include the album or any other neat info like the year or genre.

I'd like to find a tool that will batch process my files to retrieve at least the album title and genre from FreeDB based on just the artist and title found in the file name. Additional data would be nice, too. I anticipate needing to manually approve each album title selection from a dialog since one track can be found on multiple albums. Haven't had much luck so far with Godfather, ID3 Renamer, Tag&Rename, AudioGrail, MediaTagger or ID3Sync.

Any suggestions on another tool to use, or tips on how to use one of these tools to do what I want?

[tain]

This article says that WinAMP has a new tagging utility. Does anyone know if it is capbable of the tagging I need?

[DigeratiPrime]

Haven't had much luck so far with Godfather, ID3 Renamer, Tag&Rename, AudioGrail, MediaTagger or ID3Sync.

Try foobar2000?

http://www.foobar2000.org/

Or Abander TagControl?

http://www.softartstudio.com/tagcontrol/

[ripken204]

ive been using mp3tag, it can do it in batch but i dont really like doing that b/c u never know when there might be a mistake.

[tain]

Abander's program was *sooooo* close to what I want. It had a dialog like I envisioned that showed the album results from freedb and allowed you to choose from them. But it didn't apply that info to the tags! Doh! :angrym:

Thanks for suggesting foobar and mp3tag, but neither of those programs perform this function. Foobar had a 3rd party plugin that looked promising, but it is deprecated.

The search continues!

[anonymous_user]

You could try Classic Tagger which uses MusicBrainz (instead of FreeDB).

Edited November 26, 2007 by anonymous_user

[tain]

DOH!

I should have known that. Really. I even talked about it here. Guess my feeble mind was incapable of making the association for how it could be useful for this purpose.

Thanks so much! ClassicTagger works pretty well. There is a new version called PicardTagger that officially replaces Classic in a few months. Classic did a decent job, but didn't get the genre or year. Picard got everything but the genre for me. The genre is easy enough to do since I have my files separated into genre folders anyway.

One other difference that people may want to know about for these taggrs: Classic is designed for tracks, Picard is designed for albums. This isn't a really big deal, and most modern taggers seem to be album-based anyway (which has been my problem with most of them). Unlike other apps, this album interface does realize that you may not all tracks from an album and lets you work with the individual tracks. It just isn't quite as easy as the Classic since it was designed for individual tracks.

I owe you a beer