I mentioned in my last MP3 series post that I had the material to write a new post regarding this topic and so today I’m fulfilling the promise I made. I’m going to show how you can use the powerful Swiss Army knife called Mp3tag (Windows “only” app) right within your Mac. Yes, you read it right. You can run Mp3tag using your Mac. Nowadays almost everything is possible…

The great thing here is that there’s a way to use our beloved Mp3tag in Mac OS. I even asked a question at SuperUser where I was trying to find some similar software that I could use in Mac. Here’s the question: Alternative to mp3tag for Mac OS X. Well, after searching a little bit more I found a great site called PlayOnMac. What is PlayOnMac?

PlayOnMac is like wineskin, winebottler or crossover a piece of software which allows you to easily install and use in your Mac numerous games and software designed to run only with Microsoft®'s Windows®.

I then found Mp3tag bundle here. You get a .dmg file which contains Mp3 Tag.app (172.5 MB) on disk. Just mount the .dmg file with a double click and extract the .app file to your Applications folder in Mac OS dock. Doing this you have the power of Mp3tag right inside your Mac. No Windows virtual machine needed/no need to load your bootcamp Windows. It’s good because you’ll have more memory left for your Mac (in the case of a virtual machine) or you won’t spend your time changing the operating system (in the bootcamp case).

Ok, the bundle is a little bit lazy to load and the visual (retro) is Windows like but who mind?

There’s nothing better than a use case to showcase something. Today I need to organize some MP3 tags because their Track - Artist - Title fields are all a complete mess. Some data are already there and some are missing completely. I of course will use Mp3tag guessing pattern feature to solve this.

To get to the Guess values dialog window, click the Actions (Quick) icon in the toolbar and select Guess values in the dropdown menu. Screenshots can be seen here.

Here are the MP3 files before the process:

Figure 1 - Mp3tag Guess Values Window for Track Artist and Title in File Name [ before ]

As you see most of the tracks have 1 in the Track field and Title and Artist fields are missing in most of cases. All the information that is missing is present in the Filename field. Really interesting fact.

Let’s take advantage of Filename info and fill the missing tags with that data. How? Using Mp3tag Guess values window.

Source format: %_filename%

Guessing pattern: %track% - %artist% - %title%

Really easy, isn’t it?

What the hell these % symbols are doing here? They are simple placeholders that tell Mp3tag about a specific pattern found in fields of MP3 files. In this specific case, Mp3tag will extract data from the Filename field ( source ). Looking at Figure 1 we see that all file names follow a pattern: Track # - Artist - Title. Such pattern is then passed to Mp3tag in the Guessing pattern field. With this input Mp3tag is able to infer/parse the file names and split them accordingly. Each part will then be used to fill the correct MP3 tags.

Here’s the post-processed MP3 files:

Figure 2 - Mp3tag Guess Values Window for Track Artist and Title in File Name [ after ]

That’s a much better view and experience within your preferred Media Library software!

Things like this makes me really happy with computers…

Hope you find it as useful as it’s being to me in this hard task of keeping a MP3 collection organized. I at least try my best.

To see more ways of using the Guessing Pattern, check the MP3 series of posts.

This is just one more post in the MP3 series where I write about how you can organize your MP3 library/collection performing batch renaming to correct MP3 metadata and save time.

Just after I posted about Using Regular Expressions to correct mistagged MP3 I had other task to accomplish with Mp3tag but I didn’t know how to do that. What I want now is somewhat like what I showed in that previous post. The difference is that now I want to use the content of a given tag to fill another tag, thus copying/cutting that content from tag to tag.

As always I have a feeling that there must be a way of doing what I want and as always I go after it.

Here’s the problem this time:

Picture 1 - Title tag has both the Title and Artist names and Artist tag has a wrong value

As you see in Picture 1, I have some MP3 files that have the Artist name included in the Title tag. The Artist name is between brackets while the Artist tag has the text Various. Obviously this is wrong because the Artist name should be in its proper Artist tag.

How can we correct this without manual intervention that would be a time consuming task?
The simple answer is using Mp3tag and its powerful set of features like the one called Guess values.

Guess values is so amazing that its window dialog just takes 2 parameters to get the job done. They are: Source format and Guessing pattern.

The Source format field in this case has the value %title% and the Guessing pattern field has the value %title% (%artist%). You can use any mp3 tag field between percent signs (%). What do these values mean?

Source format retrieves the value present in the Title tag of each MP3 and by guessing the values through the Guessing pattern it’s possible to split the Title tag according to the pattern. This opens up a world of possibilities where you can use any kind of combinations (masks/patterns) to split the value of a given tag and have those split values fill any MP3 tag of your choice.

So, in this case we have something as this happening behind the curtains:

Title: Begins With Me (Point of Grace)

Source format = %title%
Guessing pattern = %title% (%artist%)

Making the substitution, we have:

Guessing pattern = %Begins With Me% (%Point of Grace%)

With this, Mp3tag now knows what values it must use to fill the MP3 tags we want correctly.

Here’s the final result after you press the OK button present in Picture 1:

Picture 2 - Correctly tagged MP3 files

Hope you got the idea and make good use of this.

I already have the material to write the next post in this series. Keep an eye in this blog. :)

Two months have passed since I last posted something here. These were 2 busy months in my life. Hooray, I bought a brand new car and got my driver license, not necessarily in this order.

This post is about something I had planned to write sometime ago… the two screenshots shown here I got maybe 3 months ago. :D So let’s get to it.

As a big and eclectic fan of music that I’m, every now and then I see mistagged MP3 files like the ones with title tags that contain both the artist name and the song name. The following picture shows what I mean:

Picture 1 - Mistagged MP3 files (Title field has both the Artist and Song names)

Here’s where Mp3tag comes to the rescue. As you see in Picture 1, I’m using the dialog “Replace with regular expression”. Read my previous post about this great piece of software called Mp3tag to see how to get to this dialog. It has 3 fields that you must fill to make some magic happen allowing you to correct those wrongly tagged/mistagged MP3 titles all at once. Ha! You won’t lose your precious time correcting MP3 by MP3. I know that this is boring and that’s why I desperately searched for a solution. I know that if you’re reading this, you’re probably in the same situation and you just found a solution. :)

I’ve chosen the Field TITLE since it’s the problematic field in this particular case. Now the most important part, the so called Regex or Regular expression: (.*) - (.*). This thing means that we’re gonna separate the MP3 Title field in two parts. One part will have everything (.*) before the hyphen - and the other part will contain everything after the hyphen (.*).

Example:

Dru Hill - Away (Prod. by B.Cox) (Full + NoShout) (2010)

The regex (.*) - (.*) will separate the MP3 title above in two parts…

$1 = Dru Hill
$2 = Away (Prod. by B.Cox) (Full + NoShout) (2010)

The Replace matches with field has the value $2 because in this case I want to replace/substitute the MP3 Title with only the Song/Track name (the 2nd part/match of the regex above). If instead I wanted to keep the Artist name in the Title tag (D'oh!, not something I’d want to do), I’d write $1 in this field.

Now, take a look at Picture 2. When you click OK, this is the end result/magic you get. Nice and correctly titled/tagged MP3 files. The way I wanted them to be.

Picture 2 - Correctly tagged MP3 files

To make things last forever, do not forget to click the Save button present in Mp3tag’s toolbar or in the Save tag option present in the File menu. I like to press Ctrl+S as a shortcut.

If you want to learn the basics about regular expressions to use with Mp3tag, check this out: http://help.mp3tag.de/options_format.html#regexp

As you see, using regexes (one of the most powerful features of computers) you can make any kind of change to your MP3 tags like for example removing that (2010) present in each MP3 Title field above. That 2010 should be in its proper MP3 tag, namely the Year tag. Don’t ya think?

Hope this simple process helps someone out there keep an organized MP3 library as I do like to keep mine.

Note
Mp3tag is a Windows only application as is Windows Live Writer that I use to write these blog posts. I use/run it through Parallels Desktop on my Mac mini. Read this post to get more info about how to run Windows side by side with your Mac OS.

It’s always good to keep things organized even more when it comes to MP3 files. If you use to listen to MP3 music you know what I’m talking about.

I keep a timeline of music I listen to at Last.fm. Last.fm tries to help us correcting wrong MP3 tags, but corrections are only visible online and they don’t change MP3 metadata, that is, you still have wrongly tagged MP3 residing in your music library.

To overcome such situation I started looking for a piece of software that could resolve this misinformation. I got to know a free yet powerful small application called Mp3tag that allows the execution of various commands against MP3 metadata.

Excerpting from the official site:

Mp3tag is a powerful and yet easy-to-use tool to edit metadata of common audio formats where it supports ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, iTunes MP4, WMA, Vorbis Comments and APE Tags.

It can rename files based on the tag information, replace characters or words in tags and filenames, import/export tag information, create playlists and more.

Mp3tag supports online database lookups from, e.g., Amazon, discogs, or freedb, allowing you to automatically gather proper tags and cover art for your music library.

One of the best features of Mp3tag is the Actions menu button that let’s you replace text within any MP3 tag field using simple find and replace or more advanced regular expressions. The following figure shows the options available:

Figure 1 – Options available through the Actions menu button

I’ll briefly show how to edit the Title of some files all at once - what is known as batch processing.

I’ll remove with only one command (action) the text “ - TO BE REMOVED” that is part of the Title tag of 10 MP3 files:

Figure 2 – Mp3tag listing 10 MP3 files before the batch processing

Click on the Action menu button (mouse pointer is over it in the following picture) and select the action type as Replace and click OK:

Figure 3 – Mp3tag action type selection

Now select the MP3 tag field you’d like to change. In this case I’m going to modify the content of the Title tag field. Enter the text “ - TO BE REMOVED” inside the Original field. As I want to remove the text I’ll let the Replace with field blank/empty.

Figure 4 – Mp3tag Replace action window

Click OK and voila:

Figure 5 – Mp3tag listing 10 MP3 files after the batch processing

Now you know where to look for a versatile MP3 tag editor. It comes to the rescue allowing you to avoid spending your time editing MP3 by MP3. You can do lots of things related to MP3 metadata. You can batch process all your MP3 with only one action easy as pie.

It would be good if popular media players as Windows Media Player, iTunes, etc could let us do things like this simple task I demonstrated in this post. Maybe someday they will. I hope.

References
Mp3tag online Help
Mp3tag group at Last.fm
Mp3tag at Twitter