Id3 Tag Program For Mac

Top 7 id3 tag editors for Mac OS X El Capitan If you are a music lover and have numerous music tracks stored in your music folder, it becomes necessary to add important metadata to the files in order to make them identifiable while they are being played by a music player application, or any other physical music system.

A well tagged MP3 collection makes everything from organization to playback easier. Keep reading for a closer look at your fellow readers' favorite tools for cleaning up their MP3 tags in this week's Hive Five. Photo by Darin Barry.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite tools for tagging your MP3 files. We've rounded up the top six rather than five—thanks to a particularly close call among the top candidates—and we're back to share and help you pick a program to get your MP3s in order.

Advertisement

Best MP3 Tagging Tool?

Many people get their daily music fix with MP3s, but a poorly tagged collection can make…

Read more Read

TuneUp (Windows/Mac, Basic: Free; Gold: $19.95)

Advertisement

TuneUp is a music cleaning addon for iTunes. TuneUp's simple drag and drop interface combined with an extensive database of more than 90 million acoustic fingerprints makes cleaning up your music a breeze. You can drag hundreds of songs onto the TuneUp sidebar in a single go and let it chug through the pile. When it's done, you'll have a list to approve with any tricky songs or albums flagged for your approval before the tags are altered. The same drag and drop system works for cover art; you'll be presented with a list of available cover art for coverless albums. The free version of TuneUp is limited to 100 songs and 50 album covers per month, the Gold version is unlimited. If you try TuneUp and love it, the Gold version is currently 15% off (with the coupon SONGFLU) through June 2, 2009.

MediaMonkey (Windows, Basic: Free; Gold: $19.95)

Advertisement

MediaMonkey is a popular iTunes alternative among Lifehacker readers and also a rather robust tag management tool to boot. Once you have your music collection imported into MediaMonkey, you can automatically update tags from Freedb and update cover art from Amazon. MediaMonkey has a very strong focus on tag-based organization and support for user scripts to speed up the process. If you dump a bunch of music into MediaMonkey and that music has incomplete, corrupted, or mismatched ID3 tags, MediaMonkey automatically flags them and puts them in an Edit/Unsynchronized node on the program's file navigation tree, making it extremely easy to find the bad apples in your music collection and fix them. Once you get your tags in order, you can use Media Monkey to automatically organize your music into folders using the ID3 tags as a guide, creating directories based on artist and album names. If your primary focus is tag cleanup, the free version has all the same tagging features as the pay version.

Beat Your MP3 Tags Into Shape with These MediaMonkey Scripts

Inconsistently tagged MP3s can be a real pain. Avoid hours spent digging through your music…

Read more Read

Advertisement

ID3-TagIT (Windows, Free)

Advertisement

Although development was discontinued on ID3-TagIT in 2007, it still has a base of happy users. It isn't the most spartan or automated entry in the Hive Five, but it does offer an extremely granular amount of control over even the most minute details of tagging. If you're not interested in digging into the more obscure tags, the app's quick edit box handles basic changes. Like MediaMonkey, the program will query the Freedb to help you out. ID3-TagIT has no help file or online documentation, so be prepared to spend a little while going through each menu bit by bit to get a feel for all the features and their layout.

MusicBrainz Picard (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

Advertisement

MusicBrainz is an enormous user-maintained metadatabase of album information. Their popular iEatBrainz music tagging tool has been replaced by the cross-platform PicardTagger. On top of using available information, like file names, to suggest changes to your tags, Picard also uses AcousticFingerprints of songs to semi-automatically identify songs in your collection. Once Picard finishes scanning your collection and checking it against the MusicBrainz database, it flags the tracks with a green, red, or orange flag to indicate how close of a match each file is to a fingerprint in the MusicBrainz database. From there you can check the suggested changes against your existing files side by side before approving them. Picard has an extensive drag and drop feature list, and almost every type of dragging and dropping within the interface does something useful. Dragging a file from the browser pane onto an album for example, prompts Picard to check the file against that particular album. Picard is open source and scriptable, leaving it wide open for tinkering to suit your needs.

Mp3Tag (Windows, Free)

Advertisement

Mp3Tag is a an MP3 tagging tool with a rather spartan interface which lends itself to easy use. You can batch edit your MP3 tags, including iTunes specific tags like media type or TV Show settings. If your MP3 files are named with tags in the file name like band-album-track-title.mp3, you can tell Mp3Tag to convert the naming convention of your files into the actual tags. You can also go in the opposite direction, renaming your files to reflect their tags. The latter trick is handy if you'd like to make the file name easily recognizable during searching and also have a backup of sorts should the ID3 tag become corrupted or overwritten with an incorrect tag. Mp3Tag also supports expression-based renaming, allowing you easily reformat the naming convention or formatting style of your files. Mp3Tag supports multiple online databases such as Freedb, Amazon, Discogs, and more for easy tag importing.

Foobar2000 (Windows, Free)

Advertisement

foobar2000 is a music player before all else, but it does have some basic tag editing functionality built in. Many readers were more than satisfied fixing the occasional misplaced tag in foobar2000, not needing the more robust automated scanning and tagging of more advanced tagging software. foobar2000 can query the the Freedb, and the basic tags like artist, album, genre and such can be edited quickly. If you really want to see what makes foobar200 special, take a look at how to roll your own killer audio player with foobar2000—or just head straight to our foobar2000 screenshot tour, in which we feature the impressively varied world of reader-submitted foobar2000 customizations.

Hack Attack: Roll your own killer audio player with foobar2000

Click to viewIf you love to tweak and customize your software applications to work just the way you …

Read more Read

Advertisement


Now that you've seen the candidates for best MP3 tagging tool, it's time to cast your vote to see who will take home the trophy for Master of the Tags.

Advertisement


Which MP3 Tagging Tool is Best?(ning polls)

Advertisement

Passionate about one of the contenders? Shocked that not everyone edits their ID3 tags in Notepad? Sound off in the comments below.

“Hi all, just switched to Mac and need a ID3 tag editor to edit MP3 tags on my Mac. On Windows I used the MP3tag which is absolutely great. But I can’t find it on Mac platform. So is there any decent Mac MP3 tag editor recommendation?”

Can’t find a Mac version of MP3tag? Even though MP3 tag is widely considered as the best yet free ID3 tag editor to add ID3 tags to MP3s on Windows platform, it still comes with no Mac version. That’s really a regret for those needing to fix MP3 tags on Mac OS X. And the post will show you how to edit ID3 tags on mac automatically with ID3 taggers.

Part 1: What Is An ID3 Tag

Before knowing how to edit ID3 tags on mac automatically, you need to know what is an ID3 tag. An ID3 tag is a type of meta data container used to store information about an MP3 file within the audio file itself. An ID3 tag allows the creator of a file to embed relevant information like the name of the artist, track title, album, track number and genre in the file, allowing that information to travel with the file. This capacity is especially useful for media files, like podcast s, that have been syndicated, downloaded or exchanged over the Internet independently from the Web pages that they were originally hosted upon.

The most recent versions of the ID3 standard include support for chapters and enhanced podcasts with embedded hyperlink s and images. Content producers may use ID3 tag editors to add and edit metadata for media files. In Windows XP , for example, ID3 tags can be edited by requesting the properties of a file and selecting the summary tab and accessing basic file parameter s, such as track title, number, artist and year. Both the Mac and Windows versions of iTunes, as well as other media player software, also support editing of more advanced parameters, such as album art.

ID3 tags may be edited in a variety of ways. On some platforms the file’s properties may be edited by viewing extended information in the file manager. Additionally most audio players allow editing single or groups of files. Editing groups of files is often referred to as “batch tagging”. There are also specialized applications, called taggers, which concentrate specifically on editing the tags and related tasks. Some, such as puddletag offer advanced features such as advanced batch tagging or editing based on regular expressions. Therefore, the following steps will introduce you a powerful ID3 tagger: Leawo’s Leawo Tunes Cleaner for Mac, which could help you complete the MP3 ID3 tag editing on Mac with ease.

Part 2: How to Edit ID3 Tags on Mac

As the best-used MP3 tag editor for Mac users, it assists you to edit ID3 tags on Mac in batch, automatically and efficiently. It’s smart enough to detect your songs with incomplete tags, find missing ID3 tags like artwork, album, artist, year, genre, etc. for your songs, then apply all tags to your songs automatically. Batch fix is allowed. Besides, you can personalize your song tags with the program’s editing function. Can’t wait to take a try? Follow the tutorial below to master how to edit MP3 tags with this intelligent MP3 tagging software.

Leawo Tunes Cleaner for Mac

☉ Clean up iTunes music library and other music libraries in clicks;
☉ Automatically download and add music tags like artist, title, cover, album, etc.
☉ One click duplicate removal to remove duplicate songs in music library;
☉ Manually add and complete music tags like artist, album, cover, genre, etc.

Scan Music Library

Once install and launch the MP3tag for Mac, you can see the program interface as below. Songs in your iTunes library can be scanned after clicking “Start to clean iTunes” button. You can even click “Open music files” to scan music folders on your Mac.


Fix Tags Automatically

After scanning, this auto MP3 tagger would list all your songs with incomplete tags in specific categories like “Songs without Album Artwork”, “Songs without artist”, “Songs without album”, etc.Now you could click “Fix All” button to fix all music files displayed, or select the music files you want for fixing. The software will find the proper tags from online data base and add them to your songs, so as to make your music library perfect.


Edit MP3 Tags Manually

If there are “Unrecognized Songs” after auto-fixing, you could click the edit icon in each song frame to invoke the internal music tag editor. You could add music tags like Name, Artist, Album, Year, Genre, etc. by hand, then click “Save” button to save the manual editing. After all, click “Apply” button. The whole MP3 tags editing finished!

After you finish the above steps, you will get MP3 tags in iTUnes or other music files on your Mac computers. And if you are Windows users, you can click here to know how to edit ID3 tags on Windows computers.

Name Tag Program For Mac

Part 3: How to Edit ID3 Tags on Mac via Kid3 Tag Editor

Kid3 is an easy-to-use application which is used in editing ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags for MP3 files without any effort. Though lots of MP3 players are able to edit tags, they cannot be used in an effective way as Kid3.

Kid3 aims at editing ID3 tags in files of albums in the most effective way instead of grabbing or encoding MP3 files. ID3v1 or ID3v2 tags which can be edited by other programs are able to be controlled by Kid3 with the conversion of both of them. Additionally, Kid3 can get access to all of ID3v2 tags. Kid3 can set the same value to the tags in different files, for example, artist or album or year or genre of files from an album with the same value can be set all-in-one. If the file name contains the tags information, the tags can be edited automatically according to the files name. The following instructions will guide you on how to edit ID3 tags on Mac via Kid3.

1. Supposed that a directory includes MP3 files, where the tracks are from the album named “Let’s Tag”, the album is related to the band called “One Hit Wonder”.
2. This directory is given the name in the format “artist-album”, in this case, the directory should be named “One Hit Wonder – Let’s Tag”.
3. This directory includes the tracks in the format “track title.mp3”, this is very convenient due to the short file names and the correct order sorted in alphabet. Apart from this, the information about the artist and the album has already existed in the name of directory, and you don’t need to repeat the file name anymore.

However, go back to our case, some untagged files are listed in the directory, we have to tag them with Kid3. You can refer to the steps below:

1. Choose one file from the directory by using the file menu or opening the tool bar.
2. All the files are displayed in the listbox of the files.
3. To generate tags to the files, the information from the directory can be used.
Choose the files and click on them, then click on the option “Tag 1 button in the files section”.
4. The value for the artist, the title name and the album will be set in all files.
5. To set the value of the year and genre for all files, select all files and type the specific “Year” in the date and choose “Pop” from the Genre box. These two values are set automatically.
6. All tags including the proper values can be seen after we select the first file to change the option. You also can choose the tags one by one from other files to verify.
7. Once the tags are consented by us, then we can save it by choosing the option in the file menu or the toolbar.
8. Choose the option “Create Playlist” from file menu and a file called “One Hit Wonder – Let’s Tag will be generated in the directory.

Part 4: How to Edit ID3 Tags on Mac using iTunes

To edit ID3 tags on Mac in iTunes, you can refer to the specific steps as below:

1. Launch iTunes on your Mac, then select the songs you would like to edit by single click on it. Also, multiple songs can be selected simultaneously for editing.
2. After selecting the songs for editing, choose the option “Get Info” from the File menu. Then choose the keyboard option “Command + I” on your Mac. Finally, hold down the option “Control” when you are clicking or have right click on the selected songs.
3. The Get Info dialog will pop up and list all metadata of the songs for your editing.

Part 5: How to Edit ID3 Tags on Mac through VLC

VLC media player is able to edit ID3 tags in video or audio files. You can follow the tutorial below:

1. Turn on the audio or the video that you would like to edit ID3 tags via VLC.
2. Once you have turned on the target file, click “Tools” from menu bar and then choose Media information or press on “Ctrl + I” from the keyboard on Mac.

3. A dialog “Current Media Information” will pop up.

4. Choose General tab from the pop-up dialog, then the ID3 tags like title, artist, genre and album and more can be edited to your needs.
5. Once you have finished ID3 tags that you need, click on the button “Save Metadata” on the right corner bottom of the dialog.

Part 6: How to Edit ID3 Tags on Mac with Audacity

Id3 Editor Mac

Audacity allows you to build a template for ID3 tags which are applied once MP3 files have been created. To build the template, you should run audacity and refer to the guides as below:

Tag

1. Select file and then get Metadata Editor opened. The dialog about editing ID3 tags will be turned on, then the option ID3v2 has already been chosen by default.

Mac Id3 Tag Editor

2. Then ID3 tags information can be filled in the different fields like title, artist, album, track number and year, etc.
3. In the drop-down menu of Genres, choose the option which is the most suitable for the podcast.
4. Finally, click on the button “Done”. When your MP3 files have been generated with Audacity, your tagged files will show you it has got ready to upload.