Semi-Automatic MP3 Tagger

Music collections are usually a big pile of messy filenames and folders that have artist, album and song names mixed up. Some files do have mp3 tags, some don’t and it would take a long time to go through your music collection manually and edit the mp3 tags. I literally tried and tested a dozen mp3 tagger before I came up with the best solution that would be the most precise and at the same time most automatic way of tagging my mp3 files.

I did find the free mp3 tagger called Picard shortly after I began my research on the subject. All I had to do was download and install it and add a directory that would contain my mp3 files. Picard would analyze the files and would add them into a category called unclustered files. Pressing the cluster button would try and group the files together sorted by artist and album.

This worked well for all of my files except for one single song which I had to manually drop into the right album. Now that everything was sorted the way I wanted it to be I had to start and edit the mp3 tag information to complete the operation.

This process is semi-automatic. Select an album from the list of clustered albums and press the lookup button. A website opens with search results and it is up to you to select the correct artist and album from the search results. This sounds like lots of work but it is not.

The search works fine and takes only a second to show the results. The information will be added to the Albums section of Picard. The last step would be to drag and drop the clustered album onto the new information in the Albums section. Picard tries to automatically add the correct information to the songs, if that does not work you can drag and drop them into the right place.

It is possible to edit information manually and customize the output. The default structure would be artist name / album. Picard is available for Windows and Linux.