• Adding / fixing track info, including album art; information can be retrieved from several sources: Internet, clipboard, file name, local files, and (obviously) keyboard
• Correcting files that show incorrect song duration
• Correcting files in which the player cannot seek correctly
• Converting characters for non-English names
• Adding composer name to the artist field, for players that don’t handle the composer field
• Renaming files based on their fields
• Changing word case for track info

MP3 Diag makes it easy to identify and fix issues with mp3 files. It can also be used to make changes to the mp3 files. Issues that can be detected by the software program are for example:

• broken tags / headers / audio
• duplicate tags / headers
• incorrect placement of tags / headers (ID3V2, ID3V1, LAME, Xing, …)
• low quality audio
• missing VBR header
• missing track info / cover art
• broken track info / cover art
• missing normalization data
• character encoding issues (for languages other than English)

The user needs to select one or multiple folders that contain mp3 files at the beginning. The program will automatically scan and analyze all mp3 files and display its findings in the main program interface. Each mp3 file is handled separately. It is possible to fix issues individually which could take a while depending on the size of the mp3 collection and the amount of errors found or to create a custom list that is fixing multiple errors (if they exist) at the same time.

Mp3 Diag comes with a tag editor that can query online databases like MusicBrainz or Discogs for information about selected songs or albums. Other nice to have features are a file renamer, sorting options, mp3 backups before making changes and extensive options.

Mp3 Diag is an excellent tool to scan and fix a mp3 collection. The open source tool is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux computer systems.

Related posts

• ID3 Mass Tagger (0)
• Advanced MP3 Tag Remover (0)
• What Type of Music Am I listening to ? (2)
• VLC Media Player 1.0 Released (9)
• Validate your mp3 collection (4)

You need to open a command line or write a batch file to use TidyMP3. Entering tidymp3 without parameters will display a help file with instructions on how to use the software. The basic command looks like this: tidymp3 [path] [options]. To clean all mp3 in c:\mp3 you would simply issue the command tidymp3 c:\mp3. Important switches are /b for creating a backup and /s for including subfolders.

Here is the complete list of command line parameters:

/V Verbose mode: shows detailed information
/B Save backup of the original to filename.bak
/T Save all trash (tags & stuff) to filename.trash
/F Disable frame-reconstructor (see below)
/C Compatibility mode (use tempfile, see below)
/S Recurse subfolders
/P Preserve ID3v1 tags only, removes all other non-mp3 data
/D Preserve file creation/modification time

As you can see it is possible to preserve tags and file creation & modification dates. TidyMP3 will also automatically run a frame reconstructor on the mp3 files to fix problems caused by some ID3v1 tagging tools who overwrite data of the file instead of appending the tags to it.

The tool has not been updated for some time and it has some limitations which have to be addressed. The most important is to use it only on mp3 files with 44100 Hz or higher.

Related posts

• Trout Is A Lightweight Free Music Player (2)
• Music Manager The Godfather (2)
• Mp3 Packer (10)
• Merge Mp3 (5)
• ID3 Mass Tagger (0)