ID3 Mass Tagger can add or edit id3 and id3v2 tags in multiple music files on a computer system. It currently supports the ID3 v1.1, Lyrics 3 v2.0 and ID3v2 formats which limits it somewhat to music formats that support these as well.

The developer’s homepage contains a few usage examples and downloads for Windows, Linux, Dos and FreeBSD including the source code of the application. Not all parameters are explained on the homepage though. The Readme document that is included in the download explains them all and should be read after unpacking the files to the local computer.

Some basic usage examples are the following:

Strip all id3v1 tags from all mp3 files in a folder.

id3 -d *.mp3

Copy id3v2 tags to id3v1 tags in all files

id3 -2 -1 -u "*.mp3"

Removes embedded images and padding from all mp3 recursively starting at /mydocuments

id3 -2 -rAPIC -s 0 -R "*.mp3" "/my documents"

ID3 Mass Tagger is a powerful command line music tagger. It works best in conjunction with batch files or shortcuts but can also be used separately. Could be useful for someone who is editing lots of music files on a regular basis.

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Stefan (German blog) however discovered a very nice feature of Winamp that I also did not know about. It’s not the uber-feature that would drive me back to Winamp but it’s very handy. I’m talking about the Winamp Auto Tagger which can automatically tag selected music tracks by looking them up in Gracenote music database.

Some notes about the process: Winamp Lite users seem to only be able to tag one music track at a time which could mean lots of work if you want to tag many tracks. Just right-click a track and select View File Info from the menu. That opens a new window that is displaying the tags of the selected mp3 track and the Auto-Tag button at the lower right corner.

Users of Winamp Full can use the Send To entry from the right-click context menu to tag multiple music tracks at once.

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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.

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