You might think, because of the nature of the task surrounding this tool, that MP3 Diags would be challenging to use. It’s not. In fact it’s quite simple to scan and repair your music collection. In this tutorial you will learn how to install and use MP3 Diags to diagnose and repair your broken MP3s.

NOTE: Martin covered using MP3 Diags for the Windows operating system in his article “Diagnose your MP3 collection with MP3 Diags“. Since there are issues to over come when using this application in the Linux operating system, I decided it was beneficial to cover it once again.

What can it fix?

Some of the problems that MP3 Diags can repair are:

• Adding/fixing track info.
• Correcting song duration times.
• Correcting seek problems.
• Renaming files based on fields.
• Low quality audio.
• Missing VBR header.
• Missing normalization data.
• and much more.

Now before I continue on, I will tell you that MP3 Diags can be resource intensive. If your collection is large you can expect this to take some time. During an initial scan MP3 Diags was running at approximately 2,000 files every 15 minutes. You can do the math from there.

Installing

MP3 Diags should be found in your distributions repositories. If you are using Ubuntu you can either open up Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center, do a search for “mp3 diags” (no quotes) mark the application for installation, and apply the changes.

When the application is installed you will find it in your Sound & Video menu entry.

Usage

When you first start up MP3 Diags a window will appear asking you to create a file which the application can save its configuration data. You can place this file anywhere you have write permission. In that same window you can set up a scan by including the directories you want to scan. In most modern Linux distributions you will find a ~/Music directory. If you’re like me (and you like to keep everything well organized), you can just select that folder and begin the scan.

During the scan expect your machine to become a big sluggish. You might want to start the scan and walk away (to keep yourself from getting a wee frustrated). When the scan is over, the real fun begins.

Scan results

Figure 1

Take a look at Figure 1.  What you are seeing is the results of a first-run scan containing over 2,000 audio files. Near the top (under the tool bar) is a listing of all the possible issues that each file contains. Let’s just look at one file. To show only one file highlight that file and click the “Show One Song At a Time” button (Sixth button from the left on the toolbar). I will select a file, downloaded and converted from Youtube, of Rush’s La Villa Strangiato. Obviously, since this was a download from Youtube, the audio quality is going to be poor. So let’s repair that as much as it is possible.

Figure 2

Once you have your one file selected (see Figure 2) click the first work icon on the left (that’s the first hammer on the left) which is a drop-down. When you first click this you will get a warning that says “although this works on the developers’ machine, it might not work on yours”. Take this as a caution and back up your files before you start working on them.

From the drop-down you will see numerous fixes for your file. However, instead of searching from the drop-down, you can hover your mouse over hammer icons labeled 1-4. Each of these contains a pre-configured set of fixes that allow you a single click to fix numerous, related issues on a file. For my poor audio quality file you can see it suffers from four issues:

• fa – No ID3V2.3.0 tag found
• ea – ID3V2 tag doesn’t have APIC frame.
• ab – Low quality MPEG audio stream.
• an – No normalization undo data found.

When you go to fix these problems you will instantly come across an issue when using MP3 Diags in Linux. MP3 Diags uses the application mp3gain to normalize mp3 files, which is not installed by default. And, to make matters worse, MP3 Diags does not install this dependency for you. So you will have to fire up Synaptic, search for “mp3gain” (no quotes), select the results for installation, and apply the changes.

Once mp3gain is installed you can now normalize with MP3 Diags.

Another issue, specific to Linux, is that if you want to configure MP3 Diags to not erase original files, but instead to move them to another directory, you will need to make sure you change the destination directories in the preferences window. By default all of the temporary directories are set to /tmp which you will have write access to, but if you want to archive that file you do not want it saved in the /tmp directory, because it will be deleted automatically. Different distributions handle this task differently – some clean up /tmp regularly, some upon reboot, some will empty a file in /tmp after it has gone untouched for a pre-determined span of time (usually 30 days). If you want to keep those original files around, you will want to reconfigure MP3 Diags to use a different directory than /tmp.

Final thoughts

After running MP3 Diags on my music collection, I have found that all MP3 files do, in fact, sound better and have far fewer issues. You should definitely give this application a go if you have a collection of MP3s lying around in need of repair.

Related posts

• Winamp Auto Tagger (8)
• Trout Is A Lightweight Free Music Player (2)
• The ultimate way to tag and rename mp3s (20)
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The interface is divided into two main levels. The left sidebar offers a folder browser with some filtering options at the bottom. It is for example possible to filter for specific audio formats or file names. The confusion can be attributed to the right main window. This window is divided into a main tab with buttons to rename, tag, edit, organize, retrieve online information and play. The two lower menus change depending on the main tab that is selected by the user.

The rename tab for example contains buttons to scan, open or save playlists, open the rename options, execute scripts and handle changes (like undo or ignoring files. More confusing than that are main options like the organize or online tabs where the choice in the second menu level changes the third menu.

Here are some of the highlights of the music manager:

• Batch rename of files using Tag/Filename/Folder name/Audio file information.
• Batch Tag update.
• Manual / single file editor.
• Album/filename rename & update using freedb.org or www.allmusic.com, Amazon, and custom sites
• Powerful library.
• Encode/decode your files with LAME,Ogg Vorbis or mpcenc. (trans code with out losing tag information from one format to the other)
• Restructure the files on your hard disk ( copy,move or even create shortcuts ) in new user defined location based on Tag field information.
• mp3, ogg, mpc, ape, flac, aac, apl, wv, mp4, ofr, spx file support

The Godfather is available at the developer’s website. It is compatible with most Windows operating systems and can be downloaded as a stable or beta version.

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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.

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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 tried a lot of mp3 taggers in the past and was never 100% convinced to continue using them. Some would rename songs without asking, some were not able to import tags which meant that I had to manually edit all tags by hand – do that for thousands of songs – while others were just so complicated that it took simply to long to use them.

I almost gave up but then I found a sweet little software called Tag Scanner. I hear you guys mumbling already that you surely would have heard about Tag Scanner if it was that great. I do understand your doubts but they are not justified this time. The author is from Russia and decided to create no English version of his website.

This in turn makes it impossible that search engines index the site properly and all those freeware hunters will fail to notice it – well, most of them that is, hehe.

The Tag Scanner interface looks fantastic and a little bit confusing at the same time. The most important parts are the four tabs at the top of the screen which are: Music Renamer, Tag Editor, Tag Processor and List Maker.

Music Renamer:

Rename files with ease using placeholders and tag information. The default format is artist – title which can be easily changed to artist / album / artist – title for instance. Gives you a lot of options, absolutely brilliant.

Tag Editor:

This is the manual Tag Editor which is not needed most of the time because of the Tag Processor which does it automatically. In case it does not you can use the Tag Editor to edit the tags by hand.

Tag Processor:

Looks up songs in an online database (you can select a default one in the options), preview the tag output and save it. Change the tags of an album with only three clicks. Offers manual searches if the automatic one did not come up with results.

List Maker:

Export song lists as html, csv or excel tables. You can also save and import playlists in here.

Technical Mumbo Jumbo:

• Can save ID3v1, ID3v2, APEv2, ID3v1 + ID3v2, ID3v1 + APEv2 and all combined
• Supports ID3v2 Lyrics and attached pictures
• Import and Create Playlists
• Scans Directories and subdirectories for mp3s
• Able to convert between tag formats
• Case conversions
• Export song list in html, csv and excel format
• Supports online music databases, automatic and manual searches

Related posts

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It is furthermore possible to change all of the tags without fetching data from the Internet. More Tune locates album art as well for all of the songs and may locate lyrics and band biographies as well. Last but not least it offers a similar tunes option which seems to pull data from Amazon to display albums that other customers have bought besides the one mentioned.

What I really like about More Tunes is that it automatically pulls the information from the Internet and that it only takes a second to edit the ID3 tags of the song that is currently playing. It does not however work with my favorite music player XMPlayer but I could get it to work with iTunes.

found: freewaregenius

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