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

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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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