Probably the biggest selling point of the program is the integration of multiple online music databases. This includes the popular services MusicBrainz, Discogs and Amazon, and a few others.

You can load individual files or complete directories into the program after startup. Both options become available with a click on the File menu. The program sorts the music by album name automatically after you have made your initial selection. The menu on the lower left side of the screen offers directory browsing options, ideal for switching quickly between music directories.

A click on any album or song displays the file and tag information on the right side of the interface. Here it is possible to manually edit the format or individual tags. Format patterns are available to make quick changes to individual file or folder names.

You can also tap into the supported music databases, that option is available under the File menu in the menubar.

Just select one of the available services. A search form is displayed automatically after the selection. Both the artist’s name and the album name are filled out automatically. You only need to click on find to search the database.

A red background color indicates data that is not matching with a particular file, which can be a great help if the look-up returned multiple album versions. The import options are very powerful, and support for multiple online databases increases the chance that specific albums can be found in one of the supported databases.

You can also right click on any individual file in the interface and use the available context menu options from there. This ranges from searching for an album or song cover on Google Images over playing the file to searching for lyrics or the album or song on Amazon.

The program’s Tools menu contains additional options that some users may want to utilize.

It is possible to convert ID3 tags, add a numbering system to the selected tracks, rename the album directory or apply filename or tag formats.

Kid3 is a powerful audio tag editor. It has a few usability issues here and there but the overall product is of high quality and regularly updated. Users who are interested in taking Kid3 for a test ride can download the latest version for their operating system from the developer project website over at Sourceforge.

• 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.