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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The interface does look a bit overladen at first. It is driven by four tabs at the top that let you transfer filenames to tags, tags to filenames, multi tag files and query the online CDDDB database for tags. The tag to filename option is very handy if the files are already properly tagged but the filenames are not in the format that you want them to be. Five Replacement shortcuts exist that can be applied, not only in this menu though. The five entries are artist, album, number, title and year. It is therefor possible to create a filename that would contain the track number, artist and title.

Other mandatory options are to replace spaces with _ and to change the capitalization of the filenames in a number of ways. Multiple files can be selected at once but it normally does not make sense to select more than one album. Toe Tag is directory driven which means that only the files of one directory are displayed at a time. If you want to change tags or filenames of your music collection you are in for some manual labor.

The biggest missing function in my opinion is a way to automatically pull information from an online database and apply it to all of the selected mp3 files. Since this is a very early version this feature might be implemented in a later version.

Other important features are already available. Covers can be added to the files, the volume can be normalized which is a very nice feature. The tags are saved in ID3 format.

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The only information that are not added by Picard are the cover artwork and the genre. It is understandable that the genre is not being added because it is sometimes difficulty to select a genre that everyone would be comfortable with. Itunes will be used to add the cover artwork right from the iTunes store.

Step 1: Tagging the mp3 collection

• Download Picard and install it
• Change the following options in Picard before proceeding:
  Select Audio Fingerprinting from the options and check Automatically analyze all new files
  Select Tags and uncheck Write ID3v1 tags to MP3 files and check clear existing tags before writing new tags and Write ID3v2 version 2.3 tags.
• Now drag and drop all your mp3 files and directories into the New Files folder and wait until Picard finished analyzing the music collection
• Click on the Cluster icon in the toolbar to group all the mp3 files into albums.

Step 2:Adding cover artwork in iTunes

You do need to import the mp3 files before you can find and add the cover artwork of course. Everton is describing the process which means that I’m skipping it here.

• Select all the tracks in each album you’ve just imported one at a time
• In the bottom left-hand corner of iTunes click on show/hide artwork button
• Right-click on the artwork image that is displayed in the small window and select copy
• Now right-click on the tracks you’ve highlighted and select Get info
• In the pop-up box that appears, go to the info tab, right-click in the artwork field and select paste

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