Get Your MP3 Tags in Order

[Ian David]

Every obsessive digital music collector feels a warm sense of pride knowing that his vast library of MP3s is tidy and well-tagged.

While the most recent release of iTunes featured the player's most robust song file tag-editing capability to date, there are still many other options available for managing a music collection. In fact, anyone who rips CDs outside of iTunes, downloads songs from Russian MP3 sites or -- gasp -- doesn't own an iPod would find a viable alternative to Apple Computer's media player quite welcome.

Many lesser-known music library managers simply offer more tagging features than iTunes, such as the ability to obtain artist biographies, automatically retrieve album art from a variety of sources and even fetch song lyrics.

Wired News has assembled some of the best and most popular stand-alone ID3 tag editors for this review. Before we get started, here's a quick primer on what ID3 tags are and what these editors do.

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[NJCher]

1. very helpful

I've been looking for newer, better ways to organize.



Cher

[lazarus]

2. I use

MP3/Tag Studio from Magnus Brading software. http://www.magnusbrading.com/mp3ts/

For some reason, I couldn't get a straight download of version 3.5 to work, but I downloaded an earlier version and upgraded and it worked fine. Free software, just a completely safe banner ad on it. Does all kinds of wonderful things.

What I'm looking for is software to catalog all my backup disks. I'd like to be able to look for songs that I don't keep on the hard drive and see what disc they're on.