Music Tag Editor: What For?

mp3Tag Pro is an advanced music tag editor. But what is a tag editor exactly? Does it convert songs from one supported format to another, or something?

Background

When you play some songs on your computer or mobile device, in most cases you can see song titles, artists, what album a particular song is from, when the album was released, and so on. This is pretty convenient and helpful, but it wasn't always that way. Initially music files could not contain any information about songs, and one could only put some details into filenames. Not much either, as some popular in those days operating systems / file systems worked with filenames containing at most 8 characters, so most informative filenames looked like 'track01.mp3'.

But then music tags were invented. Adding a small chunk of data to the end of an MP3 file allowed storing information about the file, such as artist, album, title, comment, track number, year. This format of saving text inside music files was called ID3 tags. The MP3 standard does not provide for any tags, but in fact ID3v1 and ID3v2 became a standard way of saving information about MP3 songs.

Later audio formats were created with tags in mind, so there are FLAC tags, APE tags, OGG Vorbis tags (comment), and so on.

What a music tag editor does

There are two main application areas for a music tagger:

• It can help editing tags in audio files.
• It can rename audio files, using information from tags.

Well, both things can be done manually, but if you have thousands of music titles, entering tags manually and renaming audio files can quickly become boring. That's where a program like mp3Tag Pro can be very helpful.

Edit music tags

While this sounds simple, in fact there are many methods of editing tags. Depending on the situation, you can:

• Edit audio tags for a group of files manually.
• Extract information from file and folder names and save it into tags fields. This tool is very powerful and allows processing thousands of files in a few clicks.
• Download album information from one of the supported services: Amazon, FreeDB, MusicBrainz, Discogs.
• Import tags from a CSV file or export tags to such file.
• Download lyrics for any number of selected songs.
• Download album art.

mp3Tag Pro can process tags in all popular audio formats, including MP3, FLAC, APE, M4A, AAC, OGG, WMA, MPC, WV. For MP3, both ID3v1 and ID3v2 can be read and saved. Additionally, mp3Tag Pro saves the Lyrics3 field. ID3v2 can be saved in ANSI or Unicode.

Rename music files

Once all information about your music files is saved in the proper fields, you can easily rename and sort your entire collection. It will take just a few seconds to sort thousands of MP3's.

Thus, a tagger can additionally:

• Rename any number of music files - using the same pattern, without typos.
• Sort audio files into newly created folders. Folders are also created according to the pattern you specify.

Conclusion

A music tag editor is an irreplaceable helper for everybody who loves music and/or audio books and has a collection of MP3, FLAC, APE, WMA, M4A, OGG files. It supplies the files with proper information and sorts them by renaming to the filename pattern that you prefer and creating a clear structure of folders. It can process thousands of files at once, requiring just a few seconds where manual work would require weeks.

Tags: mp3Tag Pro

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