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.
Your music files' metadata -- song title, artist name and so on -- is stored in a tiny companion file called an ID3 container. Two standards of ID3 exist, and some tag editors feature tools to smoothly migrate from the older ID3v1 tag standard to the newer ID3v2 standard. While ID3v1 only allowed fields for title, artist, album, a brief comment, year and a mere 80 different genres, ID3v2 expanded support to include album art, beats-per-minute data, lyrics and other arbitrary text. ID3v2 also added UTF-8 support, so you can be sure that Björk's umlaut shows up properly.
All of the editors we reviewed support MP3, but a number also support other codecs such as Ogg Vorbis, FLAC lossless audio, Microsoft's WMA format and the emerging AAC standard. The different tag editors also gather metadata -- typically from freedb or Amazon.com -- with varying levels of efficiency.
We'll begin with Windows software, then look at Mac and Linux options.
Zortam ID3 Tag Editor
http://www.zortam.com
Windows only
$20, shareware
The Zortam ID3 Tag Editor, in addition to having a name that sounds like a rejected Superman villain, has one of the busier interfaces in the lineup. Zortam displays a folder list, media library window, track listing and ID3v2 and ID3v1 windows. While the complicated controls enable one to find the more difficult stuff like cover art, song lyrics and even editorial reviews from Amazon, the hefty interface works against the user too often. The simple act of editing a solitary tag involves too many right-clicks and checkboxes.
Batch editing works as expected, and Zortam will even try to construct tags for you by parsing songs' file names. Automation is limited to cover art and lyric retrieval, so you'll have to enter things like the year of release manually. Zortam can do plenty of tricks, like convert ID3v1 tags to ID3v2, but the developers should get the more practical automation tools nailed down before adding more advanced features.
1st MP3 Tag Editor
http://1st-mp3-tag-editor.com/
Windows only
$30
For a simple tag editor, 1st MP3 scores some points for supporting Ogg Vorbis, M4A, WMA and FLAC files in addition to the common MP3. However, the editor's simple interface could use a little more complexity -- it shows one folder's worth of files at a time. It also has free-floating album art and lyrics windows and it can generate tags from file names.
The batch-editing features are great, but the automation features work sporadically; freedb queries require you to select an entire album's worth of tracks, so if you happen to hate Tricky's cover of Public Enemy's "Black Steel" enough to leave it out, this application won't be able to help you. 1st MP3 does work more effectively with queries to Amazon, however. All in all, 1st MP3 gets the job done, but anyone looking to revamp a large collection may grow frustrated with the too-simple feature set.
FixTunes
http://www.fixtunes.com
Windows only
$25
In theory, you can point FixTunes at your entire music collection and let it automatically straighten out your metadata. In practice, it threw about 90 percent of my collection into the "not looked up" category and sat waiting for my approval, which was not forthcoming.
This glitch aside, it worked once I limited things to a per-album basis. The program displays an accuracy percentage based on its automated data lookup. FixTunes gets credit for trying to take a wizard approach to tag editing, but it introduces one too many steps. Its advanced features, like "list related albums," could be duplicated with a quick trip to Amazon, and it would be more useful if it manually constructed tags for you when its automated tag lookup fails.
MediaMonkey
http://www.mediamonkey.com
Windows only
Free, pro version is $20
MediaMonkey's interface is full-featured yet streamlined and not crowded. The pleasing blue scheme has an embedded player with integrated ripping and burning features.
The application queries freedb and Amazon for tag data, and it can fix tags based on file names. Album art and the usual generic tag data can be pulled from the public databases, but lyric and comment retrieval are not included. Batch editing, both manual and automated, were easy to pull off.
Other features, like volume normalization and the ability to sync with your MP3 player, make MediaMonkey stand out, and the extra features don't interfere with ease of use.
MP3 ID3X
http://www.three-2-one.de/321apps/
Mac OS X only
$18, shareware
The elegant simplicity of this shareware application for Mac OS X is appealing -- users are presented with a single window to work with. ID3X does batch file renames and tag reconstruction based on song title and folder name, and the program can be extended with custom scripts. ID3X does simple song playback well, which is handy for quickly previewing unknown tracks. Album art handling could be improved, though. Users can drag and drop cover art images, but only to one track at a time, and batch album art jobs are hindered by a cumbersome process.
But the fact that it doesn't connect to the internet to retrieve tag information really dooms ID3X. Other programs can grab tags from freedb and other online sources. The program does support lyric retrieval through Lyrictracker.com, but it failed on every track attempted.
MPFreaker
http://www.lairware.com/mpfreaker/
Mac OS X only
$20, shareware
Even with all of its features, MPFreaker manages to present a clean interface. It pulls playlists and library data from iTunes. In fact, it largely mimics Apple's media software in appearance, with one long list of tracks organized by tag. The album art thumbnails that appear in the list view are a particularly inspired touch. MPFreaker supports AAC audio files, including tracks purchased from iTunes.
MPFreaker's automation tasks were impressive but not perfect. If you're lacking an artist name, the program will become hamstrung during its discovery task. Also, song titles like "01 Block Rockin' Beats" won't get your track number tags situated properly. The software will grab album art and lyrics automatically, but it does not support the comment field.
Options for manual tag editing are limited. While it's easy enough to edit a single track's tags, the software doesn't allow for batch editing.
EasyTag
http:/easytag.sourceforge.net
Linux only
Free, GPL
EasyTag, the first of the Linux apps we reviewed, gets the prize for easy installation. Users of Fedora can download it automatically using the yum utility. It features a "simple and explicit interface," a three-paned view for folders, track listings and tag details. The embedded player supports a wide range of audio formats, including FLAC and Ogg Vorbis.
EasyTag does support automated lookups through freedb, though album art retrieval is lacking at the moment. EasyTag does the basics well, with batch updating, and tag updating based on file name. But the basics are pretty much all it does. A new, unstable version promises support for album art and an updated look with a newer GTK graphic library.
Kid3
http://kid3.sourceforge.net
Linux
Free, GPL
For those fond of a KDE desktop, Kid3 provides a solid tag editor. Kid3 can edit Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files in addition to the usual MP3s. The interface is clean, with an emphasis on a single folder view that shows ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags simultaneously.
Kid3's automated tag import feature is nice -- it supports the new freedb servers as well as MusicBrainz and Discogs. If you have album information lying around in CSV format, the editor can import that as well. Icons next to each track indicate the file's tag version. The basic fields are supported, but Kid3 lacks support for album art and lyrics. Updates for those fields would be helpful, but this editor makes a nice addition to the Linux desktop tool kit as it is now.
No comments:
Post a Comment