Nowadays, if you want to listen to music, you can either stream it through a service like Spotify, or buy a digital file from Amazon or iTunes But if you have a large stack of old CDs at home and you sit down and rip them all over to MP3 files, then it’s time to make sure the metadata for each song is correct.
Metadata is the information your music player presents to you when you play a song. Without metadata, your song may appear on your player as “ song.mp3 †performed by “ unknown †without a cover for it. This makes it quite difficult to browse your collection of songs to find the one you want.
But with with metadata, your song can now be pronounced like “Bohemian Rhapsody†by Queen, and will come with a beautiful album cover.
If you’ve copied the CD correctly, the metadata is usually migrated automatically. But if you have cheap CDs that are being handed out in free magazine ad campaigns, or you just hash the entire copying process, the metadata can be either cluttered or completely absent. In this case, you need to find a way to quickly fix the files. Doing them one at a time is extremely tedious and time-consuming.
There are two good options for me.
MP3tag (Windows Just)
MP3tag is free software that is really easy to use, but unfortunately only available for the Windows platform. There is also a portable version available that I keep on a USB stick and use often.
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Once you have installed and launched MP3tag, select Change Directory and navigate to where the MP3 folder you want to fix is ??located.
Once you have selected a folder, the music inside will now appear. However, as the name of the program suggests, only MP3 files that can be modified will be displayed. As MP3 files go away and m4a and FLAC formats become more popular, MP3tag may eventually become obsolete.
If you use the scrollbar at the bottom, you can see all the available metadata. You can also see what information is missing from the spaces in the list.
You can enter data directly into these spaces and your changes will be saved when you click outside of them.
You can also copy and paste (CTRL + C and CTRL + V) from other metadata fields to save time typing.
If you click on a song, you can correct the metadata on the left, such as title, track number, album name, genre, and more.
You can also batch rename the metadata by highlighting more than one song and then changing it to the left. Metadata will be instantly saved across all selected files. But to save your changes forever, you must click the blue disk button in the upper left corner (under the File menu).
For artwork, I would recommend fetching images from the iTunes Artwork Finder, which also contains high-res versions and fetches images directly from the iTunes API. Then select the songs you want to decorate and drag the image to the square at the bottom of the screen.
Now click the blue save disk icon to update all MP3 files permanently.
(Cross-platform)
If you’re an Apple fan or only have access to a MacBook, the best solution would be to use iTunes If you’ve used iTunes to rip a CD, you may decide it’s faster and easier to just use it to fix the metadata instead of downloading another program like MP3tag to get the job done.
After ripping the CD into iTunes, right-click any song file you want to edit and choose Song Information.
You will now see all available metadata. Change what needs to be changed and enter whatever is missing. Click “OK” at the bottom to save all changes.
In the “Options” section, make sure the media type is set to “Music”. If you ripped a YouTube video as mp3, iTunes will sometimes mistakenly take that file as a video file.
Artwork is where you can place your album art. You can drag the image or click Add Art to navigate to the location of the image on your computer.
Click “OK” at the bottom to save all changes.
As with MP3tag, you can also select multiple song files and batch change data in them using the Get Info menu item.
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