How-To Tag your MP3

I have a huge music collection and if you are a music lover like me, you most likely do as well. The problem stems from the fact that we need some way to categorize and label our music. Sure, you can just leave things as is now but that’s no fun is it? Your music files have what are called metadata and you ‘tag’ them with the appropriate information so everything stays organized. If you use popular MP3 players like the iPod or Zune, you’ll want your songs to have the appropriate information like track name, artist information and most importantly to me, an album cover! Tagging your files isn’t as hard as it sound. In fact, it’s so easy to perform you’ll be wondering why didn’t you start earlier!

I don’t know about you but I get super irritated whenever my music player (either Windows Media Player or on my Creative Zen X-Fi) displays horrendously tagged songs or whenever I don’t see an album cover for the currently playing song. This of course isn’t the player’s fault but rather due to improper tagging of the music file itself. You can consider metadata to be extra information about the file itself. While on the outside all you see is a single MP3 file, within it contains all sorts of other informative information pertaining to the file itself. Therefore, metadata usually sticks with the file wherever it goes. The point is, you need tools to alter or change the metadata. Metadata isn’t just limited to MP3 files. Almost all the files you work with on a daily basis have some type of metaddata in them. While you most likely wouldn’t alter or even care about the metadata in a Word document, you’ll want to edit them for your photos (comments, camera used, time stamp etc) collection and in our case, for your music as well.

Why Would You Want to Tag Your Music in the First Place?

One of the main benefit of tagging your music is to better help you organize your entire music collection. Heck, even if you don’t have 50+ gigabytes of music, tagging them still proves very beneficial. One very good example is if you use Windows Media Player or just about any other MP3 player in our case, to browse for your music. With improperly tagged files, your music library probably looks like a mess right now. Don’t lie, you know what I’m talking about! For example, you have some songs with cover art while some don’t or even having the wrong cover art in some instances, music files being listed as a separate album when it shouldn’t be, excessive information that you wished to be removed, etc etc. Tagging them helps solve all these problems.

Tagging Your Files

There are many ways you can tag your music and many music players include tagging capabilities as well. Heck, even Windows itself allows you to edit the metadata by going into the Properties of the file. Here I will go over some of the tools and methods you can use.

Download MP3Tag from here.

A very popular MP3 tagging tool should come as no surprise as being called MP3Tag! It’s a very lightweight standalone tool and is very easy to use. Basically, just load a directory (folder for an album, for example) and every song in the folder will be listed in the panel. You can then freely edit the data on the left hand side either for individual songs or for every song in the folder by selecting them all. For example, you would individually edit a song if the track title is misspelled or if it has the wrong track order. By selecting all of the songs (assuming this is an album) you could edit altogether information such as the year the album was released, the album and artist name, and embed an album cover. The other cool feature is that you can actually look up Amazon and the FreeDB site to see if they can find a match for your album. If successful, it can save you some time as all of the information can be used to tag your own MP3 files. Once you have entered in the correct information, you’ll need to actually save it so that it will be ‘stuck’ to the actual files themselves. Simply hit the Save Tag button to do so.

Download MediaMonkey from here.

MediaMonkey is a versatile and free music jukebox. However, it also has music tagging capabilities. I have been using MediaMonkey to serve as my MP3 tag editor for a long time and only recently have I switched over to another method because I really don’t need a full music jukebox installed. However, if you’re tired of other music players, you might want to give MediaMonkey a try.
Simply load your songs and begin tagging away. There are a lot of information you can enter so if you’re a serious music collector, MediaMonkey’s tag editor is the one for you. Similar to MP3Tag, MediaMonkey also allows you to search Amazon for album and song listings to help you with your tag information.

Download AudioShell from here.

This is currently the tag editor I am experimenting with. Rather than installing yet another program (as the case with both MP3Tag and MediaMonkey), AudioShell integrates directly into your Windows Explorer shell. That basically allows you to quickly and easily tag your files wherever they may be on your hard drive. Once installed, you will notice two new AudioShell associated tabs when you head into the properties of a music file. Also, you’ll notice that if you hoover your mouse over a file, AudioShell will present a more thorough menu containing the metadata for that file. Rather than just having Windows tell you the file size and file name, AudioShell can provide much more information. This is useful for quickly glancing at the file’s properties.
To edit the music file metadata itself, simply head into its properties and select the AudioShell Tag Editor tab. You can then simply edit the information. Once again, you can choose to edit a individual song or an entire album by using this method. I love this because I don’t have to open up any programs nor import any music directory before being able to tag my music files. With AudioShell, I simply head directly into the folder holding the music files and tag them that way. Very convenient and easy to use.

Tagging your music is not hard. Although it might seem as a chore at first, you’ll quickly grow accustom to it. Sometimes when you rip your personal CD’s onto your computer as MP3, the metadata information could be missing and so tagging them with the above methods will definitely help you recognize the tracks in the future. But either way, if you never like the idea of how your music library is organized as of right now, then tagging them is the way to go. If you’ve never ever cared about what or how your library looks like and is comfortable with that, then that is fine as well. Not tagging your music isn’t the end of the world but I can definitely guarantee that if you do, everything will seem much more organized.