Clean up your MP3 collection with MP3tag

My niece recently turned 20 and her parents gave her an iPod as birthday present. After unwrapping the box, the very first thing she did was connect the iPod to her laptop to transfer some music to her brand new MP3 player. It was in that very moment when she realized most of her MP3s were not properly tagged.

My advice to her – and to all of you with highly messy music collections - was to use MP3tag. This gorgeous tag editor lets you easily tag your music, edit wrong tags, rename rename files, find album covers online… in short, pretty much anything you need to pimp your music collection and give it a fresh, new look.

Using MP3tag is easy as pie. Start by adding a directory from the File menu (this is the folder the program will scan for music) and then decide what needs to be done. If your files don’t have ID3 tags or they’re wrong, use the Tag Sources menu to download them from any of the provided source websites. Bear in mind that you may have to try a few before getting the right data, and that sometimes you’ll need to adjust tag information (i.e. matching your files with the right album information).

Once your files are properly tagged, you can rename them if needed. Simply use the Convert > Tag-Filename and your files will be neatly renamed according to the tags you just downloaded.

The program also includes a bunch of extra tools under the Actions menu, with which you can change case, export the information to several formats, import the album cover from a file (although you usually get it along with tags) and merge duplicate fields, among others. Just one last hint: remember to always hit Save after every change you do; otherwise all your progress will be lost.