Tagging your MP3s with the right data makes managing your music collection easier in all sorts of ways. It makes your playlists easy to organise and it enables your MP3s to retrieve information more accurately from the internet such as lyrics and album info. However, going through your collection one-by-one, changing the tags is a time consuming a painstaking process.
That’s why I was pleased to discover PicardTagger which does the job for you. It basically automatically tags your MP3s with information about most well known albums. The only things it doesn’t retrieve are the artwork or genre information which is difficult to calculate with some music types anyway.
The process couldn’t be any easier. Once installed, make sure that ‘Audio Fingerprinting’ is selected and you simply drag yourMP3s into the ‘New Files Folder’ of the PicardTagger interface. To organise your collection, simply click on the ‘Cluster’ icon to group all the MP3s together by album. Obviously, the more obscure your collection, the less likely that the tags it assigns are correct but it’s remarkably accurate with mainstream music. I’ve managed to clean up hundreds of tracks which were badly tagged.
The program is written in Python so it’s available on both Windows and Linux – Mac support will be added soon according to the developers.
