When I started ripping my CDs many moons ago, I was limited to the 30 character/field limit imposed by the ID3v1 tags.

I have files in the format:

Directory: "artist - album"
Track: "tracknumber - songtitle.mp3"

For example:

Directory: "Carter the unstoppable sex machine - 1992, the love album"
Track: "04 - Suppose You Gave A Funeral And Nobody Came.mp3"

Of course, some bits don't fit - those tags read as follows:
Artist - "Carter the unstoppable sex mac"
Title - "Suppose you gave a funeral and"

Now, the information hasn't been lost - It's all in the directory/filename.

What I need is an intelligent piece of software which I can point at a directory tree and it goes off and scans to see what matches and what it can piece together. Ideally it'd present me with a window I can check/edit changes before they're committed.

Anybody heard of any such beast? The thought of manually (well, OK, with MPTagger) processing somewhere in the region of 300+ albums is so daunting that if there's nothing to help me it probably won't get done.

Cheers,

Nick.


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In my collection I do not see this problem very much, certainly my 8 Carter USM albums needed me to go back with MPTagger, but thankfully Carter will not be producing any more albums ( unless there is yet another compilation ! ) and most other artists use shorter song titles.

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Rod, UK Mk2 64gig Red S/No.341

Try Dr. Tag. It will make new v2 tags using the filenames. http://www.asterius.de/drtag

Happy new year

Sean

Empeg 12 gig green 080000078

The best Tool for this is the MP3 Renatager. Grab a free copy on www.renatager.de. It's Freeware and a real gem.

Bye bye Janosch

I have my share of "more-than-30" titles in my collection, too. But I've found that, even if I could put the entire title into the field, the Empeg won't display all those characters at once. So I abbreviate long titles anyway. This allows me to keep using V1 tags and also allows me to see the entire abbreviated title on the Empeg screen.

I agree that in your situation, you still need a tagging tool, though. I just wanted to mention the Empeg's screen limitation and how it relates to your problem.

___________
Tony Fabris

Well, if you have any perl experience or can talk someone who does into writing you a little perl program this is quite easy. I tend to write custom scripts in perl to do my ID3 tagging because I have never found an ID3 tagger for unix that is automated enough. The two perl modules you want to look at are MP3::ID3v1Tag and MPEG::ID3v2Tag.

I am sort of in the middle of writing a little perl script that sets v1 and v2 tags based on existing tags if they are found (with v2 taking precedence if they both exist) and falls back to using directories if tags don't exist. It prompts the user to verify each tag, but usually you just have to keep hitting enter.

-Mike

In reply to:

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Try Dr. Tag

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Now that looks like a nice piece of software. Only one problem:

The unregistered version is time limited before saves are disabled. Unfortunately, this kicks in before I have had a chance to have a real play with it and try and work out if some of the features are bugs or if they're just a result of it being unregistered.

So, not wanting to lay out $20 on something which may be completely useless, I went hunting for a crack (with the intention of registering the software once I had given it a fair hearing, so to speak). Unfortunately, even with the crack, the software still showed the same 'features'. It has now been uninstalled and the hunt continues.

Nick.


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In reply to:

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if you have any perl experience

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Well.... I own all the O'Reilly books. I just haven't had a chance to read them yet!

In reply to:

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I am sort of in the middle of writing a little perl script that sets v1 and v2 tags based on existing tags if they are found

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Sounds very useful. Add to that the ability to check a tag against the filename and if the tag's been chopped short, to reset it from the file/directory name and I'll be first in the queue.

Nick.


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OK, I am working on adding that to my script. I will probably have something for you to try this evening if you want. You need a working perl install and the MP3::Tag perl module from CPAN. Are you using windows or unix? I am not sure how well this will work on windows as I make some assumptions about the directory structure that would need to be tweaked for windows.

-Mike

In reply to:

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I will probably have something for you to try this evening if you want.... Are you using windows or unix?

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Most excellent (twaaaang). I've got Perl installed on both Windows and Linux here, so I can give it a go on both platforms for you.

Nick.


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18Gb blue (now AR red) - s/n 080000299 (original queue position 8724)

OK, there is a bit of a readme and the perl script up at...

http://macgeek.dyndns.org/id3_tag/

This will read v1 and v2 tags. Create a new set of tags using that info and directory info if available and write out the updated tags in v1 and v2 format. You should definately make a copy of your files before running this on them just in case. It should "just work" on linux if you follow my directions for using find to call it and start from the top level of your mp3 archive. Let me know how it goes.

-Mike

Looks great, but do you think it would be possible to add this into the script.

'./album/artist _ track _ songname'

TommyE

Sure. There is a new version up that supports that format. I also added support for track numbers (forgot to add that to the previous version) and beefed up the comments a little.

http://macgeek.dyndns.org/id3_tag/

-Mike