With over 2000 mp3s with messed up ID3s, I wanted to ready up all the mp3s before I order my unit, I was wondering what editor you all use that can load up more than one mp3. Ugh, this is hard to explain. Load up a whole bunch in a list and then choose - hopefully you know what I'm talking about.. well then, anybody?

Read the FAQ write up by Dionysus here. Great read!

George

Oops... wrong link! Try this one. Sorry about that.

George

I've had good success with ShufflePlay. It's good at processing multiple entries at once. Also, it has some powerful tools for building filenames from tags, tags from filenames, or a mixture of the two.

I'm not sure how it compares with other players for its ease of use, but over time I've developed some tricks which help me out. For example, it's actually a playlist editor, but most of my playlists are "temporary" lists I use for the sole purpose of managing a particular editing job. I'll build a list---which usually involves recursing through all my files--and I'll trim off the files I don't need to mess with. Then, I remove files from the list as I finish editing them. When the playlist is empty, boom! My edit job is done.

I have been using Mp3-Info Extension lately. It writes ID3V2 tags, which is very handy if your tag fields are longer than 30 characters. When I previously used ID3v1 tags, I often found myself completing longer tags in emplode. MP3-Info lets you tag entire directories of Mp3 files, including subdirectories. It does take some time to get used to, but works fine. You can find it at

http://tick.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/~mutschml/MP3ext/MP3ext.html

/jhr

Mark 1 #317 - 20GB blue
Mark 2 #080000217 - 18 GB amber

Check this one out...

http://surf.to/mptagger

It's been working great. Not the most intuitive, but it does great batching and supports ID3 v2. Fast too!

||| loren.cox
||| 080000446
||| 12GB blue

For any Unix users reading this thread - look at http://id3lib.sourceforge.net. It includes a barebones command-line utility that does both id3v1 and id3v2. That's the Unix philosophy - do one thing but do it well.

Here is what I'm using to create my mp3s:

1. CDDB_get - query the CD database
2. cdparanoia - rip a CD to .wav files
3. lame - encode .wav to .mp3
4. id3lib - put id3v1 and id3v2 tags

I have a perl script that does 1 and saves the results in a file. I go in and manually edit this file to correct all the spelling mistakes and enter the year. Then another perl script does 2, 3 and 4 and moves the mp3s into the artist/year-album/track-song.mp3 hierarchy. Yes, it took some effort to glue it all together but in the end it's fully automated (save for the spelling correction pass) and it does exactly what I want.

Borislav

As told in the FAQ the ID3 Tag Studio is a very cute program to manage the ID3 tags. You can find it here.

You can fill the ID3 Tags with the name of the files, you can mass-set ID3-Tag (every field separately - i.e. move all "Rock"-mp3's in a directory and then mass-set the Genre Tag from all those file to "Rock"), you can rename all selected files based on the ID3 Tag etcetc.

Worked really good for me (and others, too)

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

I was using TagStudio at first, until i realized that a lot of my files already had v.2 ID3 tags, which it doesn't support...but the Empeg gives priority to.

So i went on a two hour search and the only one i could find that supported V.2 and had mass renaming/retagging, name -> tag, tag-> name, CDDB, and on and on (even cover art), was MPTagger. Like i mentioned before, the interface takes a little figuring out, but this is by far the best one i could find that supports all of the needed features, and most importantly ID3 v.2. If anyone gets it and can't figure it out (the docs are sparse at best), let me know, and i'll give you some pointers. I'm liking the program more and more the more i use it.

I spent about 3 hours last night retagging all my 35 gigs of mp3's... and i'm only to the G's!!! But hopefully the v.2 tags won't need to be messed with ever again.

||| loren.cox
||| 080000446
||| 12GB blue

Incidentally, there is one little tool on MusicMatch Jukebox that proves very useful... It's their "remove tag" function. It is useful because you can have it remove _just_ ID3V2 tags, leaving the ID3V1 tags intact. I managed to create some conflicts between my ID3V1 and ID3V2 tags, by using some tools that supported V2 and some that didn't. MusicMatch took care of that for me...