I am noticing that I have about 1500 tracks with incorrect genre information or no info at all in the genre tag. What is the easiest way to go about puting the correct info in each tag? My PC and Player are synchonised almost identically so I can:
A.) Update the tags using some software from my PC and then reload them onto my player.
B.) Update the tags in Emplode or JEmplode and then load the files from my player back to my PC using the correct settings in JEmplode to retain the new tag info.

If I use option A what is the best software to use to do this? I find that whatever software I use on my PC to update info in many tracks, it takes a long time while it rewrites the tags, thus slowing down the process considerably.

On the other hand if I do this in Emplode I can change the tags, then synchronise the player and walk away. After that is complete I can just download the songs with the new tags back to my PC using JEmplode.

Any help would be great.

On the PC, MP3 Tag Studio is generally the most powerful tool for applying changes to groups of tracks all at once. I don't know how the files are organized on your hard disk, though, so it's probably going to involve a certain amount of fiddling around if you go that route.

On the player, you could do a search in emplode for where Genre = "" (not sure the syntax), and then sort by the artist column and multi-select groups of tracks and edit them that way.

Oh, by the way, when I tried it there was still a bug in Jemplode that didn't write the Genre or the track number properly to the tags, so you might want to more seriously consider the PC-to-Player option.

For what it's worth, for option A I use ID3tagit (www.id3-tagit.de) which allows you to play around with all the tags in loads of ways, and then it does all the mods in batches when you can leave it if you want to. I've found that software pretty quick with large numbers of files

While waiting for responses I started to do method B....until I got your reply.
So this gives me an idea that probably can't be done but I'll throw it out there.

It would be cool to be able to export all the track information to a .csv file so some sort of database or spreadsheet program could be used to change the track info. Then after altering the file, load it back to the player. Could we use the FID to keep the info where it belongs. Is this all just a pipe dream or is it possible some way?

Another thing would be to go ahead and do it on the player, and then wait until Mike fixes that bug in Jemplode. He knows about it and has plans to nail it soon.

Another thing would be to do it on the player, and download with a strict filespec, then use a filenames-to-tags pass in MP3 Tag Studio. Have to be careful about the way certain tracks are named though, because things like question marks and slashes can't be in a file name.

I think RMM works great for re-tagging on the PC. I think it is easier to use than mp3 tag studio. It doesn't have the tag from file name and rename from tag options but it's easy to select a bunch of tracks and change the info for them all in one shot.

Oh, by the way, when I tried it there was still a bug in Jemplode that didn't write the Genre or the track number properly to the tags, so you might want to more seriously consider the PC-to-Player option.

Not sure about track numbers, but I fixed genre and year a while back. See this thread for more details. I am not sure if the patch I sent mschrag made it into the newer jemplode betas though.

-Mike

Ovbiously, I'm a little late for this one, but I have to plug my favorite ID3 batch tagger. For the past year and a quarter, I've been retagging all my MP3s with:

Tag&Rename

I'll swear it's the most powerful ID3 tagger and renamer (because it's the only one I've ever used). If you can think in terms of parsing and variable substitution, you can build VERY powerful commands to retag or rename your MP3s very easily. You should see some of the tricks I've made Tag&Rename do.

Ok, enough advertising. Just check it out.

Just tried that tonight (www.id3-tagit.de that is), and I think overall that I (well, I would) like it better than MP3 Tag Studio.

But - though it looks like you can highlight a list of songs, and change many tags with only one entry, it won't "save" them. It will ask me, and I'll click yes, and it will ask again. After about 20 presses on the "yes" button, I gave up. Reinstalled it, rebooted, etc, no change. Something I'm missing here? Otherwise I'm inclined to think "nice idea, too bad it doesn't work".

I tried Tag & Rename. I bought Tag and Rename. Now I can't stand it.

My favourite tagger (BY FAR) is Dr.Tag. Here are the programs I have used extensively:

MP3 Tag Studio (this used to be my primary. Could not handle multiple files across multiple folders when I used to use it)
iTunes
Tag and Rename
ID3TagIt! (It was free and I thought a lot better than Tag & Rename for editing multiple files at one time over different folders)
Dr.Tag - don't know when the last update came out, but this program just fit like a glove. Haven't done any tagging in about a year though, so I hope any new version didn't ruin what used to be a really good program.

Bruno

Any Program has to be fairly straightforward for me to get to grips with, I couldn't get in to tagstudio, at all, but tag & rename I thought to be phenomenal.
Last time I re-catalogued my library, I used Slink-e, the first time, dare I admit it, Real Jokebox, so when I sat down to do the whole lot again, I was resigned to spending off and on, a couple of weeks: I finished, 16,000 tracks in 3-4 hours on sunday morning - as I say: Phenomenal. Which doesn't mean to say that better taggers don't exist, but I hope I'll never need to find out!
- only problem is I've balls-ed up all the, perfectly good, tags on artists a - c, before I read the recommendation in this thread and I fear that I'm going to have to do the whole lot one at a time! - unless you can point me to a tagger that can move the artist's name back from the track no. column and recover the missing information from all the files I've renamed!

Tag & Rename should be able to do that if it's OK to change the filenames.
Map the tag fields into a filename structure and do a ID3 tags -> filename pass. Then create a mapping of the filename into the proper columns and do filename -> ID3. Then if wanted, change the filenames back to something else.

/Michael

Thanks for that Michael, I'd found, when I checked through, that in the swapping columns facility in tag & rename, the "advanced" feature allowed me to get everything back in the right columns in about 10 minutes flat, so it wasn't the problem that I thought it would be.