I have had a long standing feud with id3 tags. They made an inconsistent mess of my music files and I called them stupid dummies. I ranted about them two years ago.
Having some spare time this weekend, I decided to clean up various file dumps on my computer. Regroup years of photos, move images and videos, delete useless installation files (I don’t need installers for ten different versions of Firefox!) and downloaded demos and, most daunting, clean up the mess that is my music library. Everything up to the music library was easy. Delete, move, unzip, new folder, done. There was a lot of garbage there (holy hell, how do I accrue all of this shit? I think I moved around 20gigs and deleted 20 more), but it’s all clean now. Except for the music library.
I can’t say how much Tag and Rename has changed since I dismissed it two years ago, so it might be a far better product than I remember it to be. I was going to try it, but I figured it was worth a shot to try the freeware Mp3 Tag Tools. I’m glad that I did. I love it. It batch renames files based on their id3 tags and batch retags files based on their file names. It is simple to use and it does what it’s advertised to do with ease.
The last update for Mp3 Tag Tools came two years ago. It doesn’t matter. It’s stable and feature complete. It does everything I need it to. So the lingering question is that if the final release came two months before my rant, why did it take so long for me to discover it? If I knew of it then I wouldn’t have been in this id3+filename mess to begin with.
With this tool at my disposal, I hope that I will never fall into that mess again.
Aww man, I linked MP3TT in my journal several months back. I could have told you it was awesome then.
The other handy tool for wrangling MP3s and such like is a good multi-file rename tool… I use Total Commander as my file manager, and it has one built in. One well-constructed regular expression can make short work of someone’s shitty MP3 naming convention.