Mp3tag – Universal Tag Editor

My workflow is

1. Buying used and reasonably priced original music CDs

2. Ripping them with EAC[1] and an external LG BH16NS55 to FLAC format (takes 120 seconds per CD - this drive is FAST and ACCURATE)

3. Auto-import the ripped FLACs into my beets.io database via cronjob (which also unifies the metadata automatically in 99% of the cases)

4. Inplace-convert the FLACs to 192kbps mp3 via `beet convert`

5. Archiving the converted perfectly tagged FLACs to Bluray discs, as soon as the archive size hits 25GB

6. Point a self-hosted Navidrome instance and a Windows VM with iTunes to the beets folder

7. Use Substreamer App with Navidrome's smart playlists[2] and "favoriting" on my Android phone / iPhone as well as iTunes syncing my iPod Nano 7 via smart playlists

Works absolutely flawless and is less work than I expected. Since I automated everything possible, the only manual thing I need to do is the BUYING, the RIPPING and the Bluray ARCHIVING part.

1: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/

2: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/1417

Spotify does this thing for me where, no matter what you do, after an hour or so of listening you find yourself hearing the same 50 or so songs, over and over and over until you go mad. I still pay for it, and use it a bit, but playing my own collection is so much nicer.

If you haven’t already looked in to it, beets might be a solution for you

https://beets.io/

I remembered that taking care of metadata of 1000+ mp3 music and syncing them between music players and backing up with CD-RWs were time filler. They still are, but I enjoyed doing so. Digital garden in web 1.0 era I could say.

I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day and I'm afraid to lose my older music collection.

Services eventually disappear. Not many people recall about Vitaminic, a gem of the early 2K that along MySpace gave countless unknown artists and bands the opportunity to put their music online, then one day poof! and it was gone with all its content. I had saved a few quite interesting tracks on my hard drive and attempted to search for the artists in the hope they moved elsewhere, but no way: they were gone forever. So, screw online services: I'm not going to waste any energy in something whose kill switch is in someone else's hand.

I love MusicBrainz Picard but the UI doesn't seem to allow me to mass-manage my TB collection of music. Just crashes after trying to load it all into RAM for 20 minutes or something.

I'm sure there's a CLI or something that can accomplish what I'm trying to do though.

automedia to add parity.

What do you mean by this?

Lately I've been using MusicBrainz Picard to re-organize all of these ancient rips and then automedia to add parity. I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day

Spotify doesn't even have to disappear, it just has to lose access to the songs you care about or raise their prices to the point where they are unfair, or degrade their service in other ways until it's not worth using.

Personally, I'm paranoid about using internet based services to fetch metadata for my local media collection. I imagine their servers log those requests, each filename, the metadata pulled, IPs, and timestamps, and that they keep that data around for at least some length of time. Not sure how many sell that data, but what I'm listening to isn't really anyone else's business and I don't want the RIAA or anyone else to use that information as evidence against me somehow or coming around asking for proof of purchase for every MP3 they got from those logs.

Genre has always been a mess. For a while Primus was a ID3Tag genre in unto themselves. In general, that type of inherently fuzzy categorical will always be a mess. I’m old enough to remember the great alt.music.industrial wars over whether Nine Inch Nails was industrial or not.[0]

The problem with ID3 back when I was ripping and encoding stuff back at the turn of the century was that they were fixed length fields. Using CDDB better as a source of truth, but even it had serious inconsistency issues. Not from a data quality perspective, but from a data format perspective. It quickly became a pile of inconsistencies, particularly around artists and multiple artist albums. In the end, I ended up extending it with a better format I called eCDDB. Of course there was no one interested in fixing the format, because CDDB got sold some megacorp, and FreeDB simply ignored the obvious problems.

[0] Reznor won a Country Music Award in 2019, so that settles it. He’s country.

"The taggers are fine. The information model is a nightmare"

*Truth*. I find it really frustrating to only be able to assign one genre and one grouping to a song or album. Rating is another one. A 0-5 system is woefully insufficient to rate music. (If I had my way, it would adopt Robert Christgau's grading system[1] that runs from "Dud" to "A+"...)

[1] https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-cg90/grades-90s.php

Mp3Tag exists as a native app for macOS: https://mp3tag.app/

I use metadatics frequently as well. Great program.

My Mac player also supports tag editing. It’s a bit basic right now but more features are in the works:

https://plastaq.com/minimoon

I always forget which software I used to tag a rip that I do once in a blue moon.

I have TriTag in my bash history:

TriTag https://github.com/korseby/TriTag

Kid3 has been my go-to for a long time, but lately I've been using Strawberry[1] as my all-in-one music player, organizer, and tagger.

It has a built-in tag editor with MusicBrainz support and will auto-organize files. My only complaint with that is that it leaves behind old folders and files. e.g. If I have a few directories of MP3/Flac/whatever downloads with cover scans, it'll happily use the tags to organize the way I like it* but if there are "extra" files they stay put and have to be cleaned up manually.

But it's really a proper Swiss Army Chainsaw for doing everything in one application.

* Proper directory structure is "Artist/(YYYY) Album Name/NN-Song Title.[mp3|aac|flac]"

[1] https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ -- a fork of Clementine, which was a fork of Amarok.

Thanks, going to try this out. Mp3tag is one of the few apps I use regularly that I've still been resorting to firing up a Windows VM for (or running it through Wine).

mp3tag works flawlessly through wine too.

I've always used Kid3 on Linux

ExFalso / QuodLibet is a good alternative.

Closed source

Thank goodness. Just imagine what a mess it would be with 100 cooks.

It works flawlessly through wine.

You can use the command line tool:

    id3tag --artist Nirvana Lithium.mp3

I still consider a well tagged library to be a badge of honor

I know. I really miss my old iTunes library. I had the genres and other metadata just the way I liked them.

In my quest to find an offline MP3 player for my kid, I spent a bunch of time looking at models, but none of them give you the ability to sort (and shuffle) by artist, album, and genre the way the old iPods did.

You should consider just adding a `ripped on` tag, or if you're worried about it being a bad encoding then consider re-ripping from sources into a lossless format.

so I'll know how old the rip is - bit rates have increased a bit since last century.

It's easy to see which bitrate a track/album has, you don't need to keep dates for that? What's harder to see is what encoder was used -- modern LAME at even 128kbps is a totally different game than some 90s Xing or Fraunhofer.

Better would of course be to have lossless files of the originals and mass convert to mp3 when needed, but I suppose that's a different discussion.

> I prefer to retain the file's modified date when I just update tags so I'll know how old the rip is

Mp3Tag has a timestamp preservation setting. There's also the ability to run an external script/program on all selected files (via the Tools sub-menu of the context menu) or by configuring File>Export with a script.

For those wanting to preserve original timestamps I'd suggest storing them into custom tags in the files themselves as a backup. Mp3Tag can be set up to do this automatically using an Action (its scripting syntax). That way one can always restore them back using a script.

Its an optional donation. This is freeware ...

Is $11 for Spotify every month better?

mp3gain from 2005 is another indispensable part of a large mp3 collection.

Do you use it for portable mp3 players? Wondering why mp3gain instead of ReplayGain capable player, seems wrong to edit the music data itself instead of just tagging the gain values.

Kid3 is wonderful! Love it, and it has both GTK and Qt frontends

It also has both musicbrainz and discogs (has albums that musicbrainz doesn't even have artists for) taggers

This is trivial with the command line tool id3v2

Ha! Yes, play count (and reasonable if not always to my taste) tagging is about all I miss from iTune, and iTunes and Time Machine is about all I miss from Mac OS. I used to have "Smart Playlist" or whatever it was called that would randomly select say 30 songs with a play count less than 3 to put on my Shuffle to keep me out of musical ruts. I miss that.

I came across his article about a month ago and likewise enjoyed it. I was a little disappointed (but only a little) when I discovered afterwards that his suggestion of using event time codes to set off explosives on stage was actually suggested in the ID3v2 standards themselves!

The fanciful ideas on the POPM frame were very interesting. The ID3v2 standards author's late 1990s, pre-massive-spam-onslaught design choice to include an email address seems kind of quaint now!

I feel uneasy every time someone casually advocates the use of LLMs for a task. Sounds dirty.

Hard to explain.

EasyTAG is great in the sense that it has sufficient set of knobs to digest all kinds of MP3 tags seen in the wild, and then convert them to the preferred format.

So true. Whenever I need to use it I go and look for an update first and am always relieved (and amazed) that it's still going 20 year later. Best example of software done right.

I actually have a license for Tag&Rename, it's good software, but Window only.