Mastering Vista and Images

Fix Music Tags

Most music players, including both Windows Media Player and Apple iTunes, pay no attention to the filenames of your music files, but rather read the information (called tags) that are embedded therein. Most audio formats support tags for the artist, track, album, year, genre, and about a hundred other things. To get your music player to display and organize your music properly, the tags in your music files must be correct, and unless all your music came from the same source, some tag cleaning is often in order.

Most music library programs allow you to edit the tags of your music files. Windows Media Player (via the Advanced Tag Editor feature) as well as iTunes (discussed earlier in this chapter) even let you modify the tags of several files at once. You can even edit tags for individual files right in Windows Explorer (see Chapter 2), or multiple files if you install the AudioShell extension (http://softpointer.com/).

But what if you have a lot of music files without any tags at all? Try to import those files into a program like iTunes, and you’ll just end up with countless tracks labeled “Unknown Artist.” The solution is to use the filenames to generate the tags, and for this, you can use Ultra Tag Editor (http://www.atelio.com/):

1. Open Ultra Tag Editor, use the tree to navigate to the folder containing your files, and place checkmarks next to the specific files you want to fix.
   
2. Below, choose the Ultra Tagger tab, and then, from the Action listbox, select Generate Tag from Filename (Figure 4-13). 
    
3. Now, Ultra Tag Editor needs you to tell it where in your songs’ filenames to find the artist name, track title, track number, album name, and so on, so you’ll need to examine the filename of a typical music file on your hard disk, which might look something like Artist–Album–Title.mp3.
   
   
   Figure 4-13.   Use the Ultra Tag Editor to generate MP3 tags from filenames
   
   
   Although programs like Ultra Tag Editor are flexible, they do require that your filenames be uniform (i.e., all using the “Artist–Track.mp3” format, for instance). Since you likely have a mish-mash of different filenames, you’ll need a program like Power Rename (part of Creative Element Power Tools, http://www.creativelement.com/powertools/) to fix up your filenames with ease, without resorting to manually renaming individual files.
   
   First, determine the delimiter used to separate the information in your filenames (a hyphen,–, in this case), and type it into the Delimiters field.Next, type %1into the field containing the first piece of information (e.g., Artist),%2into the field containing the second (e.g., Album),%3for the third (e.g., Title), and so on. (Imagine your files look like%1-%2-%3-%4....mp3). 
   
4. When you’re done, click the Generate button to preview the new tags, and click Write Tags to commit your changes.

Ultra Tag Editor can also go the other direction—that is, to generate filenames based on tags. Better yet, both Windows Media Player and Apple iTunes can organize your music into folders (e.g., \Music\Artist\Album) based on the embedded tag information.

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This article is excerpted from chapter four of the book Windows Vista Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Hacks for the Cranky Consumer, written by David A. Karp (O'Reilly, 2008; ISBN: 0596527624). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.