Let's Talk about Tags.

Not the kind in your shirt of the kind you throw up under bridges, I'm talking about mp3 tags. You know, that information that tells you who and what you're listening to.

I use a CD ripper that pulls information from the Free CD database. Frankly, it's not always as good as that from the more "official" CDDB which applications like iTunes are licensed to use. People seem to have some strange ideas about genre and various artists CDs are always a crap shoot as to if the actual artist is going to be listed or if you'll see "Various Artists" listed as the artist. Sometimes I catch this before hand, but if I'm ripping a stack of discs, I don't always notice it.

Anyway, I've been using Tag Scanner for a long time and I though I'd just throw it out here as I've had many people ask me for an mp3 tagging program. The things about this I like are, it's powerful and flexable, it's easy to use once you're used to it and it's free. I've found nothing better out there.

You can pull title information from the filename or you can enter each track one at a time. You can also try to pull album info from the freedb, but I've never found this to work for me. Tag Scanner also makes it easy to rename tracks once you have the tags fixed. In short, it's a life saver for someone like me with 100+GB of mp3s.

I will issue one caviat, you can easily wipe all your tag info out if you don't know what you're doing. I highly recommend using the preview button often as it's saved my ass a few times.

Again, you can find more info and a download link here.