10 years ago I made the deci­sion to shy away from using ID3 tags with my MP3s; at the time they were new, cum­ber­some, and not really that use­ful if you already imple­mented good file-naming con­ven­tions. Then my library grew.

A year ago I realised that my archaic way of think­ing was get­ting in the way of sim­ply enjoy­ing my now fast expand­ing MP3 col­lec­tion (on a purely indul­gent level, and in a per­fec­tion­ist ‘every­thing has to be cor­rect’ level). It was then that I made another deci­sion: to cor­rect my error, no mat­ter how long it took. Every­thing had to be perfect.

Here are the tools I used (and some tuto­ri­als below that):

  • Win­dows
    • Media Mon­key — Batch con­verts to MP3, Ogg, FLAC, etc.; nor­mal­izes vol­ume lev­els; finds and embeds album art (and sin­gles’ art), auto­matic ID3 tag­ging; auto­matic file struc­tur­ing.
      Media Mon­key is just a great, all-round music organ­iser and player. It’ll even synch with your iPod.
    • MP3Gain — For all its advan­tages, Media Mon­key is quite a ‘heavy’ appli­ca­tion. To nor­mal­ize your vol­ume faster, use the light-weight (and open-source) MP3Gain.
    • MusicBrainz’s Picard — Every­thing ID3. Artist, album, art­work, etc. I haven’t used it per­son­ally, but have heard good things. How­ever I do won­der how it will deal with my sin­gles col­lec­tion: Wikipedia states, “[Picard focuses] on album ori­ented tag­ging as opposed to track based tagging”.
    • Mp3Tag — Another good all-round tag­ging util­ity. Light-weight too. Before I moved to Media Mon­key (so I had less appli­ca­tions), this was my tool of choice.
  • Linux/Unix
    • AmaroK — The best all-round music appli­ca­tion for your free OS. It does every­thing you need, and more besides. All crammed into a small, fast, light-weight appli­ca­tion. Art­work sup­port has been a bit iffy, but maybe the Embed­Cover plug-in script will fix that? Don’t for­get to enable SQL! (Oh, and it auto­mat­i­cally con­nects to your Last.fm account; sweet!)
    • Easy­TAG — I haven’t used it yet, but have a feel­ing it’s going to be my new best friend. AmaroK will always be my music player of choice, though!
  • Mac
    • Don’t kid your­self, you wouldn’t move away from iTunes even if I paid you. Or if I had your mother at knife-point.
  • Lifehacker’s Alpha Geek: Whip Your MP3 Library into Shape
  • Help
    • My cur­rent music library is 100% MP3. I’m try­ing to fully embrace the open-source cul­ture, so some sug­ges­tions on whether or not to con­vert to Ogg or FLAC is most wel­come… as are tuto­ri­als and any use­ful appli­ca­tions.