ID3
- 1. ID3 Tag Software+
- 2. Edit ID3 Tags+
- 3. Edit ID3 Tags in iTunes Library+
Metadata for music includes the album name, artist, track name, as well as the album art and other pieces of information that makes it easy to identify a particular music file. You would know this for sure if you have ever ripped songs from CDs to iTunes or added recorded songs to iTunes library chances are that you may have ended up with many files that have missing metadata or incorrect metadata, for example “Track 01” or “Unknown Artist” etc..
Jan 12, 2015 - You can batch edit tag files and it can automatically fix or complete tags. Is a powerful music organizer that you can use if you hate iTunes.
Since metadata matters a lot in keeping your iTunes library tidy, it becomes a necessity that you find the best tool that can fix all the songs in your collection easily by adding the missing metadata to your music tracks. Also, this tool should be able to add metadata to iTunes directly. Does a tool even exist that can do this as easily as you would want to? Look no further, here are two great options that will help for sure, iMusic(Mac) (iMusicfor Windows) and TidyMyMusic for Mac(Wondershare TidyMyMusic). Both of them can automatically find all the information for songs in your iTunes Library and allow you to embed the information to the songs so as to be displayed on your portable devices. In a nutshell, they can let you easily add metadata in iTunes. Let’s check how to use them below.
Part 1. How to Add Metadata in iTunes Using iMusic
Let us take a look at one of the best methods of adding metadata to iTunes, its called iMusic, an amazing app that's been around for sometime and is a favourite choice among iTunes users. iMusic is a great program that not only lets you download and record music but also helps you manage them, manage iTunes and much more. Here's a quick look at some of its amazing features.
- Lets you update your iTunes Library through organizing your music.
- You can tag the files, add or update album cover and artwork, easily remove duplicates, missing and even incomplete tracks.
- You can even download music from all the popular websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, and Spotify etc.
- You can also record music from any online resource.
- Makes it super easy to transfer music between all kinds of devices, including, Mac, PC, and multiple iOS and Android devices.
- Want to backup your iTunes Library? iMusiclets you do that easily.
- Restore your iTunes Library whenever you need.
With all the above features, iMusic is one of the most preferred iTunes alternative today. Now, let us take a look at how to use iMusic to add metadata to iTunes.
Step 1. Launch iMusic
Launch the app iMusic, the steps are the same in case of iMusicfor Windows as well. If you haven't downloaded the software yet, simply click here to download and install iMusic on your hine.
Step 2. Access your iTunes Library within iMusic
Now, what you want to do is to access your iTunes Library within iMusic. For that, click the option named 'LIBRARY' from the top bar. You will see all your music tracks from your iTunes Library listed on the next screen with the small Music icon highlighted as shown in the image below (look at the extreme left hand of the screenshot, below the iMusiclogo).
Step 3. Select the tracks you want to fix the metadata
Next, we will scan for all the missing metadata in our iTunes tracks. You can either do it manually selecting a few songs at a time by clicking on the checkbox towards the left of the tracks, or you can simply select them all by marking the checkbox in the list header (refer to the image below).
Step 4. Scan for the missing metadata
Now, click on the 'Clean Up' icon from the right hand side of the app interface, as shown in the screenshot below.
As soon as you do that, iMusicwill scan the music for missing metadata and show the results to you, just like in the screenshot below.
Step 5. Fix the missing metadata
For the final step, you may choose between the options of 'Fix music tags' and 'Fix music covers' and fix them all. To fix the tags on your iTunes music, simply click on the button 'Fix' as shown in the image given above.
And, for the artwork or album covers, switch to the option of 'Fix music covers' from the left hand side and then click on the option 'Get Covers'.
Note: Fixing music tags would fix the missing track name, artist name, album name and more. Fixing music covers on the other hand will fix any of the missing album art or artwork.
Part 2. How to Use TidyMyMusic to Add Metadata in iTunes
Step 1. Launch TidyMyMusic to automatically import your iTunes library
Before you actually add metadata to iTunes, you must first download from Wondershare official website and then install TidyMyMusic on your . When you open it, it will automatically scan your iTunes library to import all the music to the tray under the tab LIBRARY on the left hand side, as shown in the image below. TidyMyMusic for will do the scanning every time you re-open it.
Step 2. Find metadata for all the songs in iTunes
Now, if you have a large collection of songs to add metadata in iTunes, you might want to find the metadata for all songs at one go. This can be done easily on TidyMyMusic for , just go to the bottom section of the app interface and hit the button that says 'Scan'. Now, TidyMyMusic for will start the scan of all your music in your iTunes Library to find the missing metadata.
Step 3. Add metadata to all the iTunes music
The third and the final step is to simply add the missing metadata to iTunes. To do that, just go ahead hit the button that says 'Fix Missing', TidyMyMusic for will automatically add the metadata. For some reason, if you want to see whether the information for a particular song has been found by the app or not, you just have to click on that particular song. You would then be able to see the information found by TidyMyMusic for on the right hand side of the app interface. If you want to change something in it, just press the Edit icon on the top and then fill in the information as you need. Once done, click on the button 'Apply' to finish adding the new metadata for that song.
Note that the metadata are embedded to the music files, so you can transfer and display them on your portable devices like iPod or iPhone. Can’t wait to have a try? Just download TidyMyMusic for here to give it a go and you will never be let down.
There you have it, these are the best ways of adding metadata in iTunes. Now that you know how to get metadata for songs, what are you waiting for, go right ahead and fix all your songs in the iTunes Library.
How-to >Manage iTunes > How Can I Easily and Automatically Add Metadata in iTunes
Related Articles & Tips
Any Product-related questions? Tweet us @iMusic_Studio to Get Support Directly
In a previous post, I looked at how to tag the media in your iTunes library. I discussed what tags were—metadata that describes your files and helps you find what you want to play. I also looked at which tags you should consider filling in for different types of music, movies, and TV shows.
Now I want to show you how to clean up tags you've already applied. And what defines a “dirty” tag? Perhaps you have random characters in song names. Or maybe words are misspelled or incorrectly capitalized, or tracks attributed to the wrong artist. Such errors can make it harder to organize your library and find the media you want. These tips and tricks will help you sweep out those cobwebs.
Depending on where you get your music—and no, I’m not judging you—you may have some tracks with excellent tags. In other cases, you may have tracks with incomplete information. I’ve downloaded music with titles no more helpful than Track 1, Track 2, and so on. I’ve ripped CDs and found that the best available information from Gracenote—the online database iTunes uses to fill in tags—is insufficient. I’ve gotten music tagged with extra words, names, and much more.
I’m slightly tag-obsessive, but only because I want to be able to find my music when I search for it. And I use smart playlists that depend on tags. So here are some of the ways I correct these problems.
When your tags are a disaster
I’ll start with a worst-case scenario: You have some music whose tags are gibberish. You know what the music is, but you don’t want to spend too much time playing each track and then entering the tags manually. There are a couple of apps that can help.
I set up a test, with the help of Doug Adams, purveyor of Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes. Doug rolled me a custom script that replaced the main tags--Name, Artist, Album, Genre, and Year—with random characters. (For Year, it entered a random year.) The mess this script created was amazing. I took 500 tracks—some of which were popular and others less known—and ran them through Doug’s Tag Munger script. The result looks like the image below.
I then proceeded to process these tracks with two apps that claim to clean up tags. The first was TuneUp Media’s $40 per year (or $50 lifetime subscription) TuneUp. The second was Equinux's $30 SongGenie 2. Both did a good job figuring out what the music was, using “acoustic fingerprinting,” and applied tags to the files.
TuneUp found all but 14 tracks and helpfully created playlists with both the tracks it cleaned and the tracks it couldn’t find. That makes it easy to go through the 14 remaining tracks and try to figure them out.
SongGenie 2 did almost as well, finding all but 23 tracks. It didn’t make playlists, but in the SongGenie window you can see the unidentified tracks and play them. You can then manually update their tags. SongGenie, however, did worse on album names. While it found most of the song names, many of the album names were still incorrect. Both apps made mistakes on a number of tracks. For example, TuneUp thought that a recording of Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” was 永昼 by 张韶涵, from the apparently popular album 潘朵拉.
Both apps found album art, though much of it is wrong. Since many tracks can come from lots of different albums, this isn’t really a fault of the apps. They can’t know which album you got your songs from. And both apps either didn’t find genres (or found the wrong genres) for many tracks.
These apps are good if you want to do a spring cleaning of your iTunes library. They can fix a lot of errors, and SongGenie can also add lyrics.
Tweaking your tags
But that was an extreme. You’re more likely to want to polish your tags, and there are a handful of AppleScripts (all from Doug Adams) that I use regularly to fix tags when I rip CDs or download music.
When your songs don’t have track numbers, put them in a playlist and then drag them into the correct order. Run this script, and it will apply track numbers, such as 1 of 10, 2 of 10, and so on so that your albums will play in the correct order.
Sometimes, tracks have tags in the format Artist – Song Name. This script puts the artist’s name in the correct tag and leaves the song name where it should be.
I use this script to fix tags that have extraneous information at the beginning of the name tag (composers’ names, for example), or at the end (such as [Live]).
It irks me to see titles of songs such as “Beat It On Down The Line” (it should be “Beat It on Down the Line”), or “Girl From The North Country” (which should be “Girl from the North Country”). This script fixes them.
Sometimes tag information is in the wrong place—the artist name is in the Album tag and the song name in the Artist tag. This script lets you swap, copy, append, or prepend data from different tags.
This performs a basic find/replace for any text in all the main tags. You can, for example, replace one specific word with another or delete a word or phrase by leaving the Replace With field blank.
I strongly recommend tagging your music as you rip it or when you add it to your iTunes library. This saves you a lot of time later, when you decide to fix everything at once. It only takes a minute to tag an album, and with the above tools you can make the process simpler. Keep your tags clean and you’ll find the music you want a lot more easily.
To comment on this article and other Macworld content, visit our Facebook page or our Twitter feed.