14 DAY TRIAL // If you've ever been in a situation where you had this great song, that you simply loved, but had no idea what song it is, or who sings it because all you have to go on is the 'Track 6' filename? Ever been in a rush to rip a CD and figured you would edit the tags later and then forgot and ripped another one only to have them both mixed up? DO you share a computer, and a iTunes library with a sibling that is less than organized and who constantly messes up your neat little music collection with files that have no tags whatsoever? Those are the times you really wish you had a tool like iEatBrainz.
What is it? iEatBrainz is a program that takes music from your iTunes library, analyzes the sound of the tracks you tell it to, and then uses that information to match it with entries in the MusicBrainz database.
MusicBrainz is a free, user-maintained community music metadatabase. It has entries for Artists' names, Album names as well as the tracks that appear on the albums, and can match the sound signature of a song to the entries in its databases. This is especially useful for things like Audio CDs which have no metadata information, just the audio track itself. The information in the MusicBrainz database can thus be used to display information about the currently playing Audio CD track, but, more to the case in question, it can help you find out what that mysterious track is.
iEatBrainz will look up the track in the database and will give you the option to add that information to the tag of the file.
Working with it The program is pretty straightforward, once you open it up the track list and track details list is empty, so you click on the 'Choose Songs' button and make a selection from your iTunes library. Unfortunately, the entire contents of the library is one big list, and although you can use the search filed to narrow down the results, since most of the time you will be working with tracks that have no tags there is usually little, if anything to search off.
After finding tracks that have been missing or incomplete tags, you can add them to the tagging list. After all the tracks you want have been added you can move past this step to the next one.
As soon as a track is added to the tagging list, the program automatically begins analyzing it and looking for matches on the MusicBrainz database. This operation usually takes a few seconds per song and is not very resource intensive, meaning that you can just leave it in the background while you get on with something else.
After a song has been analyzed, and matches have been found, iEatBrainz will display the results next to the track name in the list. Below this list you can also see the entire tag of the songs. In the left half of the details, you can see the tag information present in the track at this moment, while on the right side you can see the tag information that iEatBrainz has found and considers should be there. Now you can update this information to the track, and you have several choices here, from updating the information of every song, to updating the information of only the currently selected songs.
Accuracy To be honest, I approached this program with skepticism. I didn't think it could actually identify a song using nothing except the sound information of the file, but it did, and with amazing accuracy. That having been said, I will say that the program is not 100% accurate, however, due to the way it works, you have every chance of getting the right result in the end.
Whenever it analyzes a track, iEatBrainz will display the metadata match on the right side of the track list. However, that is actually a drop down menu, which, if it has several matches that are quite close, will contain all those matches, so even if the entry it chose is not the right one, you can still pick out the right one from the list. This, of course, requires at least some knowledge of the track at hand, so it is only useful half the time, but still valuable. More often than not, you will be able to make a negative choice and wind up with the right result.
I will also mention that sometimes, you will get no results. This has happened to me several times, but, in all fairness, I will point out that they were obscure bootleg and bonus tracks that appeared on single CDs, which are usually on the borderline of such efforts. I also noticed that with tracks from actual albums, not covers, and bootlegs but tracks from actual albums, the results are nearly always correct.
Another thing that needs to be kept in mind is that the MusicBrainz is a community effort, and the entries are managed by actual users, very much like yourself, so mistakes and oversight can occur.
The Good Lets you find song information about virtually any audio file, provided that information is available in the MusicBrainz database.
The Bad The results are not always 100% accurate, and it can be slow as anything when working with the tags of a large number of files, but these are all issues known to the developers.
The Truth A great and commendable community project that will help many find out what that 'Track 6' actually is. Sure, it's not perfect, but then again few things are, especially when they are free and maintained by the community.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
