Mac3Tag

Mac3Tag is a Java-based application designed to create, edit and remove ID3 tags from MP3 audio tracks, including cover art. It comes in handy whenever you want to prepare your music collection for playback on media devices which can read metadata.

The tool's not packed in a setup kit. However, you must have Java installed. You can drop the program files anywhere on the disk or copy them to a USB flash drive, in order to double-click the .jar executable file and run Mac3Tag on any computer with Java. It doesn't modify Windows registry settings or create files on the disk without asking for permission.

As far as the GUI is concerned, the utility opts for a normal window with a well-structured layout, where you can open as many MP3 files as you want and view the full paths in the task list.

It's possible to set or modify the title, artist, album, genre, track number and year of one or multiple selected tracks at the same time. Meanwhile, cover art can be loaded from image files with the .jpg, .jpeg or .png extensions.

The additional features available help you set the starting track number to automatically increment all tracks, convert title, album or artist tags by defining patterns, as well as change the text encoding mode to Big5, CESU-8, GBK, IBM-Thai, ISO-2022-CN, KOI8-R, or something else.

It didn't put a strain on PC performance in our tests, running on a low amount of CPU and RAM. No error dialogs popped up and it didn't hang or crash. Tags were edited quickly and without any issues.

On the other hand, Mac3Tag's options are not that intuitive to inexperienced users. Plus, its interface could use some improvements in the graphical department.