14 DAY TRIAL // When speaking of music collections, probably the first thing that comes to mind is hundreds, even thousands of MP3 or other audio format files stored in various folders under different labels. The larger the assembly the more problems may arise when it comes to managing the songs.
Besides the ever present duplicates that we all hunt down and remove, another somewhat annoying issue is that related to the name of the file in relation with the actual content. That is to say there can be serious differences between how a document is titled and what information it really contains. Even more explicitly, some songs can have completely wrong, incomplete or missing tags, there can be many discrepancies among artist, title, album or track name.
If the number of such anomalies is too big to be manually corrected, the thing to do is to find a special software that can do the job quickly and accurately so the order can be re-established. The application you'll want to use has to be able to handle multiple files at once and offer enough filtering and renaming options. Also, there is the matter of the price you're willing to pay for such a tool and in this case, you should first take a look in the freeware category since there are many utilities precisely designed to fulfill this task and ask nothing in return.
[admark=1]A software that matches quite well the description above is MP3 Fox. Free of cost, small in size and with a good pack of features, it will help you easily rename songs and edit ID3 tags at the same time for MP3 and WMA audio types. The application is ready for use right out of the box as it carries in the archive all the needed files, thus requiring no installation or third-party dependencies. The user interface is well organized, with all the functions at hand but void of fancy effects or shiny buttons, because in this situation practicality obviously plays a more important role than good looks.
The first thing you'll need to do when starting a new job is load the files, and since this utility has batch processing capability, you can browse for the music folder and have all its subfolders included. If there are any items you wish to remove from the list, simply highlight them, press ''Delete'' on your keyboard and they're gone.
A very nice feature you will immediately notice is the generous preview display that can show you in real time how the changes will look after the task is completed. To get this information, you can click the button for simulating the actual procedure that is placed on the lower left side of the main window.
The renaming and re-tagging options are up front, easily accessible, and provide good solutions for solving several labeling problems. In fact, there are three possible selections and each of them is accompanied by detailed information to help you understand exactly what they will do if you decide to use them.
The first, and perhaps the best choice, is to change the name based on the data included in the ID3 tag. If there is no tag or it is incomplete, the title will be corrected with the help of MP3 Fox Intelligent Filename Parser that intervenes anyway to make things neat and clean. Note that if the ID3 tag does contain the needed details, the ID3v2 is used. In case it is empty, the ID3v1 tag will be scanned in turn, but you can have only the latter in use for all files by checking the corresponding box just under the renaming options area.
The second mode that can be utilized in modifying the song names is the one that implies no usage whatsoever of the ID3 tags. Here, only the Filename Parser will do all the work by erasing unneeded characters, spaces and setting the lower and uppercase logical rectifications.
Finally, there is a third way in which this tool can be employed and it is that helping you to populate and update ID3 tags. With this function, you'll be able to process just the tags and preserve the original form of the audio file, if this is what you need. This is done by simply making use of the information provided in the MP3 file name presuming it is of the form ''Artist'' - ''Title''. You should also note that you can activate the feature for removing the track numbers anytime and in all instances.
However, this is not all you can find under the hood of this utility. There is also a little button opening an area that includes several renaming schemes which can be applied to files with tags, as well as some general options for customizing how the application will handle the characters and numbers. In this tab, you will find a very useful and not often found capability, namely that of modifying or simply deleting entire strings. This means that you'll be able to replace, for example, ''VA'' with ''Various Artists'' or get rid of unwanted parts of information that repeatedly appear in MP3 titles or tags.
Although batch processing is one of the main strengths, this software gives you the possibility of manually editing music files one at a time. Double-clicking on any of the listed songs in the main view will bring up a smaller window that shows the current details and enables you to edit them. Apart from the basic info, recorded here are ID3v1 and ID3v2 tag data that can be managed and copied. An otherwise common and usually unnoticed function, but indispensable when dealing with sounds, can be accessed from this menu. It is the simple ''Play'' button that will allow you to listen to the track you're currently working with.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
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