Navdeep Shergill (A Geek at heart)

How to easily tag and catalog your mp3s

April 21st, 2006

With the growing popularity of Apple iPod; more and more people are moving their music from CDs to their computers. Of course if you are using an iPod; then your are most likely using iTunes to catalog your music collection. One of the nicest things about the iPod is its ability to allow you to easily search for your music while you are on the go.You can filter down by Artist, Album or Genre. But more often than not; when you import the songs from a CD; they do not have the necessary ID3 tags to identify them. In this tutorial; I will show you how to use a free software application to easily tag and rename your mp3s.

When you first import your songs from a CD, they will probably look something like this in windows and iTunes

Now you can imagine that when you move this to iPod; how difficult it would be to try to find the song you are looking for. One option you have now is to use iTunes to modify the ID3 tags and then manually rename each file. Using iTunes; the renaming process is very cumbersome. It would look something like this.

As you can imagine; that would take quite a long time to catalog this one album that you just imported. This is where JJ MP3 renamer comes into the picture. Its a ID3 tag editor for mp3s with a very intuitive and powerful interface. Did I mention that its free? When you first launch it; it would look like this.

Now we are going to add all those files that we imported. You can import them using the ‘Add’ button in the top right; or you can select the files from within windows explorer by right clicking on them. Once you have the files in the JJ MP3 renamer; lets get to work. I have found out that iTunes works well with ID3 v2 tags. So make sure you have pressed the ‘v2 Edit Tag’ button in bottom right. The first thing we are going to do is set the Album,Artist and Genre names. Just select all the names in the selection window and type in those values. once you have done that; click on the ‘write’ button. This will set the Album, Artist and Genre.

Now we need to set the track name for each individual track. Follow the same procedure as above; but do it one by one. Make sure you hit ‘write’ after you update each track.

Once we are done updating the ID3 tags; we will focus on changing the actual file names. I like my mp3’s to be named as ‘Artist - Track.mp3. JJ Renamer can help you do this. All you have to do is chose that option from the lower right and JJ will do all the work for you.

We are done now. Lets look at what we accomplished. Notice how the files look so much better in windows and in iTunes.

See that wasn’t so Hope this tutorial has been helpful for you. Now go on and catalog that music of yours!


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Entry Filed under: Geeky Stuff