What software do you use guys when it comes to filling in missing or repairing metadata fields? I.e. I've got many files that lack genre tag, I'd like to have them filled. Also there are 'gems' like Anthrax's 'White Noise' album that was tagged as an 'a capella' LOL.
Any suggested solutions, preferably costless?
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foobar2000 1.1.7; Win7-64
The quality of the tags is not a matter of the tool but a matter of the internet database used.
Results depends on accuracy of this database.
An excellent piece of freeware allowing youto try various sources is MP3Tag
Is this (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=80456) of any use? I think there have been other threads on the same question or similar ones—in fact, I seem to recall one occurring quite recently—although I didn’t find much on my own brief use of the built-in Google search.
I'm using MusicBrainz Picard for a while now. It fetches all metadata from the musicbrainz.org page.
While the database is fine (community-driven) it doesn't have a true native genre support. It can fetch genres from folksonomy-tags from within the database, but imho the quality is still lacking in this respect. By using a plugin it can fetch genres from lastfm-pages (by artist, not by album iirc). Don't know about the quality of these though. I suppose they should be sufficiently correct.
Might be overkill for just adding genres, but if your library is quite messy and you want to start another attempt to get it fixed, this may be the right tool. AFAIK you can't lock specific metadata fields from being changed, at least not without looking into Picard's scripting feature.
Please note the corrected link in my above post.
Also, if any of your albums are stored as CDs or images thereof, you can look up metadata based on their Table of Contents; several such utilities exist, such as the foobar2000 plugins foo_discogs (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=50523) and foo_freedb (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Components/Freedb_Tagger_%28foo_freedb2%29), although the latter may be similarly affected by inaccuracies.
Also there are 'gems' like Anthrax's 'White Noise' album that was tagged as an 'a capella' LOL.
Well, the best way to ensure that metadata meet your satisfaction is to rip and tag the files for yourself. . .