Best method for music tagging and album art [Guide]

2015-01-09 14:11:08

I've been spending the past week finding the most efficient methods for tagging to ease the process in the future so i don't have to deal with the annoyance.

First use picard, or if you don’t mind forking out some extra cash use jaikoz and get the pro version simply because it is much quicker to use. Automatic tagging is not perfect, especially for album art so make sure to double check all your songs and album art.

If you don’t know the name of the album look for the album tags in the mp3 file using mediamonkey or use google. Google is actually a great tool for this. It often provides artist and album info like this – https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=ch...erry%20firework Just type artist name – song name. Try and keep it simple e.g. instead of skillrex ft john smith – the time for love ft john smith type skillrex – the time for love. This way google will pick up the artist details more often. If you don’t find anything on google try typing wikipedia at the end. wikipedia will often tell you the album info next to the thumbnail image. If both google and wikipedia fail try typing album at the end instead and look for the information using the links in google.

Once you found out the album of the song use - http://bendodson.com/code/itunes-artwork-finder/ (make sure to set it as albums) and drag and drop the album art using mediamonkey. What.cd is also a great source for album art. If all else fails use google images.

Finally to edit the metadata in your tags use mediamonkey to edit the tags. Sometimes the information for the artist and title is in the filename but not the artist. Mediamonkey has a handy tool that lets you auto-tag from filename by right clicking the file. Then download mp3tag and download the the itunes script here - http://forums.mp3tag.de/index.php?showtopic=15726 . You can also download many other sources here - http://forums.mp3tag.de/index.php?showforum=23 but from my experience if picard or jaikoz and Itunes don’t pick up anything your best bet is to do it manually using google and mediamonkey.

This can be a painful process but just remember, once it’s over it will be much easier to maintain a high quality music playlist without all the duplicates and incorrectly named artists