It's gonna take me forever to tag all of these songs one at a time through emplode! I just spent an hour changing tags and then i got a Windows error an it shut down! I swear I am gonna get Carpal Tunnel and not be able to enjoy pushing buttons on my player!

There has to be an easier way.

By the way, how do you get the songs off of your player and onto your PC, laptop, etc.?

what program are you ripping your dc's with doesn't it make the tags for you

if you want to download from the player you have to be using the latest beta of the player software and emplode. you might want to put some songs on the player and use it a while before upgrading because there are some bugs in the beta version

Tag first, send to emplode later.

If your ripper doesn't fully (and completely) tag your music, then you're using the wrong ripper. If you're downloading all those songs from the net, then consider buying some CDs and ripping them yourself.

MP3 Tag Studio is one of the better batch tagging program for Windows. It will NOT allow some of the advance management tag methods of emplode. Tag Studio is file-based, where emplode is tag-based.

Another way to pull music off the player is to use FTP with Mark's Hijack kernel installed. Of course if your music isn't tagged (ID3) you're going to be screwed having only the FID# as a filename. Using MP3 Tag Studio you can rename a batch of files from the information in the tags. Catch 22 for you probably.

Emplode will do a basic naming job on files you save back to your PC, based on the PLAYER tags. You can then run MP3 Tag Studio and do a FILE NAME to ID3 tagging operation.

Filling in tags for loose files is a pain in the ass. You should probably look at MusicMatch for looking up individual tracks (you need some basic info for it to do a search).

If this is indeed all music you have on CD, I'd re-rip the entire collection (with a good ripper that supports FreeDB and ID3V2) rather than play around with all that file moving and manual tagging.

Good luck.

Bruno

How do you do it from the beta 7 player?

When I sent it out for warranty work they loaded that on my player. Aside from it freezing up a few times it works great.

My tags are so messed up, I need to redo them all the track numbers aren't even there so all my albums play out of order.
Is there a faster way to do this?

If you want to manually move the order of lists and songs on from within emplode, then you don't need the track ID tag to make the player play things in order. You can manually move list items up and down in the right view pane. They will play in the order listed (just make sure you're viewing by playlist order of course).

Bruno

I do use MP3 Tag studio 1.2.
I had alot of MP3's on my old hard drive on my home pc that I put on my player that I want to move to my laptop so i can re-tag all of those songs and then move them back to the player.
MP3 tag studio 1.2 doesn't do track #'s so they play out of order.
Is there a ripper out there that automatically tells you what songs are on the album and then sets them correctly?
Most of them are from cd's i ripped but there are alot i downloaded.

How do you do it from the beta 7 player?

I just added some detail to the FAQ entry on this one.

My tags are so messed up, I need to redo them all the track numbers aren't even there so all my albums play out of order. Is there a faster way to do this?

Yes, there is a FAQ entry on this as well.

For general tagging questions, please see the FAQ entries here and here.

Upgrade to a new version of MP3 Tag Studio (2.something I believe). It currently supports all the more standard ID3v2 tags, including Track number. You'll have to do the number manually though. I don't believe there is any sequential tool for it (not that it would work properly for you anyway - how would you get them into track order in the first place without the track number tag? )

Bruno

May I suggest you also adjust your signature. Your email address is coming up twice, likely because something is wrong with the UBB code you've specified. Also, would you mind putting the rest of the info from your sig onto fewer lines? This will make your posts vertically shorter for people like myself reading in flat mode.

Bruno

I would use Tag&Rename. You can grab information from CDDB and you can grab information from All Music with a couple clicks of the button.

I use it after having tried MP3 Tag Studio, Dr. TAG, etc. I really think it is the best (and I gain nothing from saying that).

Wow, it's come a long way. Looking good enough that I may just check it out. Especially if its special listing methods allow what I'm hoping.

Now if only it could access your files via FTP - then you could fix things right on the player. Of course you'd then need a command in emplode to repopulate the player database with the new tag data (a "rescan" option)

Bruno

I also use Tag And Rename. The author has added a lot of features in the last couple of releases. The AllMusic stuff REALLY helps and now that you can write ID3 V1 and V2 tags with one operation, it's pretty easy to run through your entire music collection quickly.

www.softpointer.com is T&R's website.

WOW! You are not kidding about Tag&Rename. I just tried it. The Allmusic feature alone is worth the price of admission! People, if you haven't tried this out yet, you should do so as soon as possible.

For those who haven't seen it yet, here's how it works:

You select an album's worth of MP3 files in your collection, then hit a button in Tag&Rename. It opens a little web-window where you search for the album at allmusic.com. Once the album comes up, you hit another button and it screen-scrapes the web page at allmusic, locates the necessary data, and populates your tags and filenames with that data, including the track numbers. Very very slick!

This is definitely the answer to the original question in this thread: "There's got to be an easier way", and so far, this is the easiest I've seen.

I've updated the corresponding FAQ entries to recommend both Tag Studio as well as Tag&Rename.

One thing it doesn't do well on is compilation/soundtrack albums. Everything just says "original soundtrack" instead of the proper artist name. Not sure how it could do that without some work, so I understand it. Still, for single-artist albums it seems to do a good job.

Unfortunately thats the CDDB's fault and not T&R. Almost all soundtracks are stored on the CDDB with no artists names. Sometimes you'll get lucky but usually not. What I do with soundtracks is use T&R's MP3 Filename To Tag feature and parse the artist name and song name from the filename into the coresponding location AFTER I look up the album on CDDB or AllMusic and write the info. I'm kind of finatical about getting the AllMusic info on every album because it sets the genre and year and I like having the review comments in the tags.

It's not the fault of "CDDB" - TR is using the database of FreeDB and it most certainly contains full information for every compilation album I have in my collection. Some of the entries had artist and title reversed, but I made sure to submit corrections for everything I owned. However...

I believe Tony was talking about the data from AllMusic. For compilations it doesn't include the name of the artist (at least for the few albums I pulled up over the past week). What it does include are the names of the composers/writers/lyricists (credit) for the tracks.

Bruno

True.. I had forgotten that T&R switched to freedb. I didn't remember it ever including artist names even when T&R used CDDB but that's been so long ago.

I'm not familiar with MP3 Tag Studio. Does it use CDDB or FreeDB? I thought CDDB changed their deal around to you had to have the CD in the drive to use it. While that's cool for ripping, it's kind of a pain for going back and managing your collection later.

Parsing the file name is pretty quick, though. After you get the hang of setting up parsing rules it's a snap and eventually after you set up a few sets of rules you almost always have one for whatever occasion may arise.

I used to use a program called Renamer from Gene6.Com that renamed by ID3 tags but as T&R has matured, I don't even have Renamer installed anymore. I don't think I've run into a situation in a LONG time that T&R wouldn't handle on it's own without me having to enter the tags manually.

MP3 Tag Studio doesn't support any online DB as far as I know. Not in the versions I've used. It does fast tag to file and file to tag parsing though. As well as batch processing for all sorts of stuff.

Does TR allow you to group a set of files by anything other than folder structure or manual selection? For instance, can you sort by tags within one of its views (like you can do in emplode)? I'll give it a try soon.

CDDB requires licensing fees and their licensing agreement is not very flexible (they're selling the work of the public that built their DB). FreeDB seems to be doing great and has picked up tremendous popularity.

Bruno

You can open a directory with multiple albums in it and sort by tags as long as the files already have tags. You can also select just the songs in a certain album and do a FreeDB or AllMusic lookup on them without copying them into another directory.

I believe Tony was talking about the data from AllMusic. For compilations it doesn't include the name of the artist (at least for the few albums I pulled up over the past week). What it does include are the names of the composers/writers/lyricists (credit) for the tracks.

Exactly. So I understand why T&R doesn't put them in.

In those cases I always enter the original performer names from the liner notes. I just wish there was some database which did this for me automatically. Allmusic comes the closest, but it's not quite there, still.

Usually though AllMusic or CDDB will have a format that's something like "Dee Lite/Groove Is In The Heart" as the filename. What you can do with T&R is write the tags where the artist and name are written as the song name, then rename the file using the tags and from there parse in the artist and correct title. I know it sounds like kind of a backwards way of doing it but it's really pretty fast. The soundtrack thing has always been kind of a whip for me too and that's the way I ended up doing it and it works very well.

I know it probably sounds like I'm on the T&R payroll the way I'm talking this program up but unfortunately I'm not. I'm just a longtime user and am excited in how far along this program has come and the work and commitment the author has put into it.

FWIW, I also have a Turtle Beack Audiotron which is a device kind of similar to the Rio Receiver. On the Audiotron mailing list, MP3 Tag Studio was the standard there too until people started using T&R.

Tag and rename works great, thanks
I love it now to get those files from my player....

The best program I've found to do massive tagging is perl. I looked everywhere and couldn't find any program that worked the way I wanted it to, so I spent about an hour or so and wrote a perl script that pummeled through my entire mp3 collection (about 1300) and wrote ID3 tags based on the filename/directory.

if you are wondering why I didn't tag when I ripped, it's because I used to be anti-id3 (still am to a point). I prefer to store all information in the filename. I know it has its drawbacks, but I the advantages outweigh them imho. I like to use c:\mp3\Artist\Album\Track - Title.mp3 for normal music and c:\mp3\Album\Track - Artist - Title.mp3 for compilations. (my perl script handles both)

There are no drawbacks to ID3 tags given a decoder and player software that "Does not suck."

Filenames are nice for your own person storage space AT THE TIME. They're completely useless for database driven products like the empeg. And they suffer mangling when brought through some other products and/or operating systems (try looking at those files on a Mac running OS9 - or even in OS X (support for longer names) if you're browsing them from a FAT disk or ISO CD).

One of the most backward and pedestrian things I've read in a long time were the ID3 notes on the r3mix site. I almost tossed his entire preset for the ludicrous and completely uninformed things he said about tags.

Bruno

Oh.. One more thing. For Windows, both MP3 Tag Studio as well as Tag and Rename will do what you've done with your Perl script. MP3 Tag Studio has done it for a long time. Of course, YMMV for Linux or Mac OS or...

Bruno

One of the most backward and pedestrian things I've read in a long time were the ID3 notes on the r3mix site.

Wow. What an idiot. I've read most of the rest of his site and have issues with a lot of what he says, not in that he's necessarily wrong, just remarkably short-sighted. This is the icing on the cake.

Edit: I felt I had to rebut his points somewhere. This is driving me nuts, and I'm sure he won't listen.

1. Most applications that say "ID3 compliant" don't even support a fraction of it's full functionality
   
   So? Do I need to know how to read time-synchronized lyrics if all I'm doing is renaming files based on artist, track number, etc.? When I get an editor/viewer/player that does understand that, then it's there for me to use. Until then, I can have some slightly extraneous data or just not use those features.
   
   
2. Adding an ID3v2 tag to a VBR (or ABR) mp3 file makes it nearly impossible to get these files to play correctly
   
   No it doesn't. If the player doesn't understand ID3v2, then it's possible that it will get confused if the ID3v2 data is before the VBR header, but why not just put the ID3v2 header after the VBR header, an equally acceptable place. Remember that an ID3v2 tag can appear between any two MP3 frames.
   
   
3. Adding ID3 tags means farewell to "gapless play" of mp3s ... It doesn't need much imagination to understand that there are no players (software or hardware) around that flawlessly handle all versions and all fields in any ID3-d mp3 file.
   
   Aargh. This one really gets me. Assuming that the player knows about ID3v2, it knows how to read the length of the entire tag, not just parts of it. That's all it needs to know to skip past. There's no requirement that it be able to parse all fields in the tag, but even if it did, the fields are organized the same way, so if it had to parse through the fields, there's no reason it would need to understand the data in order to skip past it.
   
   
4. Removing ID3 tags is no easy task, sometimes nearly an impossible one
   
   This one is asinine. He's complaining that if you throw random data in an mp3 file that it's hard to get it out. And somehow that's the fault of ID3, depite the fact that he admits that it's not ID3. What a maroon.
   
   
5. There is no like-mindedness of correct application or acceptable use
   
   What difference does this make? If I want to put big cover images in, I'll put big cover images in. If you want to put little ones, that's fine, too. Just because we have different ideas about what we should put in it is no reason to say that it's bad. That's like saying that since mp3 supports many different sample rates and bitrates, it's bad, because there are too many options.

Aaaugh!

Yeah he took a lot of heat for posting this information on his web site. Hes a real hard headed guy and has had several blowouts with people on his message boards. He has been away from the internet since november, and the most active tweaking is being done by dibrom now.

Sean

Well my problem with id3 is it's limited to 30 characters per artist/title/whatever. I know i could use id3v2, but I absolutely hate id3v2. I can zip through my entire mp3 collection with id3v1 or filenames in about 5 seconds, but it takes over 15 minutes with id3v2. Being able to store the id3 tag anywhere in the file, while noble, is a pretty lame way of doing it. Sure it has it's uses, but i would have prefered something similar to tiff, where it stores an offset to the first tag in the mp3 header. That tag then contains an offset to the next tag, etc. This way you could seek right through the file looking at the tags without having to care about the actual mp3 data.

As for using mp3tag studio and tag and rename:
I could not get mp3ts to run on my computer. i guess it's a bug, but the window kept 'jittering' (best I could describe it). i'm almost certain it has to do with the advertisements, because it works until the ad loads.
Tag & Rename is pretty powerful, but I don't like the user interface at all. I also have some crazy little nuances in my filenaming that would be difficult (though probably not impossible) to explain to T&R.

Yup. ID3v1 sucks. Period. It's worse than just encoding the data in the filename (unless you've got an operating system that arbitrarily prevents you from using large sets of characters in filenames). I'm not sure what it is that you're doing that takes either 5 seconds or 15 minutes. Regardless, poor implementation is not a sign that the specification is poor. Then again, it's hard to beat the speed of fixed-size buffers that are always at the same exact location. Also, you can put an ID3v2 tag anywhere in an mp3 file except in the middle of an mp3 frame. It makes the most sense in most cases, however, to put them at the beginning. If it confuses your VBR player, then just put it right after, since that's just as valid. It would be nice if you could have an offset to the tag, or individual frames in the mp3 header, but mp3 has no file header. Except for the VBR header, which is yet another ``aftermarket'' specification. Unfortunately, we can't change the mp3 spec because it's fixed by a governing body well removed from the public. This is one of the many reasons that Ogg support would be nice. Too bad it's (apparently) so hard to port to integer math.

Sorry for the ramblin'.

"This is one of the many reasons that Ogg support would be nice. Too bad it's (apparently) so hard to port to integer math."

It wouldn't be hard to do, its just that rio and arm aren't convinced that there is enough demand for ogg yet. If you contact arm, theyll tell you to have rio request it. Rio's not going to request it, because it costs more money. If it only took a week or two's worth of work, and I was a programmer, I'd do it myself.

Sean