I’ve had some moments of late, so I thought I’d finally reorganize all music files. Everything’s in MP3 format, since that is all that plays on my Sony S2. However, nearly to the last file the MP3 ID3 tags are incomplete or simply missing. Years of poor ripping seems to have taken its toll.

Fortunately, there are a variety of tools available, about a decade after MP3 files first hit the Internet, that allow ID3 tags to be determined for untagged, mistagged, or incompletely tagged files, without immediate access to the original CD. The foremost application for the task of identifying the unidentifiable in a expedient and mostly effective manner is MusicBrainz Tagger one of two interesting tools available from Music Brainz. The other application is Picard. The former utilizes acoustic fingerprinting that can often identify songs with useless filenames and broken or missing ID3 tags. The latter utilized what it can from ID3 tags to associate individual song file with its correct album, where possible, as music is generally associated with some particular album.

No reorganization is complete without sophisticated ID3 tag manipulation abilities, and the X Window System application EasyTAG is an excellent UNIX/Linux GUI based tool for altering ID3 tags, abusing them in ways such as mass retagging, retagging from filenames on disk, renaming and moving files, and creating directories based on ID3. (You need at least 1.99.10 to create directories based on ID3 attributes.)

Using the three tools, but especially the acoustic tagger and Picard, I have been able to recover the correct ID3 tag information for around half of approximately 500 music files. The remaining files were mostly recovered using existing partially complete ID3 tags and Picard. In all, only 73 out of a little over 500 files have to be dealt with by hand or more creatively with EasyTAG’s mass tagging feature.