Mp3tag

I collect all sorts of music. Some of it is brand-new and comes with reasonably comprehensive metadata already baked into the files. Some of it is old enough that it was recorded before vinyl formats were standardised, let alone tagging formats. I have single tracks, whole albums, multi-disc collections, soundtracks that were never published as soundtracks, and uncountable odds and ends. When perfectionism demands that my collection be sortable and accurate, there's only one way to approach the hairy problem of achieving consistent, well-formatted metadata across a large library of files of every imaginable media container format: Make everything perfect with Mp3tag.

It sometimes feels like everything is possible with this program. I've been able to:

• load up a collection of over thirty thousand individual tracks including MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA, Opus, and others;
• sort them any way I like, including filtering the collection with arbitrarily specific queries;
• select any number of those tracks and get an overview so I can spot non-standard or corrupted tags;
• pull information and album art from a number of web sources to fill in the missing bits;
• reformat any part of those tags with complex combinations of other metadata, often using regular expressions;
• rename the files to my personal standard, including sifting them into the right folder structure;
• undo every step if necessary, including mass file renames;
• generate a playlist file, or even a well-formatted webpage for browsing or sharing;
• export a CSV, edit that with a favourite text editor or spreadsheet, then import it to apply the changes to the files;
• and do all of the above will full Unicode support, confident that it'll just work.

Cleaning up and maintaining a music collection is time-consuming, but what could be a grueling, Sisyphean slog can instead be reduced to right-clicking a folder in Explorer, selecting "Open in Mp3tag", and running one or two menu commands to handle the worst of it. If that's not worth the price— Oh, right, it's free! Given how much time it'll save, though, you'll most likely want to toss a donation at the author anyhow.

Downsides? It lacks some modern niceties that amount to edge-polishing. The interface that looks and feels a little dated (though I'll take dated-but-functional over shiny-but-hamstrung anyday). Given the frequent updates, I wish the installer just had a single-button "same as last time" option. I wish the quick tag-editing sidebar were a little more configurable. I could list a million more little things here, but they're more like feature requests than complaints. Overall, it's just plain good stuff.

Short form: If you're a Windows user and you've ever grumbled about what a mess your music's metadata is, don't put up with it; fix it with Mp3tag.

It's okay if you have the exact numbers of tracks which 80% of my personal experience is not the case. It won't let you remove your random tracks from the list you have, which makes the program useless most of the time. The sources are excellent and fast though