I had a small pet project of converting all our Jagjit Singh audio CDs into mp3. I had access to a computer only during Summers and I had very little time (about a month and a half). So I would have to do too many things in much little time. I would rip the CDs using a primitive CD cutting software (AudioRipper may be) and then edit the mp3 tags in Winamp. There was CDDB sans Jagjit Singh. So I would manually look up track names on the back of the jewel case, type in and then use another software to submit data back to CDDB.
It became a tedious affair to tag the mp3s after they were created. Well, there was a Goto.com (the real overture) in those days that helped me find a nifty utility called mp3tagEditor(beware of look alikes – there’s just one mp3tag.de). The damn thing was so awesome that mp3 conversion became my summer hobby! I wouldn’t mind playing with blade/lame as long as this coolio was around. (dbpowerAmp came some time in 2001 I guess).
Well, what makes me write this after 8 years at 3 AM in the morning is the fact that mp3tag editor has grown up with me! I just tried it (after a really long time; I decided to do some mp3 management). The bloody thing is so so awesome that you just have to kill yourself to dream of something that it can’t do. Floran (Heidenrich) is one awesome guy. I just wish all other software matured like this super cool utility. The only glitch is that this is still a Windows utility, and though I haven’t tried it, I hope it would run on Wine.
So what did I really like about it is the fact that when you do a Tag to Filename or vice versa, you’ve got some awesome functions, regexes and extra fields that makes it much more fun. Another thing was the inclusion of getting Tag sources using a “web search”! Just give it the album name and it would pick out a list of albums from the FreeDB and match against your files. May be there’s other software doing similar things, but nothing can be better than free, tried and tested.