Mp3tag

Managing music files from different sources can be quite difficult. Sometimes you want your files to be named properly and have proper entries for artist, album and genre, so that you can simply listen to a specific subsection of your playlist without having to create new ones manually. This can be resolved easily...

Mp3tag offers to do simply that. It's a metadata editor which can be used to add basic information about your audio files such as artist, album, genre, year of release, etc. It can be downloaded and installed for free. Despite its name, it works properly with formats other than MP3.

Once you install it, you should change the directory to wherever your music files are located. All files are then displayed and you can edit info of each one by clicking on it and editing the data which appears at the left side of the screen. By default, you have to save the changes before selecting another file or they will be lost. This is unfortunate but it can be changed in Tools > Options > Tags.

You can easily select multiple files and edit their common properties, which is useful for songs from the same artist and/or the same album. It includes some advanced features as well. The Actions menu offers to easily replace and fix some things for all files, such as removing fields and replacing words.

Online databases can be exploited as well. For example, selecting songs from the same album and choosing Tag sources > freedb enables you to look for information regarding those tracks in their database. If found, you can automatically change the metadata for an entire album. Note that errors can occur, especially if the songs aren't in the same order as they are on the album. Simply selecting a song and having an option to fill out its metadata would be handy.