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Music Tagger

Music tags are metadata inside music files that contain information about the artist, song, album etc. It is the recommended way to store this kind of information, since it is more "durable" that for example the filename. Most software & hardware use the tags for displaying song information.

There are many different types of tags, depending on music file format, and Flash Renamer can write most of them: Mp3 ID3 (v1/v2), Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, Ogg Flac, Windows Media Audio (WMA), Musepack (MPC), True Audio (TTA), WavePack (WV), MP4 (M4A, M4B, M4P & M4R).

Choosing fields

Next to each field (e.g. "Artist") you will see a checkbox. If you do not enable this, the field will not be written and the current value (assuming there is one) will be left intact.

How do I write the tags based on the filenames? Assume that your mp3s have their filenames structured like this: artist - album - title. Click on Setup Parts and enter this: <%1> - <%2> - <%3>. This means that the <%> tags will be "loaded" with different parts of the filename. Now you can simply use these tags a input in the Mp3 tagger function!

Using the mp3 tagger can be difficult to understand. To make it easier there is a "quick setup" button that will automatically perform the above actions for you!

Important! This function does not have any undo!

Mp3 Writer Options

Clicking on "(mp3 options)" opens a small window with extra options specific to writing Mp3 ID3 tags.

Code library

Flash Renamer contains two code libraries for writing mp3 tags. The internal routines and TagLib, an open source library. TagLib is generally more modern, but there may be some problems with it. It's up to you to decide which library to use.

TagLib:
• Writes ID3 v2.4. Some software still do not read v2.4.
• Very fast.
• Always writes both ID3v1 and ID3v2.

Internal routines:

• Writes ID3 v2.3, which almost all software can read.
• Allows you to choose to write only ID3v1 or only ID3v2 (below)
• Optionally writes Album Artist (enable in advanced settings)

Version to write (only when using internal routines)

The checkboxes have three states:

• Not enabled: Do not write the tag.
• Enabled: Writes the tag. Adds a new tag if needed.
• Middle (Gray / Filled): Writes the tag, but only if the tag already exists. (Update mode)

  ID3v1

  The original ID3 tag is very simple and can only hold 32 characters per field, making it hard to fit allwanted information. On the plus side is that it is small and has great software support.

  ID3v2

  Version two is a major update that has more fields and contains no size limits. It is however slower andmore bulky to use, and software support is not as good as for v1. Use v2 when you have long names that do not fit inside the v1 tag.