(It tentatively appeared that FFmpeg would have been a worthy possibility not considered in the previous post, but there did not seem to be as much FFmpeg-related material on the specific tasks I would be undertaking here.) So while this post discusses various topics that may be of interest to anyone attempting a similar file renaming and/or tag cleanup project, the focus here is on ExifTool.ĮxifTool was a command-line tool. Now, for this MP3 project, after a brief search for alternatives, I decided to stick with ExifTool. As detailed in that post, I looked at various tools and decided to use ExifTool.
As suggested by a source cited in the final paragraphs, it was possible that ultimately I would get the best results from a paid rather than free service for this purpose.Ī year earlier, I had written a post working through various problems with tags for. The post also admits that I continued to learn about MusicBrainz and Picard throughout this effort, and that the fault may ultimately have been mine, insofar as I did not care enough about tags to master this subject and become adept in the use of these tools.Īfter the efforts described below, as indicated in that final section, I decided to wipe out the files that I had changed, restore my backup, and postpone this effort for a few years, in hopes that MusicBrainz, Picard, or some other tool or database would develop, by then, a more reliable, comprehensive, and automated solution. The final section of the post concludes that the MusicBrainz database contains errors, and may require some refined familiarity to use effectively. In summary, this post explores the use of ExifTool and Excel to obtain and analyze MP3 tags, and the use of MusicBrainz Picard to automatically or semi-automatically revise tags for a large number of MP3s. This post describes the steps I took in those directions. In the process, I thought I might also try to clean up relevant tags in the. I had a bunch of MP3 files, with names in this format: “Beatles–Yesterday.mp3.” I wanted to add the year to the filename, like this: “Beatles–Yesterday (1965).mp3” - using, perhaps, what I had previously learned about putting metadata (a/k/a “tags”) into filenames.