For this week’s Freeware Frenzy, I will be taking a look at ID3-TagIT 3. This is a program that you can use to edit the ID3 tags on your mp3s. With the tags properly edited, you can more easily organize your music. Your multimedia programs and mp3 players will no longer create multiple artist and album entries for things that should be together. I know that some of my mp3s have the artist name or album title spelled differently, leading to those problems. It can be a big pain. So with this program I hope to alleviate all of those issues. Let’s take a look.

Installation
Upon installation, you must agree to a license agreement and are told you must have the Microsoft .NET framework installed. This is a free 23MB download from Microsoft’s website. Installation of .NET is very fast and easy. Without the .NET installed, ID3 will fail to run. With it, you’re set to go in no time.

Tags
Before I start, I should explain about tagging. ID3-Tags exist within an mp3 file as a way to store information such as album, artist and title. There are 2 standards of tags, simply called ID3v1 and ID3v2. The differences are explained on the ID3 website as follows:

ID3v1 only contains entries for the title (30), artist (30), album (30), defined genres, track number, year and a comment. The numbers in parentheses tell you many characters an entry can contain, because the entry length is limited.

These limits do not exist in the ID3v2 tags, and not only are entries no longer limited in their length, there are also a much greater number of entries possible, like songwriter, web addresses, etc.
Further information can be found at http://www.id3.org/

Use
This program is chock full of options for you to completely customize your music tags. Once I fiddled around a bit to figure out how everything works, I started to really appreciate this program. I have so many mp3s without good tags that this program will save me a lot of time. You can simply edit one file at a time, or do some mass editing. The Quick edit on the right side is handy for album and artist. Simply highlight all of the files in the main window, type the artist in a hit OK. Bingo, all of files are tagged. I also liked that I could edit the title tags for all the songs using the “Take from Filename” button. I am not concerned enough to go so far as to add composers, lyrics, involved people, URLs, Pictures, Ratings and all of the myriad of other options ID3v2 supports, but for anyone who wants their music to be a complete package, the options are all there. I simply care about proper album/artist/title information in v1 and v2. I found the Option to “Apply Edits to Both Tags” a huge time-saver. You need to Save your work after working within a folder, but the program reminds you of this so you won’t lose your edits.

Features
ID3-TagIT fully supports editing both ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. It allows you to edit one or many mp3s at a time. You can query the Free Database for CD Information. You can easily swap between Version 1 and 2 tags. You can apply “filters” to only have certain artists, albums or titles in the main window. This is helpful to prevent confusion when working in multiple albums. You can even convert the case of your lettering. You can enumerate the files with track numbers, and get file information such as bitrate, version, and duration with the handy Information box. ID3-TagIT will search for duplicate files The Preferences menu is full of other options that I won’t bore you with here.

Conclusion
Simply put, this program does its job, and does it very well. I look forward to editing all of my files with this program. I am confident that any organizational headaches will be a thing of the past when I am through. If you are like me, with a zillion mismatched mp3 files and can’t stand opening your playlist to find album entries for acdc, ACDC, AC/DC and AC.DC , I highly recommend giving ID3-TagIT a shot. The only thing I can knock it for is the lack of help files or forums, which the creator says are coming. Normally this is a big problem for me, but after minimal poking around, I could do what I needed. You can download the program here: http://www.id3-tagit.de/english/index.htm