For this week’s Freeware Frenzy, I’m going to take a look at TigoTago, a music tagging program. TigoTago may have an interesting name, but with easy ID3 tag editing for mp3, wma, wav, asf, wmv and avi, it could be the answer to any perpetually unorganized music collection.
Setup simply asks to install three items; the main program, a desktop icon and “Integrate with System”. All three are checked by default, and the latter two can be removed. I had no idea what the integration did, there was no explanation. For the sake of completeness, I went ahead and left it, and setup was finished in seconds. The program auto-opens, but there was just a program window to greet me, no introductory wizard to help me out. So I started by visiting the Help file. Therein were two basic sections, a general break down of how the program works and the Operations, or features.
You use the main window to navigate the folder trees on your hard drive. Clicking on the […] at the top moves you up one level and clicking on a folder moves you down into that folder. Backspace moves you out of a folder as well. You can of course navigate via the File menu at the top for a bit more speed.
As I’ve learned in my experiences with mp3 tagging, there are two types (layers) of tags, named ID3v1 and ID3v2. Level one contains basic info, such as the song title, artist, and album. Level two contains more advanced information such as composer, genre, and comments. Different applications will look at different layers, but most modern media player program, like Winamp or Windows Media Player can handle both.
Thus proper tagging helps you organize your media for playback on your computer, another computer via network or CD, or the increasingly popular portable media players, including the Apple iPod and Creative Zen players. Without organizing your music first, your PMP will be full of odds and ends; artists or album listings with only one track or multiple listings due to spelling or capitalization errors.
Enter tagging programs. I have done some tag editing within Winamp, my media player of choice, but it was not designed for intense, full collection editing, more-so for quick and simple edits and minor errors. TigoTago is designed solely for tag editing your entire collection of music, using a simple yet practical method; the spreadsheet.
Simple open up an album folder and all the tag data is laid out in familiar rows and columns. Use tab or the mouse to navigate and simply start typing to replace the text in any given cell. A triple click will put the cursor inside the cell for minor edits. Handy buttons along the top let you switch to v1 or v2 on the fly. I recommend working in v2 because it contains all of v1’s categories, plus others, then copying v2 to v1 and saving both.
Your first step is to take the easy road by connecting to the online CD databases to fill in your tag information automatically. Your ripping program most likely did this for you, but if not, TigoTago includes the freedb and discogs.com. I had poor luck finding some albums on either one, so your mileage may vary here. But TigoTago is for the power user who wants full control over tags.
To avoid senselessly tabbing across all of the cells to enter information repetitively, such as the artist or album name for every track, or to avoid fixing formatting errors (I personally do not want the track number in the file name) TigoTago has some shortcuts. For example, if you’ve entered an artist name for track one, and you want the entire track list to have that same artist, simply highlight the filled in cell and hit “Ctrl T”. This will fill in the entire column with whatever you typed. I also found it useful to right click and use “Names from Tags” for naming files. TigoTago uses masks, or sets of characters to tell the program how to format the names. So I used “%1 – %2″ to format my files as Artist – Title. The Names from Tags window will list all of the masks to help you out. Lastly, I enjoyed the option of changing cases. A simple menu will reformat text to avoid ACDC, acdc, AcDc, etc.
Overall, TigoTago does its job well. I would have liked to see a little more cooperation with the tagging databases, simply for completeness, but I can overlook that because the whole reason I downloaded TigoTago was for manual control. After only a few minutes of reading the help file, and trying out some options, I had all the necessary skills to work with TigoTago. While tag editing isn’t exactly fun, TigoTago makes it less of a chore to spend hours organizing all of your thousands of mp3s. Check it out at: http://www.tigotago.com/
