Tag! You're it!

Tag! You're it!

Now that you have captured your audiobook files from the wild CD jungle, you will want to tag them before you release them back into the wild.

No, I haven't gotten a job with a nature show, but just like scientists and conservationists tag animals for future identification, audiobook addicts can benefit from proper tagging of the files they put on their players.

We are going to be reviewing a real jewel of a program called, simply enough, MP3Tag.  Now while you could use your media manager software like Windows Media Player or iTunes to add or correct the tags in your audio files, MP3Tag will make this task easy and quick.  Once you know a couple of the key features, you will be able to tag a complete set of files literally in seconds.

ID3 tags are a way to store information about a file within the file itself.  This prevents us from having to use long, cumbersome file names, or complex directory structures to identify audio files.  This allows player programs and devices like MP3 players to present us choices when browsing, like Artist, Album, Genre, and so on.  It also allows the player to display information about the file being played, including cover art and even lyrics.

Ideally, this process is transparent and the music and books that we put on our players have been tagged by the retailer like Audible, iTunes, Rhapsody, Zune Marketplace, and others.  You download the tracks, copy or sync them to the player and can browse them however you like and enjoy track information and album art without any effort.

In the real world, our content comes from a variety of sources, and not all of them provide the tags that allow us to easily browse and enjoy our music and books.  Thankfully there are tools that can help us in this task.

If you read the recent article on ripping audiobook CDs with BonkEnc, you may have noticed that it has some features to allow us to tag the audio files we create.  If you are like me, you will make some mistakes and since we use the Encode to single file feature, the Title tag ends up being the same as the Album tag.  Let's fix up a collection of files and you will see what I mean.

MP3Tag

MP3 Tag is a fairly simple grid style editor.  We are going to concentrate on just the few features you need.

You can download MP3Tag from the MP3Tag download page   The install process is simple and straightforward.  There are no toolbars ads or spyware to worry about.  All the defaults should be fine for most people and you can launch the program right away.  As with other open source software, many people have donated their time and skill, so consider donating to the authors if you find this program useful.

MP3Tag's Main screen

Click on the Change Directory button in the toolbar   and find the directory that contains the MP3 files that you want to work on.

Note the Subdirectory check box at the bottom of the file window.  If you leave it checked you can tag many directories of MP3 files at once.  It does not matter in our case, as there are no subdirectories in our book's folder.  (Hint: folders and directories are interchangeable terms in this tutorial)

You will see below that I have selected the folder that contains the files for Harlan Coben's "Promise Me" which was nine disks and so I have nine MP3 files.

I have noticed that the Title and Album are the same for all the files.  This makes it hard to tell the difference between the files when they are on the player, since most players display the title from the tag rather than the filename.

MP3Tag makes this an easy fix.  

1. Select all the files (you can click the first, hold Shift and click the last, or just press Ctrl A)

2. Click the second action button near the middle of the toolbar   This is the Filename to Tag feature.  You will get a window that lets you tell MP3Tag how to interpret the file name.

Since we want our Title to be the same as our file name, we just want "%title%" to be in the box (without the quotes) like this:

As soon as you do this, MP3Tag will show the title tag below the format string box.  Looks good!  Now we can click OK and MP3Tag will make the changes to all our files.  This beats having to change the title tag for a bunch of files individually.

3. Leaving all the files selected, we can look over to the left and check to see that the tags common to all our tracks are correct

You can see now that the Artist, Album, Year and Genre tags are correct and we know they are all the same for each file.  If a tag is different for one or more of the files, MP3Tag shows < keep > in that box.  If you see < keep > in one of the tags that should be the same for all files, just type in the correct tag and click the save button.

So to review:

1. Open the folder containing the audiobook files.

2. Select all files.  (Ctrl-A, or Click the first file and Shift Click the last)

3. Use the Filename to Tag feature to copy the filename to the Title tag.

4. Leave all selected and check the other tags. (Artist, Album, and Genre are the most important ones)

5. Save

Other features:

MP3Tag is very powerful and very configurable, so these are just a couple of the functions.  You might want to change the order of the columns like I did.  You just right click on one of the column headers and select Customize Columns.  I selected Path and moved it way down the list so the column was still available off to the right, but I now see the most important (to me) information without scrolling.  I did this for Album Artist too since that usually applies to music albums.

There are also a ton of automated functions.  In the tools menu there is an auto-numbering wizard that lets you add sequential track numbers to many files all in one go.  It even saves the tags for you when it's done.  You can add leading zeros too which is good when you have more than 10 tracks.  It even has "reset track numbers for each directory" allowing you to number the tracks in many directories at one time.

So experiment and have fun!

As always, I will answer any questions you have in the comments.