If there is one thing I’m anal about, it is MP3 tags. I have spent days making sure the tags on my 8000+ song collection are as complete as possible. At first I thought adding cover art was a waste of space, but I’ve gone ahead and embedded covers when they can be found.

I’ve tried TONS of applications and these are the two programs that work the best.

Editing tags: I’ve been using Media Rage since Mac OS 9 days when it was called MP3 Rage. Easy to use. Feature rich. Responsive developers. I can’t say enough about it. I have yet to find a better product for editing tags in almost 10 years. 

Tag Gathering: For an automated method of filling-in the more obscure data MPFreaker is the best. It quickly scans the internet for Titles, Genre, Year, Track #s, and Lyrics and updates the tags. Where I think it really shines is in gathering album covers. Most album cover applications only hit Amazon and other online music stores so their results can leave big holes in a collection. MPFreaker does a damn good job of scouring a huge range of cover sources with a high degree of success. To do what MPFreaker has done to my collection would have taken days or weeks of manual editing, even with the batch utilities that Media Rage provides. 

MPFreaker has one caveat. I don’t recommend setting it loose on an entire collection, especially when it comes to album names. Because the same song, or even song title, may appear on different albums, it is best to cautiously use it or closely supervise the results. I don’t fault the program for this though.