Tagging Software for Mac (Leopard)?

[The Monkey]

I use iTunes to manage my music collection. Its tagging capabilities leave a lot to be desired. I'm playing around with fixtunes to clean up some of the tags, but I was wondering if folks have any other suggestions about a good tagger that works with Mac and iTunes.

[The Monkey]

Bumping this to see if anyone has had any luck.

[grawk]

Max works pretty well. sbooth.org

[blessingx]

Hate to disagree Monk, but the most powerful tool for tagging I've found on any platform is iTunes on the Mac. You just have to use AppleScripts (Mac only) effectively.

Run over to Doug's AppleScripts for Itunes and download the following to start (I use all three regularly):

This tag, that tag
Put track prefix to track number
Remove n charaters in front or back

With 450 scripts there aren't a lot of problems missing.

[EdipisReks]

Tag works well, for the opensource stuff.

[The Monkey]

Originally Posted by blessingx

Hate to disagree Monk, but the most powerful tool for tagging I've found on any platform is iTunes on the Mac. You just have to use AppleScripts (Mac only) effectively.

Run over to Doug's AppleScripts for Itunes and download the following to start (I use all three regularly):

This tag, that tag
Put track prefix to track number
Remove n charaters in front or back

With 450 scripts there aren't a lot of problems missing.

Wow, those are useful. I think you're right, until a tag & rename is created for mac, I'll use these. Everything else is too clunky for my id tag challenged brain.

[blessingx]

Yeah Media Rage is another though I'm not sure they ever got around to supporting ALAC.

But iTunes is so powerful if you use it with Applescripts and hijack with Audio Hijack Pro too.

For instance with a various artists soundtrack, using those Applescripts I'll move over the song order from song name to track number, erase a few characters in front of song name where track number was, then copy over artists names after song name (Theme Song - X band). Then rename artists to 'X Soundtrack'. Album is under single directory and if you're like me you maneuver around by artist, but you still have all the individual artists names in the track title for reference or searching. And that's just the start, though I've found those three the most I use.

There's also a kinda nice Lossless to AAC Workflow script that if you have your iPod attached will rip ALAC from your CD, convert to AAC compression of your choice, move to iPod, delete the AAC version on the computer leaving only the ALAC copy.

[Hopstretch]

Originally Posted by blessingx

There's also a kinda nice Lossless to AAC Workflow script that if you have your iPod attached will rip ALAC from your CD, convert to AAC compression of your choice, move to iPod, delete the AAC version on the computer leaving only the ALAC copy.

Thank you very much for this link! I was looking for something to manage lower bit rate transfers from my library to my wife's Nano and that's perfect.

[blessingx]

There are more tools (including for Linux & Windows) listed in this guide:

Fix your music library: song names, album art, automatically! :: The Tux Geek

[The Monkey]

How is ieatbrainz?

[blessingx]

It gets positively talked about a lot in the Mac community, but I've never had a reason to use it.

[The Monkey]

So I've started using Tag & Rename for XP under Fusion. It's a very good program. Does exactly what I want it to do. But when I fire up iTunes, it wants me to reassociate (my word) the song that appears in iTunes with the underlying file. For lots of reasons, this is a pain in the ass. I feel like this shouldn't be so hard because I am not changing any of the locations of the files (though I am changing file names). Is there a way to get the library to automatically, I don't know, update? Or some such shit?

Damn computers.

[grawk]

You changed the filename, of course you have to change where it's pointing

[The Monkey]

Originally Posted by grawk

You changed the filename, of course you have to change where it's pointing

Yeah, but I'm wondering if I can make iTunes do a sweep of the changed files and basically import them. Do I have to do that manually?

[grawk]

Check dougs apple scripts. There might be one to do what you want. That's one of those things that is completely contrary to how itunes works tho.

[Hopstretch]

Saw this new tagging utility today. There's a free trial, so I guess you could go see if it's any good.

[The Monkey]

Thanks for the tip. Tried it--I still prefer tag & rename under Windows.