ID3 posts

Filed under: Audio, Utilities, Windows, Freeware

MP3-Check examines your music collection, tells you what's wrong with it

by Brad Linder May 18th 2008

Got a few thousand MP3s in your music collection with missing or incorrect ID3 tags? MP3-Check won't fix them for you, but it will let you know what's missing. It's a light weight utility that can process large amounts of information quickly and let you know if your MP3 files:

Are missing ID3 tags
Don't meet your bit rate or sample rate requirements
Are stereo or mono
Meet a specified volume threshold

MP3-Check also lets you choose third party tools to associate with the program so that, for example, when you find an MP3 with no ID3 information you can right click on it to launch your favorite ID3 tag editor. If your ID3 tags aren't just missing, but are actually wrong, you might want to check out a tool like MusicBrainz which will compare your files with an online database and try to find the correct metadata.

[via GHacks]

Tags: id3, mp3, mp3-check, music

Filed under: Audio, Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Organize your music collection with TagScanner

by Brad Linder Apr 8th 2008

If you've got about a dozen MP3s or other digital music files on your computer, odds are you don't have too much trouble keeping them organized. But if you've got a few thousand, it can be hard to find what you're looking for unless each track is properly named and tagged. While popular music players like Windows Media Player, iTunes, Foobar2000 and Media Monkey will check online databases to find the appropriate metadata for songs you download or rip from a CD, sometimes mistakes occur. TagScanner can help clean up the mess.

TagScanner is a free Windows application that gives you a variety of tools for organizing your digital music collection. You can import tag information from freedb.org, Amazon, or TrackType.org. you can also generate tags from files and foldernames, or rename your files based on tag information. The application supports a wide variety of formats:

MP3, OGG, Musepack, Monkey Audio, FLAC, AAC, OptimFROG, SPEEX, WavePack, TrueAudio, WMA, MP4 audio files
ID3 1.0/1.1/1.2/2/2.3/2.4, APE v1 and v2, WMA, MP4, and Vortbis tags, comments, and metadata

There's also a playlist editor and support for exporting playlists as HTML, Excel, and CSV files. And to top things off, there's a rudimentary audio player built right into TagScanner so you can listen to tracks while you're organizing them.

[via TechnoSpot]

Tags: id3, music, tagscanner

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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