anyone knows of a good mac app to re-build the messed up metadata of mp3 files. This may have to retrive on line music databases to retrieve and correct the wrong metadata I have on some files. Better still if the app can recognize non English songs
thanks in advance
I use Mp3tag to edit the metadata of my MP3 files. I always do this manually, but “it supports online database lookups from Discogs and MusicBrainz, allowing to gather proper tags and download cover art for music libraries.
Maybe you can give this App a try?
I’d also go with both of the previous suggestions. MP3tag is great, and I’ve used it long before it was a proper Mac app. However, much as I love it, it doesn’t always seem to copy info over to Apple Music properly, which is deeply frustrating.
Meta approaches things slightly differently. I’ve only recently started using it, but so far it’s been good. I bought it because of the issues I mentioned with MP3tag. I’d painstakingly gone through all 50k mp3s on my computer with MP3tag, only to find that there were lots and lots of issues with release dates and groupings when I rebuilt the Music library. I’m not sure, but I think Meta stores the metadata within the MP3 itself, not externally within the tagger’s database.
I have a similar sort of issue when I tag ebooks with Calibre, carefully correcting book covers, but finding the proper covers don’t carry over when I open the ebook in Apple’s Books app or Kindle for IoS. That’s why I suspect it’s where the taggers actually store the metadata that’s important.
One more thing. Discogs and Musicbrainz are massive databases, and do cover a lot of what for want of a better term I’d call non-US or UK pop and rock. Some other taggers have used Gracenote.
You can find details of a lot of unauthorised or live recordings on Discogs. I don’t know Musicbrainz as well, but it seems very similar to Discogs. It may even draw on Discogs. It also does its own app, btw.
It’s not always easy to tag classical music using Discogs, mainly because you have to look for the conductor or orchestra. That may or may not make sense, but it can be pretty time taking.
If, like me, you have lots of music from around the world you’ll quickly realise that Discogs very often details recordings by musicians in their own languages rather than in English, which can make it tricky if you don’t speak those languages.
And lastly, all the taggers, and pretty much all the maps of genres and groupings that you see on the internet are very focused on Western pop, rock, and electronic music, and sometimes very American. You’ll find lists of microgenres of rock and electronic music, but other musics are just described as, say, African. That’s pretty out of order in 2023.
thanks everyone for the recommendations. I think I shall try them all out to see how it goes. This could become a mini project for me that may last a couple of months to sort out the mess.
I have been using Yate. Very powerful.