I have an offline music library. I’ve recently been going through my music library and updating the metadata in the files. A lot of my files were getting sorted by VLC into big ‘unknown artist’ and ‘various artist’ collections, so I wanted to make sure all the track data was correct and in the right place. I’ve been using MP3Tag for many years and I’ve realised I never wrote up a review, which I really need to do, because it is an excellent piece of software.

MP3Tag is free software, though there is no public source code. The first thing you see when starting it is a very clean interface, and it’s immediately intuitive. File list on the right, metadata on the left, controls along the top. It’s compact, and everything is where it needs to be. And in the file view you can add virtually any metadata column you can think of, not just ones that show up in audio files. Despite the name, it works with many different audio formats, not just MP3 files.

All of the built-in tools are excellent for maintaining a library. some of the most useful for me have been:

Tag-Filename conversion. Sometimes I will download tracks that are missing embedded metadata, but the filename contains all the info I need. MP3Tag makes it easy to ‘query’ the filename to extract the data, and vice versa to rename the files based on the metadata. It makes it really easy to keep all the data visible and ordered.

Album Art Adjustment. Certain music stores embed huge album art into the music files. 1Mb may not be much, but it adds up if every single music track has that huge data within it. Mp3Tag offers built-in options to compress and adjust it, and it’s as simple as copy and paste if you want to change the album art for some other image.

Downloading Metadata. When ripping music from CDs and other formats, it can be tedious to manually type in all the metadata from the physical cover. There are lots of online databases with this info, and MP3Tag easily links up to them. I’ve used MusicBrainz which has very comprehensive coverage of physical releases.

I am no stranger to the command line, and there are probably tools that could be used to do much the same things via typed commands and scripts, but MP3Tag’s interface is so easy to use, I can’t see much point in even looking for CLI alternatives. Though I haven’t had a need to use it yet, there is a built-in scripting system, and a community of users building and sharing tools that may help on GitHub, and the documentation published on their site is good.

It hasn’t always been perfect. One issues I’ve noticed when working with a lot of files is that there is no way to ‘queue up’ modifications before committing to changes, so every change you make requires you to wait for it to save to the disk before you can move on. I’ve also seen one instance of corrupted metadata which MP3Tag could not recover data from, even though windows explorer and VLC could.

In any case, having used it for many years, I have seen that it has received steady updates, and at no point has it ever veered into enshittification or a loss of scope. The software has always remained focused on doing the one thig it was designed to do. For anyone who has a very large media library, I would strongly recommend MP3Tag.