I’ve been using the free MusicBrainz database to tag and name my mp3 files for a while now. MusicBrainz is an interactive service where a software client, Picard, compares the “acoustic fingerprints” of a group of mp3 files saved on your hard disk with those fingerprints already uploaded to its servers by other members of the MusicBrainz community. If these fingerprints match, Picard can automatically write the tags to the mp3s. This ensures that your music player (whether iTunes, Winamp, Amarok or whatever) displays the correct information about the track it’s playing - artist, title, year etc.

This tagging information becomes particularly useful if you have an account with Last.fm, where it’s easy to find ten or more different names for a popular track. Having more than one name for a track or song misrepresents the number of times it has been played on the Last.fm database. For example, this search shows how many times The Beatles track “I Am the Walrus” has been tagged incorrectly.

More information about MusicBrainz can be found here.

For adding album artwork and any additional tags not supported by MusicBrainz to the tracks (for example, genre is unsupported by MusicBrainz because it’s subjective depending on the listener) I recommend Softpointer’s Tag&Rename tag editor (Windows, shareware, 30 day trial period, US $29.95 to register). I’d also suggest downloading the free AudioShell shell extension for Windows while you’re there.

As an interesting side note to all of this, the BBC has recently announced that it will be using information taken from the MusicBrainz database to underpin the artist and album information on the BBC Music website. An entry on the MusicBrainz wiki explains in more detail how this will work.

Technorati Tags: audio, bbc, mp3, music, musicbrainz

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