[Plasma Shield]

Anyone who has a large music collection, has a lot of music with tags, wrong tags, or a lack of tags tries to fix that. So what do you do? You try to find the right tags for the music on the internet, right?

iTunes makes this a massive pain in the ass. As in, fucking yourself up the ass with a spiked pike painful.

There’s no option to get iTunes to auto-tag your music, well actually I don’t know, but you definitely need an iTunes account to get the album art working. I assume the function tags You’ll also need a credit card because to get a iTunes account you need to provide credit card details. Faking the credit card number is hard, trust me, and probably illegal too.

I googled “itunes tagging utility” and the best link I found was to a Lifehacker post, The 23 Best iTunes Add-ons.

Whilst the list had some useful utilities. The only one relevant to me and runs on a PC was moreTunes. Which turned out to be completely useless, it couldn’t find any of the artists I was playing. This isn’t to say I have eccentric tastes in music, but that either the amazon database for music tags was down, which it wasn’t, or that moreTunes is crappy software.

In the end, I downloaded a media player called MediaMonkey and copied music library over to it manually and tried to tagged it from the internet that way. The problem is, the amazon search won’t come up with anything unless the Album name is right, and yes, heaps of my songs had missing album names. The only solution to the problem I found was to search for the name of the song in the iTunes Store and the manually edit the ID3 tags of the songs to include the album name and ithens earch for the rest of the tags on amazon from MediaMonkey.

Slightly more efficient than looking the tags up in Wikipedia and enter it manually.

SCREW YOU APPLE. HOW HARD IS IT TO MAKE ITUNES AUTOTAG MY DAMN MUSIC.

</rant>

Update: MusicBrainz Picard is an excellent tagger, although it doesn’t download the album art for you, might have to use some other program for that.