ID3 Tag Your MP3 to Play

http://live.pirillo.com/ - Does your MP3 player play your music back in the wrong order? It might be that your ID3 tags are out of order! Shabtai is facing this exact same problem and asks "how do I convince my MP3 player to play files in the order I want?"

Shabtai’s problem may be related to the ID3 tag information. An ID3 tag is meta data which is inserted into a multimedia file (usually MP3) which allows the user to store information about the media. This information includes the artist, album, song name, track number, and other information.

If this information is wrong then the MP3 player will not be able to play back the music files in the right order, or display the right information. How do you correct faulty ID3 tag information? With an ID3 tag editor, of course! The chat room had a ton of suggestions:

For the Mac, there’s the open-source project iEatBrainz:

EatBrainz is the Mac OS X MusicBrainz client, written by Jay Tuley. It performs acoustic fingerprint matching in conjunction with the MusicBrainz database. Designed to work with iTunes, it can fingerprint MP3, AAC files, or any other format playable with QuickTime and tell iTunes to change the metadata of the files to the matched version.

For Windows you can use Audioshell:

AudioShell is a freeware MS Windows Explorer shell extension plug-in which allows you to view and edit music tags directly in Windows Explorer. It is support all files and tags standards supported by Tag&Rename. AudioShell adds ID3 tag editor and viewer tabs to the music files properties menu (you can edit ID3 tags file by file or in groups), detailed music files hints with tag and file information, and additional columns in the Explorer files list. Full Unicode support.

Of, if you don’t like having a shell extension, try Foobar2000:

Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full Unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.