Best way to handle a music ID3 tagging workflow?

Questions & Suggestions
1

I am currently in the process of digitising my vinyl collection. I know that when I get to the end of all this, I will have a lot of work properly titling all these tracks. Before I even get to that point I will also have a number of tasks with the audio, such as trimming the beginning and ends, applying fade outs and so on. While there is not a huge amount that I can automate with the audio treatment, one thing I need to think about now is how I handle the metadata.

The process I have at the moment does make use of Keyboard Maestro to quickly capture key data such as artist name, the record title (not individual tracks, I will take care of those later), year, and genre. With that data, I am saving the file name such that each data item is separated with a pipe character. My thinking is that I can later automate the process of retrieving that data and somehow using that to populate ID3 tags. Managing this inside of Apple's Music app really is not going to work for me. Somehow I need a solution that will allow me to iterate through all of the files, grabbing that data from the file name, and then automating the update of ID3 tags from that. And this is where I am looking for some suggestions right now ...

What would you recommend for the purposes of bulk editing and updating ID3 tags based on the file name? I am confident that I can write macros that will do most of what I need, part I'm not clear about is what application might be the best fit for this.

Any thoughts/ideas appreciated :slight_smile:

2

If say... you had consistent naming of your mp3's, something like: Artist - Song Title (Year).mp3 or whatever...it would be pretty simple to parse those filenames with regex and then run an ffmpeg script inside keyboard maestro to add the ID3 metadata. That's how i'd approach it, but there also might be some tools that already do this specific thing.

As expected... seems like someone has a pretty comprehensive app written to do just what you're asking (and more). You could definitely script it, but it might be worth $20 for someone else to have done all the work :wink:

3

Hey Lloyd,

There are ways and means to do this. Here's a start:

Edit MP3 and/or WAV Metadata Tags? - #2 by ccstone

I haven't looked into this is quite a while, but if I remember correctly there are several available command line utilities available.

Scripting ID3 Tags Search

-Chris