imreoliver@Foxpop

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The Foxpop Masstagging Guide

How-to with screenshots for automated id3 masstagging with foobar2000.
Nov 2006

3. Fill in Missing Data

There are three ways to fill in the missing artist, title, year, genre, etc. values: query from a freedb server, import values from the filenames and finally look up the album's track list on with Google.

3.1. Import music data from freedb

1. Select all the tracks of one album (only works with all the tracks)
2. Rearrange by dragging for the commercial track order (check for order of 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3, 4, etc.)
3. Right Click\Tagging\Get tags from freedb
4. Select one of the results, change fields you want (usually Genre needs correction)
5. Update files
(More about this component here.)

If you get bad results:
- tracks are not in the commercial order
- tracks are missing
- freedb works per cd, so two cd albums, like Greatest Hits, must be queried cd by cd (this is why I store in one folder only 1 cd)
- the album is not what you think it is (like cd3 and cd4 swapped in a multi volume album)
- the album is not in the freedb database

The freedb results page. Correct the Artist/Album/Year/Genre fields if you want to.
Only works for complete albums, with tracks in the commercial order.

 

3.2. Guess music data from filenames

  1. Select all the tracks of the album.
  2. You can put them in the right order, but not necessary.
  3. Right click\Tagging\Manage scripts.
  4. Build a scheme or select from the menu.
  5. Click Run.

Usually you will need the combination of the following fields:
%artist%
%album%
%title%
%tracknumber%
%discnumber%
%temp%

When I don't want to change some of the data, but it needs to be handled, I feed it into a temp field, which I delete afterwards.

Most often, I filled track title names with these formats :

artist - album- nn - title.mp3 %artist% - %album% - %tracknumber% - %title%
nn.title.mp3 %tracknumber%.%title%
nn. artist - title.mp3 %tracknumber%. %artist% - %title%
dnn. title.mp3 %discnumber%%tracknumber% %title%
nn. artist - title.mp3 (read artist into temp only) %tracknumber% %temp% - %title%

 

3.3. Enter music data from Google

This is my super favorite feature in foobar2000: it can process a track list in txt format and update the fields track-by-track.
To look up missing data of an album (those that freedb cannot find), I search simply for the "artistname albumname" string with Google. Some very good results are at Amazon.com (all data + covers).

Fill in track titles from a txt track list with Masstagger's Input data - one line per track:

  1. Select all the tracks of one album.
  2. Rearrange by dragging for correct track order (check for order: 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3, 4 ).
  3. Right Click\Tagging\Manage Scripts.
  4. Add\Input data (one line per track).
  5. Enter the scheme.
  6. Copy-paste the track listing (if there is lot of junk text, just mask it in the scheme).
  7. OK and Run.

(I wanted to save a script with this, but I don't know yet how to make it to stop for data input, so I can copy in the track list.)

Select Input data (one line per track) to copy paste track titles one-by-one from a track list (like at amazon.com).

Amazon.com's track list selected

Masstagger's Input data pattern to mask amazon.com's list

To enter data by hand one-by-one:

Even for incomplete albums, I find the above method faster (I just delete unwanted lines from the track list). But in case I have to work on pile of mp3 shuffled together into one folder, I also tile windows horizontally.

  1. Minimize all the windows (Win+D).
  2. Maximize only foobar2000 plus the page with the track titles.
  3. Right click on the Windows Title bar and select Tile Windows Horizontally.
  4. Select the track title in Amazon.com, right click and 'Copy'.
  5. Right click the track in foobar2000, Properties, Paste in the track title, and OK.

Google Music Search

Wikipedia

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Last edited on 14-Jan-2007.

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(c) Imre Oliver Kozak and @Foxpop.