Which program is best at music data tagging?

[GoFastr]

What's your experience with programs that can update all of your music that shows up as Track01 - Unkonwn Artist - Unknown Album?

I have several CD's that have great music compiled from friends and are like greatest hits CD's and have even compiled some of my own over the years but when they get ripped onto the PC, no title-artist or album data shows up for them as they are not original OEM CD's.

I've tried several freebie program downloads that only do the first 20-50 songs with mixed results. Some do both Windows Media Player and iTunes and others only do one or the other. I guess I liked TuneUp the best but is there anythng else better?

I'll pay for a good program one but I'd rather hear from others as to what actually works the best as the marketing BS for the products is just hopeless.

Thanks.

 

[Trev]

Honestly, and I know it's not the answer you'd be looking for... I just make an effort to manually label any media I load up on my storage as it goes on there.

1 album, or 1 film backup at a time. It's tedious, but knowing that it's done right, without an automated app screwing things up, ... makes me happy. Surprisingly enough... I'm a man of very little patience too.

If your library is already an insane mess... I couldn't think of it. But I made sure after my last HDD took a dive, that everything moving forward would be a clean house - if you get my meaning.

Would be interested in hearing though if there're really solid successful apps that pull it off without issues. Open to trying new things.

 

[MDS]

What's your experience with programs that can update all of your music that shows up as Track01 - Unkonwn Artist - Unknown Album?

I have several CD's that have great music compiled from friends and are like greatest hits CD's and have even compiled some of my own over the years but when they get ripped onto the PC, no title-artist or album data shows up for them as they are not original OEM CD's.

In general, it's not possible.

The way any tagging program works is by calculating a CRC code for all of the tracks on a disc and then looking up that code in a database. On a few occasions, you'll get a 'match' which isn't actually correct - it just so happened that the value calculated for the disc matched another disc.

You may have some luck with a music fingerprinting app, like Shazam, which listens to the music and tries to identify it that way. If it can identify it then you could manually update the tags yourself.

 

[GoFastr]

LOL....How'd you guess!.....Shazam is what started this thing!

I was just hoping I wouldn't have to sit down and manually Shazam all of my music. I actually bought it because the free version only does 5 songs per day. It's amazing because it hasn't missed a beat on even some of my lesser known reggae CD's that TuneUP and other software couldn't find.