There are a few nice and shiny services out there that offer automatic MP3 re-tagging, but I have never found one that does everything I want. The fully automated solutions really scare me, and others require that you use iTunes. I'm sure they work fine for the majority of people (in fact a lot of them work on both PC and Mac), but I wanted something a little more powerful. For a long time it's been a dream of mine to find a program that can query the Last.fm database and re-tag my music (specifically genres) using their accurately crowd-sourced information. I even went so far as to hobble together my own PHP script that did this, but it was clunky and I am not very proud of it (so I won't be posting it here). This dream came true when I found MusicBrainz Picard Tagger.

Right out of the box, Picard will scan your music library and find the proper band names, album titles, release dates, and song titles for your music. It will also find all kinds of extra information such as the publisher, country of origin, catalog number, and barcode for specific albums. If you agree with the information it suggests, you can click "Save" and rest easy knowing you're on your way to MP3 tag bliss.

So what's this about Last.fm tags? Picard Tagger supports plugins, and more specifically, there is a plugin called LastFMPlus. LastFMPlus extends Picard's tagging capabilities to include very specific genres, grouping (more broad genres), moods (happy, sad, trippy), occasions (summer, driving), and more. What's even better is Picard will perform searches on a per-track basis, so you don't have to worry about artists or albums that cover more than one genre. There is a pretty detailed tutorial on how to install and use it on their website, but it's been down for me more than once, so I've hosted the tutorial myself which you can download right here. I've also hosted the plugin myself, which can be downloaded here. Their tutorial doesn't cover everything and assumes you already know how to use Picard, so I'll quickly go over the main points so you don't have to read any more than you already are.

Installation & Setup

After you've downloaded Picard, install it but don't open it yet. Download the LastFMPlus plugin and extract it to the plugins folder within your Picard installation directory. Once you've extracted it, there should be a lastfmplus folder in the plugins folder. Within that, there should be two python (.py) files. If you're hardcore, you could open these in a text editor and modify the plugin yourself, but you probably won't need to.

Run Picard and do what any self respecting geek would do first: open the options. You can click through and enable and disable whatever you like, but in order to enable the plugin, you'll have to click Plugins and enable Last.fm Plus. You can also enable other useful plugins that came bundled with Picard, like Disc Numbers, which will properly tag multi-disc albums. When you're done, click OK to close the options panel, and then open it back up again. Next to Plugins on the left side, there should be [+] icon indicating there's more underneath that menu item. Go ahead and click that to reveal the Last.fm Plus plugin options. You can play with these settings or leave them all at default, but what you have to do is go over to the 2nd tab and click the bold "Load Defaults" button at the bottom. Now click OK.

Let the tagging begin

Now you're ready to really get started. Picard has two main windows: the left side which shows you unmatched files, and the right side which shows you songs that are ready to tag. Use the toolbar buttons at the top to add individual files or an entire folder to the left window. Once they are listed, click "Cluster" to group them by album. If you're tagging individual songs, there's no need to cluster. If you already have fairly well tagged music, you can select which songs from the left window that you want to look up and click "Lookup". The selected songs will be moved to the right side and let you know it's "loading album information". A few seconds later, you should be able to see which, if any, of your selected songs were found. There will be a rectangular meter next to the matched songs indicating how well your song was matched to the one in the database. If it was a perfect match, you'll see a fully green meter. You can right click on the song in the right window and inspect its details to see the custom tags that were added by LastFMPlus. If you're happy with the results, select the song(s) you want to save and click "Save".

If your tags are a mess or the "Lookup" button is finding incorrect matches, there's still hope. Picard uses fingerprinting to determine the origin of your music even if you have completely incorrect tags or no tags at all. Add your music to the left window as you normally would, except click "Scan" instead of "Lookup". It takes a little longer than usual, but it will more than often find a match. There were a few cases when, despite proper pre-existing tags, "Lookup" failed to properly find a match, but "Scan" did. 

That wasn't so bad

With my 1000+ album music library, Picard was unable to find proper tag information for about a dozen of them. One of the downsides is that if the album isn't in Picard's database, then you can't use the LastFMPlus plugin to at least get proper genre information. Even with this limitation, a 1.2% failure rate is something that I'm willing to live with. Not to mention it even found some rarer bootlegs that I wasn't expecting it to find. I also had some bizarre matches with a few albums, specifically in cases when it finds matches across multiple releases of the same album (like deluxe editions), so I had to manually move around the matched tracks so that they made up a single complete matched album. You also might have problems finding albums if you're searching for them on (or before) their release date. This is because Picard uses a user-contributed database, so if nobody else has added that album before you, it's not going to pull any matches. This is a good opportunity for you to contribute!

So it's not perfect, but it's damn good. It has satisfied my need for perfect tags the most out of any solution I've tried, and it allows a wide range of customization. Now we can all create incredibly specific playlists depending on any mood or occasion. 

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Last.fm just released an experimental little application called Boffin, which scans your entire music library and creates a tag cloud based on all of the genres in your collection. It doesn't just read the genre tags for every song, though, it instead looks up every song of yours in the Last.fm database and creates a tag cloud using their own tags. So you don't have to worry about retagging all your stuff! The result is something very similar to the regular Last.fm radio, except it plays from your own collection rather than theirs.

Do I want to listen to only folk and punk? Yes please. You can read about it here or download it here for PC or Mac.

It also lets you export your tag cloud to Wordle, which I wrote about before if you remember. This is mine:

PRETTY NIFTY.

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Before you read this post, I must warn you that it is very TEXT HEAVY. It is text heavy because i am VERY PASSIONATE about this issue. Now that you have been warned, you may continue reading:

I got a new Zune 80GB MP3 player recently, and I've had a couple months to get really familiar with it. So far I've been pretty pleased with everything, but my only issues are with the software. As I expected, Microsoft only lets you use their software to sync your music between your player and PC. That means, even if you don't like it, you are stuck with it. Some people have developed a utility that lets you sync using WMP11 or iTunes, but it is kind of buggy and (I'm hoping) still in development. I am willing to live with using the Zune software, since it is fairly easy to use, except it behaves rather poorly when it comes to tags.

I have a bit of an obsession when it comes to my music being encoded and tagged exacly how I want. I spent a good portion of the past couple months re-ripping, re-downloading and re-tagging my entire music collection so I could have it just right, and I am happy to be finally done (so is Billie). When I finished, the last thing I did was set my entire music folder to read-only so that nothing could ever modify it without my knowledge. I right clicked on the folder, looked at the properties, and saw that there were 3594 files total. I deleted my previous iTunes library, dragged in my fresh new read-only folder, and confirmed that it had imported exactly 3594 songs. It did, and I was happy. +1 for iTunes.

The next step was to perform the same process with the Zune software. After dragging everything in, it told me there were 3592 songs total. Awesome. Two missing, now only if I knew which ones it decided to ignore. I deleted everything from the Zune software and tried again. 3592. Every time. I was forced go through album by album until I found the missing two songs. Eventually I narrowed it down to a song from Mezzanine by Massive Attack and another song from Rated R by Queens of the Stone Age. The problem was duplicate song names. In the case of Mezzanine, track 5 and 11 were both called Exchange and (Exchange), and I guess the Zune software wasn't smart enough to distinguish the two, even though they were correctly tagged with separate track numbers, and the 2nd even had brackets around it. On Rated R, the problem was with Feel Good Hit of the Summer which was is the first song on the album, but also included as the first song on a bonus disc. I guess the Zune software wasn't smart enough to distinguish between disc number tags, either. I was forced to (with great pain) rename the songs so that the software could realize they were indeed separate songs.

After confirming that both the Zune software and music folder contained exactly 3594 songs, I synced them with my Zune and again, confirmed that it contained 3594 songs as well. I quickly browsed through my Zune to make sure that it had correctly imported all of the album art (another thing I am terribly picky about), which it had, but another tag related issue was brought to my attention. The Zune software actually was smart enough to sort multi-disc albums properly, in the expected order of disc 1, track 1-10 first, then disc 2, track 1-10 second, however, the software installed on the Zune likes to do it a little differently. Instead of what you'd expect, it sorts it as track 1, track 1, track 2, track 2, etc., mixing disc 1 and 2 while completely ignoring the disc number tag. My only option in this case is to rename the 2nd disc as "Album Title (disc 2)", which is really ugly. Since I only have a few albums with more than one disc, I decided to leave them as they were and hope that Micorosft fixes the problem in a new patch, although it baffles me as to why the software on the PC and the software on the Zune player would behave so differently.

The next step in my epic journey was to copy all of the songs from my Zune to my computer at work. I figured that since I had already taken care of the tag issues, it would be a breeze. I dragged everything to my PC, and did a quick check to see how many songs it had found. 3592. AWESOME. I checked the Massive Attack and Queens of the Stone Age folders, and saw everything was there. I haven't had the time to narrow down the problem this time, but I dragged everything into iTunes anyway. I wasn't surprised to see that iTunes managed to import 3618 songs. Somehow during the process of copying everything from my home PC to my Zune to my work PC, 24 extra songs were fabricated out of nothing. I'd like to hear these songs, but it'll have to wait for another day to figure out what they are.

On the plus side, the Zune software didn't overwrite any of my tags, despite a quick scare when I noticed some differences between how it displayed "featuring" artists. I specifically formatted all songs featuring another artist to be written as "Feat. Some Guy", but the Zune software, for reasons currently unknown, displays them somtimes as "Ft. Some Guy" or "feat. Some Guy". After checking the tags, I found that they were untouched, and it was just the software that was displaying them differently, and inconsistently. Why. It also "forgets" the album art and release year when displaying your library on a PC other than the one in which you originally imported the songs. And again, after checking the tags, everything appears how it should be.

After browsing a few forums, I noticed other Zune owners are having similar (and other, more annoying) problems as me. Hopefully Micorosft takes notice and does the right thing.

In somewhat related news, I watched this video with Adam Savage from Mythbusters over the weekend. He talks about his obession with various things, and if you think I am too obsessed with trivial things like MP3 tags, then watch this video.

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