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tagscanner is a free software that helps in organizing large music collections.
it has two groups of functionalities: id3 tag editing functionalities and file name generating tool.
id3 is a metadata that is mostly used for mp3 files. it normally contains information about the title of the song, the artist, the composer, the album name, album year, track number, disc number, and sometimes the album cover art.
there are two versions of id3 tags: id3v1 and id3v2. among all the subversions id3v2.3 is the most popular.
many audio players like winamp or itunes let you edit tags. itunes is even stronger in the sense that it lets you edit multiple tags but it is a bit confusing because it will not save them into id3 tags by default and you need to convert them to id3 tags. neither it provides a direct way of renaming files. tagscanner however has tons of functionalities related to the file names: generating some or all parts of the id3 tag from the file name and generating all or some of the file name from the id3 tag.
example: let's say i have downloaded roger waters's 1992 album, amused to death. the files have no tags but their names contain song names and track numbers in a bad formatting* ( e.g. roger waters-01-the ballad of bill hubbard.mp3). everything can be fixed in two simple steps:
step 1, generating tags from file names: define "-" as delimiter; artist=%1 (1st part of the file name); album="amused to death"; year="1992"; genre="progressive rock"; track number=%2 (2nd part of the file name); title=%3 (3rd part of the file name); and so on.
step 2, generating file names in a standard form: define the file names to have track number as their first part, titles as their second part and " - " as the delimiter; simply as: %7 - %2 (%7 stands for track number and %2 stands for title).
* anyone has (or should have) a standard format for their audio/video collection. my standard for file names are
a) tracknumber - songname.extension
e.g. 13 - it's a miracle.mp3
when the files are within a folder that contain songs of one artist/band.
b) tracknumber - artistname - songname.extension
when the files are withing a folder that contain songs of different artists/bands. it might be a compilation album.
of course when there is no record of the track numbers or some other information they are unintentionally omitted from the file name.
c) songname.extension
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