I’ve been using the PicardTagger the last week and thought I would post up a quick post of appreciation.

I have over 6000 mp3’s - all from a sizable CD collection.   Some of the mp3’s date back to prior to automatic tagging (University days in 97-00!), when even if such things existed I would not have had a net connection to use.

What Picard does is basically allow you to retag the id3 tags on a album, rename the filenames to a common format, add things like album release date and genre. All in no time flat.   Ie, saves re-ripping old CD’s.

Basically if you have some of the info already in id3 format, it tries to match the tracks to a album quicky.

If like me you just have the track numbers and names, but no id3 at all, you can seach for the album in the database, click a link to add to the tagger, then manaully drag/drop the mp3’s, aac, mp4a’s to the right track name - then click save. With practise, some albums only take me 20 secs to re-tag. Some take one minute.

I’ve also taken to using it on existing mp3’s from more modern rips that have missed out on some details… over the years I’ve used several tools to rip CD’s so the information was not consistant. Picard has made it so. (Apologies for the poor star-trek reference).

For those that download music I also understand it can identify mp3’s from a md5 hash of the rip. Thus saving more time.

Picard has saved me countless hours of re-ripping -as this would have been quicker than tagging - I had ~ 200 cd’s which already had perfect rips…

Hope this post helps someone else save time. My mp3 collection at least is re-invigorated in one evenings work thanks to the Picard chaps!