As anal as a gay man, as lazy as a programmer

Last night, I mastered some karaoke mixes of my Eponymous 4 demos, and I created some MP3s out of the mixes.

I’m usually a stickler about my MP3 tagging, but the tools I use for my demos don’t really deal with tagging. I don’t use the MP3 export function in Cakewalk because I trust LAME far too much, so I use winLAME to convert my demo WAV files to MP3. The version of winLAME I have doesn’t include an interface to tag.

So I’ve been neglectful and inconsistent about tagging my demos, which bothers my anal retentive tendencies.

I’m a creature of habit, so my automatic reflex when I want to update ID3 tags is to right-click on my Winamp playlist and view file info. I didn’t feel like typing the same information 12 times, so I briefly toyed with the idea of writing a script to do it for me.

But I was feeling too lazy to write a script.

I figured someone else must have created software for the sole purpose of tagging MP3s — nothing so integrated as Musicbrainz Picard but something to make the process of updating a whole bunch of MP3s easier.

So I surfed the web a bit and came across Mp3Tag. I downloaded it, installed it, read about two paragraphs of documentation, then gave the software a spin.

At first, I wasn’t impressed. I wanted to include copyright and URL information in my demo files, but the interface didn’t include those fields by default. I messed around with the preferences to expose those fields, and I skimmed through the documentation some more.

I hadn’t realized Mp3Tag could perform a lot of batch processes.

I highlighted all the MP3s in the window, set the URL to http://www.eponymous4.com/ and pressed CTRL+S. It worked — all the MP3s now included the URL to the Eponymous 4 web site.

Once I understood how the software worked, I went to town. I added copyright dates, I filled in blank fields, I even managed to rename the files to include track numbers.

Mp3Tag isn’t totally perfect. I wouldn’t mind sorting by two columns — for instance, sorting by album, then by track number. Right now, you can only sort one column at a time.

The Tag » Filename renaming function is rather weird when it comes to using brackets in file names. It wasn’t until I hit upon the idea of escaping the bracketed text in single-quotes did I manage to get the results I wanted.

Finally, the interface requires a black-on-white scheme. I really despise software developers who don’t take into account customized settings of a user. Some of us don’t like staring at white all the time.

So the two aspects of my personality allowed me to discover a great piece of software. I’m gay enough to be a stickler about how I want my MP3s to be named and tagged, but I’m lazy enough to seek out a tool to help me do it.