Metatogger 7.3.3.0

Overview

There are countless tools in the web designed to help you tag your audio files. Some of them are free and less-functional, whilst others are paid but offer more features. Metatogger is a combination of both; it is a freeware with the features of a professional, shareware product, since it gives you the power to control many tags of your music files in a nice and friendly environment.

Installation

The installation procedure is not different than any other typical program’s installation. After a few steps the main installation process will begin and finish shortly. Metatogger is 100% clean from spyware, viruses and other types of malware; no additional software is included in the installation package either.

Supported operating systems are Windows 7 and 8.

Interface

The program has a ribbon as its main interface which makes it a software with a modern look to go with its enhanced functionality. The 3 available tabs are File, Home and View. From the first tab you can load audio files, save your session in Metatogger or view technical information about the program as well as make a few settings- such as change language. The Home and View tabs share the same main screen and change only the toolbar buttons. On the left hand side is the tool pane, which displays common and uncommon tags of the selected file. Clicking on the buttons at the bottom you can get tags from filename/path, grab covers from Discogs or rename and sort files according to their tags. On the center of the screen you can see a list with all the loaded files and on the right is the properties pane, with details of the selected file (filename, codec, duration, bitrate, etc.).

Pros

It supports many popular audio formats, like MP3, WMA Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MusePack, Speex and many others. As for the tags, you can edit a great deal of them- artist, title, album, date, genre, copyright, license, description, performer, version etc. It can be a pain in the back to tag your songs manually, that’s why Metatogger has the ability to automatically tag them using the “Acoustic Fingerprint” feature. This function takes the song’s acoustic identity, connects to the MusicBrainz online database and searches for the song with the same fingerprint. If any matches are found, the tags for that song are downloaded and automatically filled in the tag fields. A similar feature exists for finding cover arts, only that in this situation the program uses the tags to find a cover art from the Discogs database. But you didn’t think the fun stops there, right? After you finish tagging your songs, MetaTogger can search LyricWiki.org to import lyrics for them.

The program can also take care of duplicates in your list by comparing their acoustic fingerprints.

There is a media player integrated into Metatogger, a valuable feature that couldn’t be missing from a tool like this.

Cons

It’s not exactly lightweight, mainly due to its rich interface, but you should have no problem if you have a medium system.

Alternatives

Mp3tag (free) is one of the easiest to use but very good tagging tools that supports a wide variety of formats and tags. TagScanner (free) and EasyTAG (free) are two other nice alternatives, out of which TagScanner takes the first place.

Conclusion

Metatogger is doing its best to attract users regardless of experience, and it succeeds thanks to its unique features and innovative interface. The modern user needs to use software like this.