id3

Any kind of data file can be corrupted, but your MP3s are especially vulnerable to damage and corruption since there's a lot of them, they tend to hang around for years, and all kinds of programs handle them. MP3 Checker is a simple, free tool that scans your MP3s for any kind of corruption, as long as it's data corruption; it can't tell good music from bad, only good files from bad. With drag-and-drop and file quarantining, it's fast, easy to use, and safe.

MP3 Checker is a simple tool with an appropriately simple interface: a … Read more

It can be a challenge to maintain a pristine music collection once you've migrated to a digital library. With all the moving, copying, downloading, ripping, and transferring files that sometimes goes on, many of us are bound to end up with some duplicate tracks scattered around our hard drives. If you want to get things all nice and tidy again--not to mention clear up some space on your computer--Similarity is here to help. This fairly basic utility scans your system for music files and helps you locate and delete dupes.

Similarity is a quick and light app, with limited … Read more

A couple years back, iTunes faithful were rewarded with TuneUp Companion, a handy plug-in that makes filling in, cleaning up, and correcting ID3 tags for tracks in one's music library a cinch. Now, those who prefer Windows Media Player for their music management and playback have been invited to the party. As of today, users will be able to download a version of the software for WMP from the TuneUp Web site. Even better, the first 50 CNET readers to e-mail TuneUp will receive a code to activate a Gold account, which regularly costs $29.95.

Those who opt … Read more

Earlier on Friday, Mufin launched its music player, which analyzes the songs in your music collection based on their audio content, rather than on human analysis or genre.

Human analysis, naturally, is subjective, and genre labeling is totally arbitrary and unreliable--I particularly hate the meaningless label "Alternative," which can apply to everything from dead-slow acoustic to fast punk; it's more about the hairstyles of the artists than the content of the music.

Once Mufin has analyzed your tunes, it can recommend similar-sounding songs from your collection. It also catalogs songs in its online database and can recommend … Read more

According to a recent New York Times article, 80 percent of people who make New Year's resolutions abandon them before Valentine's Day. But we can all beat the odds, right?

This year, I'm hoping to make some sense of my digital music collection. I'm a big fan of the audio-tracking site Last.fm (my username is "field_day" if you want to friend me), but I'll often get an error when trying to "scrobble" a song because my ID3 information is missing or erroneous.

ID3 is a metadata format within MP3 files … Read more

I was notified a few months ago of the possibility of adding our extended show notes to the MP3 files that we publish daily. This is something that fans had been asking for in the past and up until then, I thought it was utterly impossible. Well, there is a way. Here's how.

The first thing to keep in mind is that adding show notes to your MP3 file must be the last thing you do to the file before publishing it to the web. If you add show notes to the file and then open it up in … Read more

It's the law of entropy: as your digital music collection increases, you're bound to run into mislabeled songs, duplicate tracks in multiple file formats, and other problems. Apple's iTunes does a fine job of displaying song data and letting you edit it--as long as the song's in a format that iTunes supports (if you try to import a WMA file, for instance, iTunes will ask if you want to convert it first). Microsoft's Windows Media Player has an advanced tag editor, but it's buried a few menu options down, and it only lists songs … Read more