Your audio file has an ID3 tag, which stores information like Cover Image, Name, Title, Track Number, Artist, and Album Name within the audio file. Now if you buy the original album and transfer it to your phone, you won’t have this problem but if you download your songs from ‘other sources’, or if you’re ripping the CD to your computer it shreds off the metadata from the audio files. This is just one use case why do we need mp3 tag editor for Android, Windows, iOS, and Mac. You would also need an mp3 tag editor if you record your own files because that container is empty unless you feed it data during creation.
Read: Best Audio recording software for Mac
Let’s check how you can edit tags with these mp3 tag editors
Not many people know this but you can edit all the tags of an audio file without the need of a special tool. You can edit most of the tags by going to file’s properties in Windows. To do this select an audio file and right-click to reveal the list of options. Click Properties and look for the tab ‘Details‘. On the details tab, you’ll see options like – Album name, Year, Genre etc.
You can click on each of these parameters and edit title, album, artist, etc. If you have a batch of files, you can just select all the files and update the metadata for all the files at once.
However, you can’t update the album art with this method. This is the simplest way without any special tools to edit the id3 tags. For multiple albums or batches, we can use an advanced application which makes this repetitive job much easier.
Best MP3 Tag Editors
1. For Windows
Mp3tag is a freeware application available for Windows which lets you edit metadata for multiple audio files like mp3, aac, Ogg, FLAC, etc. The reason we mentioned this application because this application has few distinctive features which set it apart.
Using Mp3tag is easy and you can download the setup file by clicking this link. Mp3tag is the best software if you have a lot of files to edit. You can just select a directory and the files show up on the application window, you can choose individual files or select all to edit the metadata.
The most interesting feature of this application is the actions option. Doing repetitive tasks can be tiring and you can create actions in this application which would automatically do the process for you. For example, you have a few albums and you wish to remove all the duplicate fields from the audio files, you can just click on Actions and choose to remove duplicate fields.
If the fields have been misplaced, for example, if your Filenames show some codes and tags have the actual names you can just switch those fields with the press of a button in the convert option in the menu bar.
Or maybe you need to rename the whole batch of files, you can do this by selecting the option ‘filename filename’. It would ask you to enter the new filename pattern and you do it and hit enter. It processes it for every selected file very quickly.
2. For macOS
Like Windows, there is a native way to update the audio tags in the macOS, using iTunes. Simply select the tracks and hit Command-I to get files info and edit the metadata there. You can edit that information like – Artist, Name, Genre, Cover Art, Released date etc.
However, to edit bulk songs, you can use a free app – Music Tag Editor Lite. It supports batch processing and online cover art search to keep your albums updated.
However, if you are looking for more powerful solutions, then try Meta. It’s paid software for professionals and has a plethora of advanced features. You can edit tags for almost all the audio formats. You can easily look for album cover art right in the app and edit the artwork with its smart editor and compress it so it takes minimum space as metadata.
It set pattern based Names for files with its automated operations and it detects the pattern and makes it a breeze to rename the files in a batch. It will be essential if you’re a DJ and have a large album and you need to find tracks quickly.
You can download the Meta Tag Editor here and it comes with a 3-day trial so that you can get a whiff of how powerful this software actually is.
3. For iOS
There is no direct way to edit tags directly on your iPhone, but what you can do is change the audio tags on your Mac and then transfer it to iTunes.
If you keep your Music on the cloud for backup then I have a good news, there is an app that takes the music from your cloud stores it locally on your phone and lets you edit audio tags as well.
EverMusic is a music player app which connects to your cloud drive accounts and lets you download all the music on your phone. You can connect Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, Mega, Yandex, MediaFire and SMB among the few.
You would have to log in once in these services and then you can browse for your music and download it. Not only that it also syncs with your existing music library on your iPhone and saves it in one place. Even better you can wirelessly transfer your music to this app directly with its Wifi transfer feature.
When all the music is in one place you can edit the tags by tapping the options icon(…) to the right of every file and tapping edit audio tags. Well, you can’t actually edit all the files at once as this app doesn’t have that feature. At least get all the music in one place. I would recommend that you use iTunes to edit the tags if you have a batch of files to edit.
4. For Android
When you look for a tag editor for your Android Phone, what are the most things you want the app to offer? It should let you change, Album, tag, Artists, Filename and Cover Art. These are the tags which are mostly used to sort and files into separate folders in the music player.
Star Music Tag Editor lets you edit multiple files at once with the option to edit each parameter individually. The app indexes all the audio files and arranges them in different tabs based on location, date created, Album, Artists etc.
Song tab has all the files in your system and you can long press to select multiple files. Tap on the pencil icon on the top right to edit the id3 tags.
You would see Artwork, Song Title, Artist, Album, year, genre, Track number, language etc.
It has the option to add lyrics as well to the song in the id3 tag which is great. And you can search the lyrics and copy paste it to the lyrics textbox and save after you’re done. Now, not all music players support lyrics playback. You’d need one that supports to be able to see lyrics with the music playback.
Also Read: Best Audio editing apps for iPhone and iPad
The best mp3 tag editor
If you’re on Windows, the native feature would get the job done if you don’t have a large album collection. Mp3tag works for both Windows and MacOS and is best for batch processing. Meta is for Professionals like DJs and producers and has many advanced features. Star tag editor is best for Android. Evermusic even though is technically a music player but has a feature to edit tags as well. Tell us how do you edit tags for your music files.