EN/RU
last updated
May 25, 2024

:: taghycardia ::

Free MP3 auto tagging utility for the lazy: fix tags in downloaded music with a few clicks. Automated repair of tag problems causing albums inaccessibility on iPhone/Android or other tag-sorting portable mediaplayers.
Auto cover art downloading/embedding and tag image removal modes. Recursive Unicode (.m3u8) playlist creation. Low-footprint install; swift tag updates; portable version available. Works under Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10/11, and Linux (using Wine).

Features:

Ad


Download

taghycardia 1.57 portable

taghycardia 1.57



The professional edition of taghycardia fully supporting non-MP3 file formats (incl. FLAC), updatable FREE of charge for lifetime, can be obtained here.

What is this for

Some portable mediaplayers can only organize mp3 tracks using tags. So, if the tags are messed up (which is a common case), use of such a player is complicated by the fact that all files lacking tags "disappear" or move in an "untitled" folder upon uploading. Besides, if some of the tracks of an album have even slightly different album/artist field than the others, the device "creates" an extra album or artist for each of the variations. Examples of media players having this sad feature include Apple devices, as well as Creative Zen, etc. So, taghycardia offers an easy way to prevent the "disintegration" of albums uploaded to such tag-only devices.

Note that the program is not so much meant for organizing mp3s, as for correcting faulty metadata in existing music folders to make them easily accessible on iPhones etc., hence renaming/configuring options are minimal and not very flexible.

As the scanning is read-only, taghycardia can also be used as a purely diagnostic tool that tells what is wrong with your music tags, and based on that info you can later reorganize and fix your music library using specialized tag and rename tools. Part of this task can be accomplished with the integrated folder-level tag editor enabling to fix some metadata faults in a semi-automated mode with the help of Discogs database and other online resources.

In addition, the program can be used as an efficient automated cover art fixing tool: it uses both local and online cover art images to tag mp3 files that lack embedded pictures. Also, it can be used for the opposite, to remove redundant images from tags to save precious space on your mobile device or HDD/SDD.


Usage

  1. Choose a folder using the ellipsis button at the top left or just drag and drop a folder onto the program's window.
    NOTE1: The program will recursively process ALL folders under the selected root (e.g. C:\Music, C:\Music\Album1, C:\Music\Album2, etc.)
    NOTE2: You can drag and drop multiple folders to process at once (see example)
    NOTE3: You can drag and drop a single music file to fix its tag as well. See details here.
  2. Click Go for full scale tag processing/fixing, Remove Art for quick cover art removal or Playlist Generator for playlist creation.
  3. If you chose the full-scale tag processing, wait till the read-only scan is complete answering the prompts, then scroll the scan log to review the suggested changes and adjust/cancel them if needed. Finally, click Apply Changes.




Details

In the Tag processing/fixing mode, the program will scan the selected folder or folder tree in read-only mode.

If a tag in an music file is absent or the artist/album fields are empty, the utility can add/rewrite id3v1/v2 tags to make up for that. When it is unable to deduce the missing info automatically, you may enter artist/album/year either by hand or with help of the integrated Discogs.com search. For the latter, click the corresponding button: Artist/Album/Year fields will be used as the search keywords. To restore original field values after changing them, use the Revert button.






The program also detects spelling inconsistencies in file tags across a folder. For instance, if some of the mp3 files in the folder have "Depeche Mode" as the artist name, while the others - "depeche mode", that would be noted in the log. If an album inconsistency in tracks of a folder is detected (with the artist being uniform), a tag normalization dialog would be shown asking if the user wants to unify tags across the folder. Click comboboxes to select from all the detected variations of the artist/album fields or type in your own version.




Also, there is a special button in the discrepancies processing dialog meant for handling personal compilations (folders containing various tracks from various albums). If clicked for the first time, it will present the following dialog to choose a mode.



If you are sure that the folder contains a personal compilation, and you'd like to fix missing tags in all the tracks, choose Full track-by-track tagging. If you think that some tracks may contain wrong tags, also tick Force re-tagging: in this case taghycardia will re-detect all tracks in the folder from scratch.

The second option, Modify tags to access as a signle album on a portable device, is designed to allow easy access to personal compilations on tag-only mediaplayers. If chosen, the feature schedules special tag rewrites for every track in a folder: the Artist field would be left original, with Album written as the current folder name for unified access on a player and Trackname replaced using the %Artist% - %Tracktitle% pattern.

Note that if you use iPhone/iPad, Set iTunes "Part of a compilation" flag option should be enabled for the compilations to be accessible as single entities on your device. In addition, you can sort the tracks in your personal compilations by name/filename/artist/randomly using the namesake setting in the options dialog. After uploading to an iOS device, compilations prepared this way by taghycardia would be accessible as one-piece albums in My Music/Compilations area. Please note that this feature destroys original tags of your music files, so be sure to back them up before using this option. If you have used it accidentally, you can try to restore original tags with the feature described here.

If you've chosen Full track-by-track tagging without Force re-tagging, taghycardia tries to detect all the files having incomplete tags (i.e. lacking album, artist, tracktitle fields, and/or embedded cover art), showing a progress bar. This can take a while, so you can safely switch to other applications: when the detection is complete, taghycardia will show a notification in the bottom right corner. Click on the notification to have taghycardia pop back up.

After the re-detection of all faulty tags in a personal compilation, taghycardia tries to find duplicate tracks in the folder, i.e., tracks with differing file names, but identical Tracktitle, Artist, and Album names. If found, the following dialog would be shown:



Here, all duplicating tracks of the folder are shown, sorted by their bitrate. The track with the highest bitrate is listed in black — this one will be kept. All the red stricken-through tracks are to be deleted (upon clicking Apply Changes in the main window). If unsatisfied with taghycardia's choice, you can double click tracks to change them from to be deleted to to be kept. Clicking No in the dialog will cancel all the deletions.

Note: In Settings -> More, you can enable taghycardia to check duplicates by comparing only the Tracktitle and Artist fields, or disable the duplicate finder altogether.

After the track-by-track detection is complete, the following table appears:



The lines in bold mean tracks with faulty tags that have been successfully detected. The lines in plain text are tracks with tags not in need of fixing. The lines in red refer to tracks with incomplete or missing tags that taghycardia has failed to detect.

Scroll through the table to check if everything is alright, paying attention to the red lines, but also to the others to see if their tags are correct. If anything is wrong, you can fix the things manually by double clicking a line. The following dialog then appears:



Click Detect if you believe that the existing tag in a well-tagged track is wrong. If that does not work, but you know Artist, Album and/or Year of the track, enter them manually, and then click Discogs to try finding the cover art.

If you have a local cover image for a track that you'd like to use instead of the automatically found, existing, or missing one, choose the track and click Select local image.

You can also tick Rename files to %Artist% - %Title% if you need that.

After checking out/fixing all the tracks' info in the table, click Save Changes to have taghycardia schedule the tag rewrites.

Please note that all the changes to personal compilation folders (except for lyrics embedding, see below) will be made only after you click Apply Changes in the main window.

If you need lyrics to be found online and embedded in the tracks of the folder, click the Lyrics button, then, in the appearing dialog, Update in tags. The lyrics for the tracks, if found, will be embedded into the tags right away. Also, see the Lyrics section.

If you've ticked Force re-tagging in the Choose processing mode dialog or clicked Redetect All in Folder Tag Editor, taghycardia will re-detect all tracks in the folder taking no account of their existing tags. Use this feature if you believe that the existing tags in all or some tracks of a folder are wrong, e.g., as a result of rewriting the tags accidentally.

With "Auto skip official compilations" enabled (in the Settings dialog), the program is also capable to detect "official" compilations - folders with tracks having uniform Album name, but differing Artist names.




The processing is defined by the program's settings. If folder renaming is enabled, taghycardia will check whether the compilations folder names adhere to the "%Artist% - %Album% (%Year%)" fixed pattern, where %Artist% is defined in the Settings/Official Compilations dialog (usually, "Various", "VA" or whatever you prefer). If a folder has been wrongly detected as a compilation, the NOT compilation button could be clicked to call up the discrepancies correction dialog for the folder. If, however, folder renaming is disabled, the folders deemed as compilations would be simply skipped. Later, if needed, you can either fix them manually or rescan again with autoskipping disabled.




Finally, the program detects corrupt/missing track numbers, trying to substitute the faulty ones with the numbers extracted from filenames.



The log explained

Now that the program has finished scanning your folders, the next step is to review the scan log.

NOTE: When spotted an unwanted operation in the log while reviewing, to cancel it, just right click the corresponding line: it will turn stricken through. If you need to cancel all operations for a folder, right click its name. You can also change tags for a folder manually by double clicking its name; after the changes, the planned actions for the folder will cancel automatically.

NOTE2: To preview downloaded cover art while scrolling through the scan log, point mouse to a line beginning with the words "Cover art" or "Found online". If unsatisfied with an automatically found image, click the selector button under the image to get more pics to choose from:



Keep in mind that taghycardia works on a folder level: by default, it treats every folder as a separate album . However, the program supports the notion of personal compilations, which are treated specially depending on the settings and the choice the user makes during the scanning.

If you are using the program for its main purpose, that is, pre-processing some folders to make them accessible on a portable player, AND you have set all the settings right, AND you are sure you've done everything right when answering the prompts during the scanning, then you may skip the review part and just click the Apply changes button: taghycardia will take care of the rest making the albums fully accessible on your tag-sorting player upon uploading.

If you are using the program primarily for automated cover art downloading or removing, make sure you also read the Cover Art section.

The scan log lists every folder the program has processed, in the following format:

C:\Folder_Path
Artist:
Album:
Year:
Artists found:
Albums found:
Cover art:
Critical errors
Non-critical errors
> Planned action
Additional info
-- Diagnosis


The first thing you need to look for is red lines meaning critical errors, that is, errors leading to the (possibly, partial) inaccessibility of an album on a tag-sorting player. Taghycardia fixes such errors automatically whenever possible. The program considers the following errors critical:

Album/Artist empty: A track lacks the Album or Artist field in the tag, which leads either to placing such track in an "untitled" folder on a player or to the track being inaccessible as part of the album on an iPhone/iPad/other iOS device. When you click Apply changes, taghycardia completes the missing tag fields.
Track numbers not present or corrupt: This means the tags of the tracks in a folder have no Track Number field, or the field is incorrectly formatted, or the numbers are inconsistent (say, some numbers are missing or out of order). When this is the case, a tag-sorting player lists the tracks of an album in a wrong order. To fix this, taghycardia looks if correct numbers are present in the file names of the tracks. If they are, then after the Apply changes button is clicked the program writes the numbers into the tags. Otherwise, a warning is shown. Whenever automated track number fixing is not possible, one may correct numbers manually or semi-automatically using the internal mass tag editor (opened by double clicking a folder path in the scan log).

Also, look for the brown diagnostic messages:

-- Ok means the album is fully accessible on a tag-sorting portable player: all the tracks have consistent artist and album fields, as well as correct track numbers. Mind however, that some tags may still be incomplete -- missing data that is not essential to an album's integrity, such as cover art or year.
-- Compilation detected means all the tracks in a folder have the same Album name, but differing Artist names. If you have the correspondent settings enabled, then taghycardia would add iTunes' "Part of a compilation" mark to all tracks in such folder upon clicking the Apply changes button.
-- Discrepancies found means the tracks in the folder have inconsistent Album and/or Artist fields. All the discovered variations are listed then ("Artists found:", "Albums found:"). Depending on the user's choices made during the scan, taghycardia may schedule a corrective action to unify Artist and/or Album fields in all tracks.

All the planned corrective actions are denoted the following way in the log:
> Rewrite id3 tags -> Artist :: Album :: Year


Fixing Cover Art

Taghycardia performs cover art analysis stating a diagnosis for each mp3 folder. It looks if artwork is present in all or some tracks of a folder, and whether the images are consistent. When they are not, a diagnosis like "Cover Art present in all/some tracks, pictures differ" is shown. When that is the case, or when more than one image file is present in a folder, and none is named "cover", "front" or "folder.jpg" (or whatever else specified in the Manage local autoselection dialog), no measures would be taken to fix the inconsistent/missing cover art. There is still, however, the option to choose an image to embed in all tracks of the folder using the internal Mass tag editor.

There are three modes of cover art processing in taghycardia:

1) To make taghycardia use locally found art for the tracks that lack an embedded pic, select the Cover art processing/Embed when missing option. If you want the program to also try finding cover art online automatically whenever a search in a local folder fails, enable the Use cover art from Discogs option. Downloaded images then would be saved under the name specified in the Save as box. Any valid filename is supported as well as the %AlbumTitle%.jpg macro, which would have cover art saved under the name of the album (taken from the tags) with an appropriate extension. NOTE: As of yet, there is no way to disable using locally found cover art in taghycardia when the Embed when missing option is selected. The only workaround is to remove all image files (*.png, *.jpg/.jpeg, *.gif, *.bmp) from the folders you're about to process with the program.

2) If you need to remove cover art from your music files AND pre-process tags for uploading to a player, select the Cover art processing/Strip when present option in the Settings dialog. (For quick cover art removal without the full-scale processing, just select a root folder, and click the Remove art button.) There is an option to also extract and save removed images using the filename specified in the Save as box (%AlbumTitle%.jpg macro is supported). When processing a personal compilation with a diversity of embedded images, each of them would be extracted and saved under the same name as the source music file, although with a .jpg extension. Note that auto-downloading art from Discogs is still possible in this mode, although the images wouldn't be embedded into the tracks, just saved as image files.

3) If you just want to auto-download art without embedding into each music file or stripping images from tags, select the Cover art processing/Leave as is option together with Get cover art from Discogs. The downloaded images would be saved using the filename specified in the Save as box (%AlbumTitle%.jpg macro is supported).

With Cover art processing/Embed when missing option chosen, Taghycardia picks up locally found images to embed into an album automatically on the following two conditions: You may use the Mass tag editor whenever taghycardia states one of the following Cover Art diagnoses for a folder:
" -- pictures differ"
" -- present in N of NN tracks"
" -- possibly present in the folder (unable to autoselect a pic to use)"

The first one means the tracks in the folder have varying embedded cover art images. The second is displayed when some tracks in the folder lack images, while the others do have them. To view the images, run the Mass tag editor with a double click on the folder path, and select tracks from the list one by one. If you wish to use an image for ALL tracks of the folder, just select a track and click the Apply changes button.
The third of the above diagnoses, meanwhile, indicates that no tracks of a folder have embedded cover art, BUT there are several image files in the folder itself, and none of them is named "cover.*", "front.*", "folder.jpg" (or whatever else that is defined in the Options -> Manage local autoselection). Again, in this case you may choose an image to embed in ALL tracks of the folder. To do that, perform the following steps:



- Run the internal Mass tag editor with a double-click on the folder path
- Select an image using the arrow-buttons on the right of the Editor window, and
- Click the Apply changes button in the Editor.


Lyrics

There are several ways of updating lyrics for music files in taghycardia:

1. Through the scan results. The program provides a lyrics report for each of the scanned folders specifying the number of tracks that already have an embedded song text. Note that instrumental tracks or tracks with a song text less than 20 characters long are counted as having no lyrics when producing the report. To download lyrics online for an album, double click a Lyrics Report line:




After the program completes the search, a dialog is presented allowing to view the found lyrics along with the lyrics already embedded into the tags (if any):




Has the program failed to find lyrics automatically, texts could be copy-pasted from somewhere into the dialog:




After all lyrics for an album are downloaded and/or copypasted, they can be written into the tags by clicking the Update in Tags button. Note that lyrics are searched using Artist and TrackTitle as keywords, so make sure these fields are correct and properly spelled - e.g. using the internal Mass Tag Editor.

2. Updating lyrics in the Mass Tag Editor. If you are not sure whether a folder has correct Artist name and/or TrackTitles, those can be fixed semi-automatically with the internal Mass Tag Editor (opened by double clicking a folder path in the scan results window). Note that taghycardia's lyrics finder is case-sensitive, so artist name must be spelled with a correct case (e.g. "Depeche Mode" rather than "depeche mode", etc.).
If tracktitles are missing or seem to have fragments that may interfere with lyrics finding (like extra characters, numbers, album/artist names, etc.), you may try to get a correct track listing for the folder. Once fixing tracktitles and/or Artist name is done, click the Lyrics button to try finding lyrics online. After the search is over, click Ok to confirm, then Apply Changes to write the lyrics into the Tags.




2.1. There is also a way to view/find/modify/embed lyrics for individual tracks in Mass Tag Editor: by way of right-clicking a line in the track list. Note that this is the only mode when you can delete lyrics from a track. To remove a song text from a track's tag, clear the lyric window (e.g. by pressing Ctlr+A, Del) and click Update.

NOTE: The professional version of taghycardia fully supporting the Lyrics capability, updatable free of charge for further premium features, can be obtained here.


What else can you do with the log?

1) You may look through the log for any undesired actions. Bold green-text lines schedule folder renames, while Bold black-text lines schedule tag rewrites. By right-clicking the lines (or by clearing the Perform this action checkbox), you can cancel the correspondent individual actions. Also, a mass canceling of all operations for a folder is possible. For that, just right click the folder path.





2) You may use the integrated mass tag editor to fix tags in a folder manually. To call up the editor, double click the folder name:


Usually, when there are no track titles in tags, it is OK to use filenames for the titles (this is done automatically when the corresponding option is enabled). However, sometimes there is a need to clarify the tracklist, e.g. if the titles are not empty, but incomplete or meaningless (say, something like "Track_01..NN" is used as a title). This is where taghycardia's internal Mass tag editor comes to help. To clarify the tracklist, click the Mass edit tags button in the editor, enter correct Artist/Album/Year if needed (to be able to do that, uncheck the corresponding "Don't change" checkboxes first), and click Discogs.



In the appearing combobox, choose a matching release, and click the Get tracklist button.



Taghycardia then performs a best-effort fuzzy match between the filenames and the Discogs tracklist it downloaded. This does not always produce good results as filenames can differ from the Discogs tracklist profoundly. The tracks the program failed to find a match for are listed in red. When unsatisfied with the automated match, you may try to choose a different release using the Discogs button again, or, as a last resort, click the Manual Match button in the tracklist compare window.



In the appearing dialog, manually select the matching items on the left and on the right, and click Match for each of the tracks sequentially.

A tutorial on clarifying tracklist and art through Discogs using Mass tag editor could be found here.

Finally, there is a Redetect all button in the tag editor table. Click it if you believe that the folder has been erroneously tagged as an album, while in fact it is a compilation — taghycardia would then re-detect tags for every file in the folder. Please mind that this operation destroys your existing folder processing log, so it's better to use the option for your folders one by one. See the Track-by-track tagging section for details on how to handle the files after re-detecting.


Unicode Playlist Generator




Using taghycardia, one can generate a Unicode (.m3u8) playlist for the currently selected folder and all its subfolders by clicking the Playlist Generator button. The feature offers a couple of options: for one, you can specify the number of tracks to take from each album in the folder tree to include into the playlist, either sequentially (beginning from track #1) or random. In addition, you can tell the Generator not to include track No.1 of each folder if the song is named "Intro" or its duration is less than 2 minutes. Thus, the generator can be used to compile a "sampler" playlist for a large number of freshly downloaded albums.

NOTE: .m3u8 playlists are supported by all modern software media players, like foobar2000, etc. They are also supported by many car stereos and some Android-based media playing apps, such as Rocket Player. One can upload a relative-path m3u8 playlist (created using the corresponding option in taghycardia) along with the albums to such a device to select and listen to it.


Single File Processing

Since v. 1.53, taghycardia supports fixing tags in individual files. To correct a tag in a single music file, either just drag and drop it into the main window, or enable Add "Create playlist", "Process with taghycardia" to Windows Explorer context menu in Settings. With the latter enabled, you will be able to right-click a music file and process it by selecting "Fix music file tag with taghycardia" from the menu.

Either way, the following dialog will appear:



It's pretty self-explanatory. In case taghycardia fails to detect a missing tag, it opens a window identical to the one described here, enabling you to fix the tag manually.

Program Options
Back to log explanation  


Tech blabbery

When writing ID3v2 tags, the ID3v2.3 version is used, with text fields encoded in UTF-16. A few commandline arguments are supported: folder name, -G folder name, and -GP folder name. With the first one supplied, taghycardia would process the folder automatically upon startup. The second one causes taghycardia to launch in the playlist generator mode, while the third would make the program create a playlist using its latest settings, open the playlist in the system-default media player, and close taghycardia. Additionally, there is an experimental filename switch causing taghycardia to re-detect the single track and, if successful, download a corresponding cover image to re-tag the file with that.



In the works:

  • Unattended fully automated tagging mode



- to help speed up the work on new features
- to keep the project going
- to thank the author

Disclaimer

taghycardia is provided without any warranty whatsoever. Use at your own risk. In no circumstances the author shall be liable for any damage incurred as a result of using the program. Please read the documentation, make sure you understand the purpose of the program, and review carefully the changes it offers prior to applying them.



Feedback

Feel free to write on anything concerning the program to support@taghycardia.info.

Ad




Reviews & Awards

"Simple utility for automatically normalizing the tags of entire MP3 folders without having to go through complicated configuration panels"

- Softpedia

"A free-to-use program that can resolve faulty metadata in your music folders to make them easily accessible on your mobile devices"

- Sooftware.com

"Handy freeware which assists you in correcting the missing tags of your audio files"

- ilovefreesoftware.com

"If you’re looking for a fast and efficient tag editor to take care of your basic tagging needs, taghycardia is your solution."

- download3k.com

"taghycardia can modify multiple tags, without too much intervention from the user. The software is free and you can install it on any computer, in a few seconds"

- findmysoft.com

"this program is extremely handy for those who currently have a disorganized MP3 collection regardless of whether they want to transfer it to a portable device or play them at home"

- www.canadiancontent.net

"excellent little application which helps users with messy MP3 collections"

- www.lo4d.com



taghycardia : Editor's Pick award on Filecluster

More taghycardia Awards and Reviews
Links