MusicIP Mixer Help - Tag Fixing

MusicIP Mixer has several options for fixing the tags in your music files.

Automatic Tag Fixing (Windows only)

To get suggestions from MusicDNS on how to update your metadata, just select one or more songs, and press the Fix Tags button. Select the changes you agree with, skip the ones you don't, and press the Apply button.

Artist Synchronization

If you have a registration key, you can use the Fix Artists Power Tool. This will suggest artists which are listed as different spellings or formats which could be merged into a single spelling or format. Select the changes you agree with, skip the ones you don't, and press the Apply button.

Manual or Pattern Based Tag Fixing

Sometimes there's no option but to fix the tags yourself. You can do so manually, by selecting one or more songs, right-clicking, and choosing Edit Tags (you can use Ctrl-E as a short-cut on Windows). In the resulting dialog box, simply change the fields you would like to modify, and press the OK or Apply buttons to update your files. If you modify more than one file at a time, you will need to choose which fields are affected by selecting the checkbox next to each field.

If you would like to make changes which can be derived from the filename, path, or existing metadata, you can press the Advanced option to bring up the advanced tag editor (you can go straight to this dialog by choosing Ctrl-Alt-E instead of Ctrl-E). The idea behind the advanced tag editor is to use existing information to update incorrect tags in your files. Although it may seem confusing at first, you will be able to accomplish a lot once you understand how the system is set up. Look at the examples to help you get started.

In the basic mode, the full path and file of the original songs are available to extract metadata from. For instance, if your filenames have the track number, followed by a dash, followed by the song name, you might use a pattern like this:

%t - %n

Once you've entered or selected a pattern, press the Apply Pattern button to see recommended changes based on the metadata. Only cases where the new name would differ from the old name will be shown. You can select the edits you want to apply by using the leftmost checkboxes. When you are satisfied with the edits, press the OK or Apply buttons. (You can also just delete any edits you don't like by selecting them and pressing the Delete key.)

Like our other tables, you can click on the headers to sort the suggestions by File, Field, Old Value, or New Value. If the new value is close, but not quite right, feel free to click on the field and edit it directly before applying it.

The Ignore Case checkbox is used to throw out suggestions which would only differ from the current values by differences in upper or lower case letters.

The Ignore Whitespace checkbox is used to throw out suggestions which would only differ from the current values by additional or missing whitespace characters.

Example 1

If your files have names like Artist - Song Name.mp3, then you would enter a pattern like this:

%artist - %name

When you press the Apply Pattern button, any inconsistencies will show up, and the edits can be applied.

Example 2

If your files are stored in directory names which correspond to the artist name, the you would enter a pattern like this:

%artist\%other

This means the parent directory is the artist name, and the rest of the file can be ignored.

Advanced Patterns

If you want to update metadata based on existing metadata, you can press the small triangle to the left of the Pattern entry field, and a new field will appear where you can enter the Source pattern. Use a pattern to select the metadata you want to use as a basis.

Example 3

If you want to swap the artist and song names, you would enter a Source like this:

%a * %n

and a Pattern like this:

%n * %a

This will swap the fields. Make sure the character between them (here we used * ) isn't part of any of the existing fields.

Example 4

If your song names are correct, but all uppercase or lowercase, you can take advantage of the ~ pattern modifier, which will try to guess the correct capitalization (using English capitalization rules). In this case, you would enter a Source like this:

%n

and a Pattern like this:

%~n

Any strange cases which were not done correctly can either be deleted, or corrected manually before pressing the Apply button.