In the example below, I used the track number tag, a hyphen, and the title tag to come up with a file name pattern I like to see in the Finder.I detailed the entire story in the December 2019 episode of our Club-exclusive MacStories Unplugged podcast, but in short: I still use Apple Music to stream music every day and discover new artists; however, for those times when I want to more intentionally listen to music without doing anything else, I like to sit down, put on my good Sony headphones, and try to enjoy all the sonic details of my favorite songs that wouldnt normally be revealed by AirPods or my iPad Pros speakers.But this post isnt about how Ive been dipping my toes into the wild world of audiophiles and high-resolution music; rather, I want to highlight an excellent Mac app Ive been using to organize and edit the metadata of the FLAC music library Ive been assembling over the past year.
Meta Music Tag Editor Download FLAC MusicHowever, I prefer to purchase and download FLAC music on my Mac mini because my music collection is also backed up and mirrored to Plex, and the Mac mini as you might imagine is running a Plex media server instance in the background at all times. The music library is stored on a 1 TB Samsung T5 external SSD thats connected via USB-C to the Mac mini; whenever I purchase new music, I manually copy it into the T5 as well as the Sony Walkmans SD card via the Finder. But sometimes it doesnt, which leads to the unfortunate situation of ending up with songs on my Walkman that lack album artwork or feature extra text in their titles such as Remastered or Explicit. Its particularly annoying when artwork is missing because it ruins the experience of looking at the now playing screen while Im focused on enjoying music. Plex doesnt have this issue: by virtue of being an online service, Plex can search various databases for correct metadata and automatically fill missing fields in my library. One of the reasons I enjoy listening to my personal music library the old-school way is that the Walkman is completely offline, but that comes with the disadvantage of being unable to fix incorrect metadata via the web. The word Remastered shouldnt be part of the song title field. I came across Meta a few months ago when, frustrated with the ugliness and bloated nature of other desktop metadata editors, I took it upon myself to find a polished, modern tag editor designed specifically with Mac users in mind. Meta is exactly what I was looking for: the app is a modern Mac utility that supports all popular audio formats (from standard MP3 and MP4 to FLAC, DSF, and AIFF) and can write metadata formats such as ID3v1, ID3v2, MP4, and APE tags. Meta Music Tag Editor Professional Mac AppUnlike other cross-platform or open-source tag editors, Metas feature set is focused on one area editing metadata for your digital music collection and supports all the common interface paradigms youd expect from a professional Mac app running on Catalina. Meta Music Tag Editor Trial You CanThe Meta website has details and screenshots that cover all of the apps features, and theres also a full 3-day free trial you can use without limitations to take Meta for a spin. Having used the app for a while, I would describe it as follows: Meta is based on a powerful tag engine (called TagLib ) and customizable, native Mac UI that supports a resizable sidebar, popovers, dark mode, keyboard shortcuts, and multiple view options; in addition to this flexible UI, Meta sports an incredible text-matching engine that lets you perform tasks such as batch renaming multiple files, creating new tags by mixing text and metadata tokens, finding and replacing text, and even converting file paths or metadata to new tags using regex patterns. Once Ive identified an album that needs some of its metadata fixed, I drop the entire folder from the Finder into Meta. If I want to add artwork to it, all I need to do is select all songs in Metas main list, then drag the artwork image I previously downloaded from Google Images into the artwork section of Metas sidebar. The artwork tag will be instantly written to all FLAC files at once, and thats it. In my experience, results provided by Meta have been perfect (images fetched by Meta are high-definition covers with the correct color saturation and no watermarks); at least for me, theyre worth the extra purchase so I dont have to manually search for each album artwork and clutter my desktop with (often low-res) images downloaded from random websites found via Google. Meta makes these kinds of batch edits extremely easy: after selecting all songs, I can select Edit Find Find Replace from the menu bar (or hit F) to activate the apps find and replace UI. From there, I can type the text I want to get rid of in the Find field and select the All button next to Replace (a common UI element in Mac apps) to clear the unwanted text from all title fields at once. In a nice touch, Meta visually confirms text matches found in the selected items and even lets you add special tokens such as tab characters or white space if you want to further refine your searches. If you dont want to replace an existing tags value but compose a new one altogether, Meta can do that as well: after selecting an item (or multiple ones), hit the pencil button in the toolbar to open the Compose Tag popup, which lets you use arbitrary plain text as well as built-in tokens to overwrite any existing tag value. In the screenshot below, you can see how I edited the Year field for all songs contained in The Cures Greatest Hits album by manually typing 2001 into the Compose Tag box.
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