Reader Mail: Easy Way to Tag MP3s?

Reader GrunzWald writes: I've got a huge library of songs in iTunes, but a big chunk of them aren't tagged at all; they're just titled  "Track 1," "Track 2" and so on and I'm not interested in adding all the info manually. Help!

GrunzWald: I feel your pain. While music apps like iTunes and Windows Media Player will automatically fetch song titles, artists and album info for retail music CDs, you're pretty much on your own if you're ripping a mix CD or just happen to have a ton of untagged MP3 files on your hard drive.

Here's a shortcut I found in "Rule the Web," a handy book of tips by Boing Boing editor Mark Frauenfelder. Mark suggests checking out MusicBrainz.org, a site that features a treasure trove of song info, along with a series of free apps (Windows, Mac, and Linux versions are available) that'll analyze your untagged (or incompletely tagged) tunes, grab their audio "fingerprints," check them against the songs in the MusicBrainz database. If the app finds a match, it'll come back with a new set of tags for your inspection (or you can just set the utility to update your tunes automatically). The apps (Picard for Windows and Linux users, iEatBrainz! for Mac; others are available) aren't guaranteed to recognize all the untagged songs on your hard disk, but hey—it's better than filling in all the blanks yourself.