Mp3tag v2.87a review and suggestions

General Discussion
#1

Mp3tag v2.87a
Review; strengths & needs
Strengths:

  1. Extract cover art, defaults to folder.jpg. That saves tons of time!
  2. Size/position changes in extract (and add) dialog boxes are stored and re-appled -- EXCELLENT.
  3. Drag & drop album folder to program window opens content (this triggered my donation).
  4. A generally intuitive management of album and track information.
    Needs:
  5. Keyboard shortcuts to commonly-used features, like "Tag - Filename", and the Add, Remove and Extract cover art functions. When you are curating dozens or more albums, "mousing around" is too slow, and on a 4k monitor, requires a lot of precision. Thankfully the Windows shortcuts to Select-All and Save are there. Allowing the user to choose and apply keyboard shortcuts would be awesome, but just having some would be great. Generally, the program needs to be useable, within an album/folder, using only the keyboard, because moving back and forth between keyboard and mouse is too slow. When keyboard shortcuts are enabled, a "gaming keyboard" & software makes things even faster with macros, but there is no way to "macro" mouse movement!
  6. An easier way to get to "edit" of tag information on a track. The long-click and hold is too slow. The delay before playing the track is too short, and having "play track" happen differently would be better anyway (maybe select track by clicking on the data-type icon on the left and hitting the spacebar?). F2 defaults to editing the filename, not whatever column is displayed first (left), but Tab progresses left/right as usual, which is inconsistent. Since "filename" is an "end product" of the metadata, why start there? I don't ever want to edit the filename - I want it generated from good metadata.
  7. Some indication that the data is "dirty" (hasn't been saved). Since trackwise changes are written immediately but things like album (and art) changes are not, it would be useful to have some visual indication that a needed save has not occurred.
  8. The Tag - Filename formats are preserved, but can't really be edited or removed. Here too, a way to select the desired commonly-used format BY KEYBOARD would be great, so that all the necessary work on an album can be done without using the mouse.
  9. When dealing with album art, it would be great to see some visual representation of how much/many images are in the various tracks already. It seems common for album art to be loaded into just ONE file, and it's often higher resolution than what is supplied in the folder. Seeing what is where would help assess the clean-up needed, and avoid doing an internet hunt for better art.
  10. This is a reach, but it would be incredibly useful! Say you're ripping and curating dozens of albums. You rip them all into a folder tree, scan or acquire the album art, clean it all up to whatever standard you prefer, and name every album graphic something consistent (I use folder.jpg). Wouldn't it be awesome to point Mp3Tag at the top level folder and have it load the "local" folder.jpg into the tag of every IN that local folder, walking the tree and doing THEM ALL? This would save me HOURS of stupid tedious work!
#2

The current version is 2.87c.

The shortcut is Alt-1
You can create action to

and adding the ampersand in front of a trigger letter would create a keyboard short cut that can be used following the Alt-A to open the actions menu.

2 slow clicks would enter the edit mode as well.
Alternatively, you can use the extended tags dialogue to jump from track to track and edit fields.
In general, see the help on keyboard shortcuts:

The default of the cover filename can be set by you in
Tools>Options>Tag Sources.
You can use text constants like "folder.jpg" or tag variables like
%album%_%cover_mimetype%

Strings to name files that are needed by you more often can be stored as actions of the type "format value" for _FILENAME - and actions can be accessed by user defined short cuts - this has been described already.

You can define a column with the value %_covers% that shows you how many covers are there in each file.

I load covers into all my files, not just one. Windows Media Player unifies files with the name folder.jpg to the dimensions of 200*200 pixel.
In 2.87c you can also see the width and height of the first picture as data in a column.

The action of the type "Import cover from file" imports specified or the first file matching wildcards from the specified or current folder - if there is a cover file in each folder, you can add them with just one actions in one go.

#3

Thanks for this quick reply! Funny, before I posted, I checked within the program for a new version. I guess it doesn't look for alpha suffix updates...
I saw the "Tools - Tools" window and planned to look for any existing tools I might add, but hadn't been aware of the programmability functions using % and & but will look into how to exploit those right away! Perhaps I should RTFM, huh?
I routinely acquire boxes of CDs from yard sales, thrift stores and swap meets (avoiding the "remastered" casualties of the "Loudness Wars") in addition to adding things already in FLAC, so establishing an efficient curation process makes a lot of difference in time and frustration!

#5

Tools -> Options -> Updates -> Also include Development Builds

Perhaps I should RTFM, huh?

You also take a look in the Howto/FAQ-section of the forum.