No, I don't work for Softpointer, but this is best tool out there

Pros: What makes it great is that it has a variety of approaches to fixing songs in your library of it's missing, incorrect or ill-formatted tags. You can use pattern matching to scrape track titles, artists, etc from filenames, folders or even parts of existing tags. However, it also can do matches on the fabricated CD track lists of songs against CDDB. By fabricated CD track lists I mean if you have a burned CD that say someone added an extra track to that throws off a CD match. You can omit that song in the search list and see if CDDB cam match the track list's "footprint". Finally, if all else fails, you can do an album search against Amazon and fill in the fields that way. You can fill in one, some or all the fields by selecting check boxes. That is also the means to get album artwork added to your tags easily. The features are really well executed and very powerful but don't have that "half baked" feel a lot of those "cheap as free" tools out there. While the feature set may seem overwhelming at first with it's bounty of toolbars, the features are easy to use once you take a moment of figure them out. Access to more esoteric features like pattern matching and bulk processing is visualized very will in the UI and is flexible enough that you don't get into situations where the tool can't do something because of a silly limitation in the features execution.

Cons: There is a slightly steep learning curve only because there are so many things this tool can do. It is useful for fixing tags and filename and has lots of bulk features to run tasks against sets of files, however it is kind of lacking on means of actually moving the files and folders around. They exist, but they sometimes don't do exactly what you might expect at first. It also has some techniques that may not see obvious to the novice that could be better cued in the UI. It will probably do exactly what you want it to do but it might take you a few tries to figure how to best do it. I found that there were two learning curves. One, to learn how to use all the various features and figure out how to best use them, and two, how to devise a process or workflow for fixing music that needed to be "cleaned" before I dropped it into my music collection.

Posted: 06-Dec-2007 07:34:30 AM