Earlier in January 2001, I bought a Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox. The Nomad Jukebox is the first generation of large harddrive based portable MP3 players. It ships with a 6GB Fujitsu notebook harddrive. I replaced the 6GB drive with a 20GB IBM notebook drive, and I am putting my entire CD and MP3 album collection onto my Nomad.

Soon after I started transferring my MP3 files to my Nomad, I discovered that some of the MP3s had incorrect or inconsistent ID3 tags, or no ID3 tag at all. I first downloaded a couple MP3 tagger programs and I did a lot of hand re-tagging. That soon became tedious, and knowing that I would always have new MP3s that might need re-tagging, I decided it would be easier to write my own ID3 tagger instead of searching for one that did a good job of batch tagging.

So, I wrote my own, in C. It's a simple program with the highly original name of mp3tagger. It's a command line based program, intented to be called from a wrapping Perl (or some other language) script that would parse the names of many MP3 files and run mp3tagger with the appropriate command line arguments to update the tag of each MP3 file. Hence, an easy to use batch tagging method.

Note that mp3tagger currently only works with ID3 version 1 tags. ID3 version 2 may be supported in a future release, but I've been getting along fine with ID3v1 for what I need.

I'm sharing my source code, and some precompiled binaries, for the world to use. And I'm including the following copyright notes:

Copyright 2001, Adam Woodworth
This program is freeware.
You may use this program as you wish,
but please e-mail me if you find this program
useful and/or if you borrow code from the
C source code.

Here is the C source file. I originally wrote it on Linux, but I have also tested it on IRIX and MacOS X, and I have included the appropriate #ifdef's for compiling on Windows, at least with Microsoft Visual C/C++. Just make sure you include /DWIN32 in your compiler flags when compiling on Windows.

C Source Code: mp3tagger.c

And here are some executables:
You may need to right click on a link and click "Save Link As" or something similar to save the executable to your computer.

Linux:	mp3tagger
IRIX:	mp3tagger
Mac OS X:	mp3tagger
Windows:	mp3tagger.exe

Please remember that mp3tagger is a command line program, and thus you must run it from the command line, or within a shell/Perl script, etc. You'll also need to make mp3tagger executable on Unix/MacOSX with "chmod 755 mp3tagger".