AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Topic: AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor (Read 7193 times) previous topic - next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

2005-03-30 18:55:04

I just stumbled across a relatively new and free Audio Tag Viewer & Editor that is built into the Windows Explorer shell. Right click on any file name in Windows Explorer and view or edit the full tags of just about any type of audio file.

http://www.softpointer.com/AudioShell.htm

It is Freeware and made by the folks who make Tag & Rename (and who I think also wrote Tag and M3U).

While it doesn't have the conversion features and other nice things of dbPowerAmp, it is a great, useful tag viewer and editor. I haven't seen anyone else give a new announcement thread or anything in detail about AudioShell other than a mention to it buried in a few threads here on HA (which may be hard to find for some users), so here is a thread just about this nifty utility program.

File formats for which AudioShell will view and edit tags are:
FLAC (Vorbis comment tags), MP3 (all ID3V2 versions supported), Monkey's APE, WavPack, Microsoft WMA, WMV, ASF, Apple iTunes AAC (M4A & M4P), MP4 files, OGG files, MPC, MP+, and Optim Frog (APE and APEv2 tags).

AudioShell includes full Unicode support in tags also.

It can also allow you to have Windows Explorer display a custom tag based list of your files.

All in all a nifty program in my opinion. I value any comments from users of this app on how they like it, and also if anyone found any bugs or compatability problems in tagging.

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #1 – 2005-03-30 19:03:50

guest0101: thanx for pointing that out. What a great app. I won't stop me using mp3tag, but it's damn useful nonetheless.

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #2 – 2005-03-30 19:06:31

Quote

guest0101: thanx for pointing that out. What a great app. I won't stop me using mp3tag, but it's damn useful nonetheless.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=286995"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Thanks for letting me know about mp3tag. I didn't really know about that program. Sounds nice also! It is good to see audio tag editors evolving/maturing to support so many popular formats.

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #3 – 2005-03-30 21:38:27

mp3tag is a good tagger but it has no unicode support what prevents me from using it...

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #4 – 2005-04-01 21:03:33

I like Audio Shell a lot too. I just wish it supported APE2 tags for MP3s.

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #5 – 2005-04-02 07:12:17

I also use it, but the lack of APEv2 on mp3 is a downside for me also. There are some other annoying omissions, especially the 'technical' data for wavpack files. Bitrate, duration etc all show up as '0' or '00:00' and so-forth.

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #6 – 2005-04-02 15:23:47

Quote

I also use it, but the lack of APEv2 on mp3 is a downside for me also. There are some other annoying omissions, especially the 'technical' data for wavpack files. Bitrate, duration etc all show up as '0' or '00:00' and so-forth.
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Cpt.,

Perhaps you should contact the AudioShell author and let him know of these "limitations" with WavPack tags in AudioShell, as they are likely an oversight. I don't currently use WavPack so I can't verify or report these omissions that you stated.

His contact feedback page is at: [a href="http://www.softpointer.com/contact.htm]http://www.softpointer.com/contact.htm[/url]

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #7 – 2005-04-04 04:54:43

Quote

Quote
I also use it, but the lack of APEv2 on mp3 is a downside for me also. There are some other annoying omissions, especially the 'technical' data for wavpack files. Bitrate, duration etc all show up as '0' or '00:00' and so-forth.
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Cpt.,

Perhaps you should contact the AudioShell author and let him know of these "limitations" with WavPack tags in AudioShell, as they are likely an oversight. I don't currently use WavPack so I can't verify or report these omissions that you stated.

His contact feedback page is at: [a href="http://www.softpointer.com/contact.htm]http://www.softpointer.com/contact.htm[/url]
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=287804"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Yep, already done so: a few days before my post. No feedback thus far.

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #8 – 2005-04-16 02:47:47

Hm. Such a program existed for years? MP3 Info Shell Extension by Michael Mutschler:

One of the first id3v2 taggers. Source code available.

OK, It's MP3 only. But i guess it could easily be modified to do id3(v2) on any kind of file type.

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #9 – 2005-04-16 03:10:15

yeah this is a wonderful program , thanks for finding it. i <3 having an encspot equivalent program detect the encoder just on a mouse-highlight. brilliance!

i collect mp3 tag programs , you can never have enough is my philsophy

/me uses:
-iTUNES
-Winamp
-cdtag
-Tag & Rename
-Now this!

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #10 – 2005-04-16 08:51:53

What I like most i Mp3-Info Shell Extension is the possibility to have different icons depending on the bitrate. Unfortunately it is limited to mp3 files of course. I'd love to have such possibility for other audio file types, but unfortuntely I don't have enough programming skills to play with the source.
Does anybody know a programm (shell extention, Total Commander plugin) with similar feature? Or is it possible such functionality to be added to existing Mp3-Info Shell Extension in easy way?

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #11 – 2005-04-30 09:45:21

!Warning! I'm a bit new at this so could be missing something here!!

Short summary - Audioshell 1.0 seems not to read MP3 tags on my LAME-encoded files if the track title is under 32 characters!!!

More details:
I'm using EAC (095b) and MAREO to front a ripping process which uses LAME 3.90 to produce MP3s, as well as AAC (using ItunesEncode46) and FLAC. Each CD is ripped into each of the three formats and stuffed into a suitable directory structure. All of the file ripping is going great.

I'm then using Audioshell as a quick check that the tags are ok. For the AAC and FLAC files, they always are. However for the MP3 files Audioshell often shows empty tags - artist, track, album, year... But if I use something else to look in the MP3s such as Windows Media PLayer, or iTunes, they see the tags just fine.

It was driving me nuts to work out when this occurred - it seemed to be on the large majority of MP3s, but every now and again one would work. And my classical tracks are ALWAYS ok! Eventually I spotted it - it works if the track title is longer than 32 characters (might be out by one or two on the number). OR if the album title is longer than 32 characters. But if both are shorter, doesn't work. (and my classical tracks are always ok because my naming convention always gives long names!).

I really like using Audioshell because it integrates into the windows explorer so well, and also ***important bit here*** because it allows me easily to fix the tags across a mix of file types (AAC, FLAC, MP3) after ripping, which I have to do with virtually all of my classical CDs.

Has anyone got any ideas about what's happening here?

Thanks
ceejay.

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #12 – 2005-04-30 17:14:34

I'm not an Audioshell user but I guess you're using a 'smart' tagger that uses id3v2 fields only for information that can't fit into id3v1 (whose album, title and artist fields are 32 characters long) but audioshell ignores v1 tagging information if v2 tags are present (or is set up to ignore them at all, check your options).
If you wish to further investigate this issue, i'd recommend the usage of the handy command line tool called tag.exe as it has options and features to help you determine technical informations about those tags. You can find it here (Neil Popham's site).

Hope to be of any help and no worries.
-losof

Edit: -Clarification- I didn't mean to suggest ceejay to use another tagger, just wanted to provide some kind of support and an answer to the question asked, there are plenty of tag editor discussion threads elsewhere already.

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #13 – 2005-05-02 05:48:39

There's another MP3 Tagger that I think is sadly overlooked, because it's feature set blows away any other tagger I've seen.
It's called MP3TagStudio, and was written by a guy called Magnus Brading.
It's freeware (wth a banner), and US$19 to lose the banner and get free upgrades for life.
No, I don't work for the guy! I just think it's a brilliant bit of programming.
Briefly, some of the tools are:
Tag from filename (self explanatory)
Rename from tags (self explanatory)
Mass set tags (set same data to multiple files)
Tag from list (import data from text file to tags)
Create lists (export tag data to text file or csv)
and more.
Plus, there's casefix/substring replacement tools attached to each module.
Sorry if I'm rambling... just love the program.

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #14 – 2005-05-02 06:08:16

I find Foobar2000's masstagger to work very well.

AudioShell a fantastic audio tag editor

Reply #15 – 2005-05-03 06:50:40

Quote

I find Foobar2000's masstagger to work very well.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=294707"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I second it.

Notice