When scanning and tagging my CDs, I always feel like Sisyphus, having to roll the boulder uphill every time. CDs rarely provide all the information a tango DJ needs, especially the recording date. Much of it has to be gathered manually and then entered, even though modern software automates a lot of the process. A lot of tag information is available in large online databases, but these are almost always insufficient. Fortunately, you can sometimes find gems online, like the database for tango CDs that I’ll be discussing today.
As an example, I re-encoded the CD “Sus Exitos con Alberto Amor” by Rodolfo Biagi (Reliquias, 1999). The data was then post-processed using the program MP3TAG (version 2.86) by Florian Heidenreich [1]. The CD will also be found in the freedb database (via internet search), and essential tag information will be automatically written. The CD must be sorted by track number. The result looks like this:
Pic. 1: CD with Tag-Information from freedb
Note that the artists and titles are already correctly entered. The year entered is the CD’s release year (not helpful for us), and the genre tag is “Tango” everywhere, even though there are also waltzes and milongas among the titles. The artists are also listed redundantly in the title field.
First, we need the most important data, such as the recording details. The database “tango.info” can help us with this [2]. A search for “Sus exitos con Alberto Amor” yields a correct result and redirects us to this page:
Pic. 2: CD-Page on tango.info
The page initially provides general information about the CD; a very useful feature is the image of the CD cover, which can be copied directly from the page for further use in MP3TAG. This saves you the trouble of scanning the CD booklet.
Further down you will find the track information, which you could now manually enter into MP3TAG.
Pic.3: Track information from tango.info
What is particularly helpful here is that tango.info also provides correct TAG information that meets our requirements.
Clicking on “Tango.info/tools: tracktagger/1.4.1” will take you to the following page:
Pic. 4: Tango.info Track Tagger
The output window now displays tag information in colon-separated format, meaning the individual tags are separated only by semicolons and written on a single line per music track. The information shown here is:
1: in-Count (can be ignored)
2: TINP Number of CD
3: Album
4: Album Artist
5: CD Number
6: Track Number
7: TIWC Title Number
8: Title
9: Artist
10: Genre
11: Date
12: ISO-Language
13: Label
The content of the lower window containing the track information can now be saved to a TXT file and processed in MP3TAG. For this, MP3TAG simply needs a so-called format string to process (or, in technical terms, parse) each line.
Unfortunately, the format strings provided by tango.Info are no longer usable. Here is an example of the format string I use:
%dummy%;%dummy%;%album%;%album artist%;%discnumber%;%tracknumber%;%comment%;%title%;%artist%;%genre%;%year%;%dummy%;%composer%
The format string tells MP3TAG which fields the information should be written to.
The “Convert Textfile – Tag” function applies the tag information according to the format string; here too, it must be noted that the files must be sorted by track number:
Pic. 5: Writing the Tags
The result looks like this:
Pic. 6: Result after writing the Tags
Next, I adjust the tagging to my conventions. First, the artists are converted to the artist-singer format. This is done manually here:
Pic. 7: Changing the Artist
The filename is then simplified using the `Convert Tag-Filename` function and the format string: Rodolfo Biagi – %title%. Next, the year is extracted and appended in parentheses after the title. This is done using the `Convert Tag-Tag` function and the format string: %title% ($left(%year%,4)).
Finally, the genre information can be converted so that the first letter is capitalized. This is done again using the Convert Tag-Tag function with the format string $caps3(%genre%).
So here is the final result:
Pic. 8: Final Result
The tag information provided by Tango.Info is therefore extremely helpful for quickly tagging the newly ripped CD, provided one is willing to familiarize oneself a little with the automation functions of MP3TAG.
The tango.info database can also be highly recommended as a free source of information. So thank you very much for this service.
Thank you and best regards,
-Richard
thanksgiving
Many thanks to Cassiel for pointing out this feature to me.
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