You may have heard of 411-Song: you call them with your cell phone, hold up the cell phone to music you’re listening to, and several seconds later, it texts you the name of that song. Pretty useful, considering how many times all of us have struggled to remember the name of a song.
While there appears to be software (Tunatic) that does something similar from your computer, I thought it would be more interesting if there was something to take an existing music file, figure out the Artist, Album, etc., and rename the file. Something to make it easy to organize and reorganize your music.
As it turns out, it exists and it’s really quite good: MusicBrainz. The software’s free, and they have versions that work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. They maintain an online database of all the music that the community has identified, and the software contacts that database to match your music file to the information they have. An additional surprise: it works for at least some classical and anime/j-pop music!
September 12, 2008 at 13:47
Bah! These are all ooooold stuff.. If you have an iphone, Shazam can identify a tune in a noisy grocery store and Midomi can id a song just from you humming it. It’s much more likely you’ll want to id a song when out somewhere..
November 28, 2010 at 00:11
Billy misses the point! As I record vinyl to MP3 it would be nice to have something that would add all the MP3 tags.