Every music collection has those tracks. You know, “track01”, “unknown artist”, “unknown album” – yes, those kinds of tracks! Tracks that you might not know who the artist is, or what the song title is… And sometimes even trusting Google to find out doesn’t help.

In my search to clear out my music collection of “track01” anomalies, a friend told me to try out MusicBrainz – an open source MP3-tagging software, which can make one’s life easier - or, as the developers of MusicBrainz call it: “The Open Music Encyclopaedia that collects, and makes available to the public, music metadata”.

It’s not too hard to figure out how it works, and get going, thanks to all the guides on their website. You can basically do anything from there – read the guidelines, submit your own data and download the software – best news is, it works on Windows, Mac as well as Linux, so it doesn’t matter which operating system you use, it should be compatible. 

To get started, you can download the software, and install it. (It’s about an 8MB download, and won’t take too long unless you're still on dial-up.) The tool is called MusicBrainz Picard.

Fun fact: Picard is, a reference to Captain Jean-Luc Picard from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Once Picard is installed, you can start updating your current music collection’s ID3 (as well as ID3v2) tags, and actually know what the song titles and artists are. This is how easy it is:

• Open MusicBrainz Picard

You will see the top screen. This is the central area from where you will be tagging your music.

• Select the songs or albums you want to update from your music folder (wherever it may lie)

This can be either a song, or an album that you may want to tag.

• View the imported songs – they will more than likely show up in the “unmatched files” folder.

• Select the unmatched files, and click on cluster - a new album-cluster will be made, for tagging.

• Select the clustered folder, and click on “lookup” – where after it sill start searching for your music data.

• The matched songs will appear in the right hand bar, and will have a colour assigned – green, for matched, red or orange for an “uncertain” match (in which case red would be the least likely, or inaccurate match, and green would be a perfect match). If none of the colours appear, and is instead replaced with a music note, this means that the song could not be matched fully in the current database.

• From here, you can save the matched titles; by selecting the album and clicking on “save”. Green ticks should now appear next to the saved songs, and the ID3 (or ID3v2) tags should now be updated correctly.

• For the unmatched songs (those with music notes, instead of ticks), you can manually search for them, by clicking on the “lookup” button in the right hand corner. The tool should then redirect you to their website, where you can manually tag the song.

Once you are on the site, you should be able to click on the “tagger” and the data should update accordingly.

The database for the music is still growing, as it is open source, and user-updated. This means that your song may not be there at one given time. This is where you can always step in, and contribute some knowledge of your own, to make MusicBrainz work even better.

There’s no overall limit to the amount of tags you can use, and you can adapt quite a few features in the tool itself – by downloading and installing plug-ins from their site. These are user-created, and could help with naming schemes for songs, for example. There are quite a few of them to choose from, and can be matched to your personal taste (pick the plug-in that you prefer).

The tool is very customisable, and you can always play around with the options to create your perfect naming schemes, and order for your digital music collection.

**Do note that this tool isn’t accurate for South African music – so you will have to tag those manually**

For more information, you can have a look at the MusicBrainz website, or have a look at their tagging guide here.