Featured Freeware: TagScanner

Digital music is all well and good, but who wants to type in album and artist information for each track? With TagScanner, you don't have to. This efficient and powerful tag editor lets you edit metadata automatically as well as by hand, both for individual files and file batches.

The automatic tagging feature is most impressive. Although it can hit up online databases such as FreeDB, Discogs, and Amazon like many other auto-tagging apps, it can also generate tags from file and folder names--that's something many similar apps can't do. It works in the opposite direction, too, generating file names from tags. The app supports ID3v1, ID3v2, Vorbis comments, APEv2, WindowsMedia, and MP4/iTunes tags.

TagScanner has an elegant and orderly interface, and lets you preview file names before applying changes. The only catch is that you'll need to spend some time learning the program's file- and tag-naming language. However, if you have thousands of music tracks crying out for organization, that's a small price to pay.