(Guide/Review) Tagcomplete is a freeware tool that tags songs automatically using a community built database

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Tagcomplete is a freeware tool that tags songs automatically using a community built database

 

Having your music library tagged properly can be very helpful.  Whether you're in the mood for a particular genre or artist, or you just want to keep things nice ang organized, tags are awesome. Manually tagging tracks can be a bit tiring, and there are auto-tagging solutions readily available that do most of the heavy lifting. One of our favorite music players, MusicBee, supports that for instance.

 

 

Tagcomplete is a freeware tool that tags songs automatically using a community built database. When you run it for the first time, you will be presented with a license agreement which is in German. If you scroll down, you can read the English version of the same.

 

TagComplete's interface might remind you of MediaPurge, that's because they are made by the same developer. The program's GUI is split into two panes, and has a menu at the top of the screen.

 

To get started, you will need to select a folder to scan. Click on the first option on the sidebar, Step 1 Select Directory. The panel that appears on the right-hand side has options to add or exclude sub-folders.

 

 

If you want to scan specific tracks instead of an entire folder, use the "Add file selection" button. The list of directories that you have added appears in the box in the middle. To start over, click on the New button.

 

 

When you're ready hit the Next button to proceed to Step 2, and TagComplete will create a local cache of its database.

 

 

This takes a long time to complete, it took over an hour for me. But this is sort of a one-time process, the next time you scan some tracks the local cache is updated as required and that is done faster. The cache is saved in your USERS folder, C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\TagComplete\Cache. The program creates CSV files each of which are 100MB, and the folder sums up to about 1.84GB.

 

 

Here's how it works. Unlike usual tag editing programs, TagComplete relies on a database maintained by its community. The program identifies songs by using MediaPurge's acoustic fingerprint scanning, and when it finds untitled songs, it automatically tags them by pulling the metadata from the community database.

 

TagComplete displays its privacy policy on its main screen, and it says that no personal data is collected. The acoustic fingerprint and metadata of tracks are sent to the community database, and this is done anonymously. When you add some tracks to TagComplete, you're essentially contributing to the community database.

 

 

Once TagComplete has finished scanning the added tracks, it will list the deviating metadata, that's what it calls the tracks which have incorrect tags in comparison to those in its database. Hit the apply button to fix the tags automatically.

 

Since the program relies on a community database, I recommend going the extra mile to check each tag in the list. It's nice to have a choice per track instead of a single button to accept all changes. If a tag is way off, you may choose to discard it. Let's say one of the tags is incorrect, or maybe you want to customize it, you can click on the More button to bring up the built-in Tag Editor. This allows you to edit the track info, title, artist, album, year, comment, etc. You can also add album art covers to audio tracks manually.

 

 

TagComplete is a freeware program, it is not portable. While it is a useful tool for managing your music library, the slow cache creation process and the sheer size of the database is not something that's going to please users. The biggest flaw in my opinion is that the program does not work offline, which makes that huge cache unnecessary. The program should only download the specific track's information.

Landing Page http://www.peter-ebe.de/TagComplete/info/tagcomplete_download_en.php

 

 

Source: Tagcomplete is a freeware tool that tags songs automatically using a community built database