Freedb

You have some old files encoded with no tags and now that you have thousand of tags to enter, you are desparated? This page should help you a bit to have all the work achieved in only several minutes. Foobar offers you the ability to link information to numerous files without any waste of time to do it. You are able to tag your files thanks to the internet or the filenames themselves. It also allows you to add new tag fields to enlarge the abilities of foobar ( for example you can rate your files (with quicktag), know if there are various artists on the album etc.. you could also sort your files by genre, period, year, composer, performer etc...). Foobar not only fully supports APEv2, ID3v2, MP4, WMA, Vorbis_comment, but it also allows you to create and edit fastly your tags, remove some ones, duplicate tags from a file to another etc.. thanks to the different masstaggers. The system is based on the Case utility called TAG which is based on commandline and has enormous possibilities.

Freedb

This component, which was developed by Dariusz Sieradzki (alias messer), allows users to give information related to their albums thanks to an external database (freedb). The gain of time using this component is enormous as you don't have to enter manually any tag.

The selected songs must be into the commercial order of the album or it won't work.

Masstagging functions are avaible from the contextual menu:

You have five possibilities:

Configure


Freedb configuration

preview

auto CDDA tagging

freedb proxy config

Get tags


Clicking on get tags, the search will start, it only takes couples of seconds generally. Then this window will pop up. The user is able to choose the fields to write, consequently you are able to save the information already entered without overwriting them with this component. You can also choose how your files will be tracknumbered. The interface is really clear. If you have several matches, just choose one and then I advice you to preview the selected album and choose the one with information corresponding to your wantings..

Then just click on tag files to tag them or cancel if you have changed your mind. Then, your files will be updated.

Using Get tags (multiple albums) will only repeat this process for each album.

Manual query


If the automatic way doesn't work, the user can enter manually the values corresponding to his album. You wil have to enter the genre and the discID. As you are not wizards, the only way to know the TWO values is going on the freedb website and do a search there.
Take care of the genre fields, it must be the one entered in the freedb which rarely corresponds to the real genre of the album (for example an album of Mozart could be with the Rock genre !!).

Search


Here, you will do a search on the freedb server. The criterion are various and could filter the results, use them to avoid hundreds of answers (or thousands..).

If those methods do not work, just try to do your search on other database as gracenote.