Music tags

vTag

Sort out the tags on a music collection that is already on the disk.

The problem

Half of a music collection has its information only in the file names — "04 - Radiohead - Karma Police.mp3" and nothing inside the file at all. The other half has perfectly good tags and file names like "track04.mp3". Neither half shows up properly on a phone, in a car, or on the office music system.

Fixing it one file at a time is not work anybody will do twice. Fixing it forty files at a time is the difference, and it is also where a tag editor can quietly ruin an afternoon: set the album on forty tracks with the wrong tool and you can lose forty titles in one click.

What it does

1It never changes the audio

vTag reads the tag, replaces it, and copies the audio through untouched. Nothing in it re-encodes or resamples anything. A file that goes through vTag comes out with the same audio it went in with, byte for byte — which is checked on every format, in the tests.

2Forty files at once

Select the album, type the album name once. Every field can be set across a whole selection: album, artist, year, genre, artwork, the lot.

3A field they disagree on is left alone

With several files selected, anything they do not all share shows as "several values" — and leaving it alone leaves every file’s own value alone. That is the behaviour that separates a tag editor you can trust from one that eats titles.

4Read the tags out of the file names

Give it a pattern like {track} - {artist} - {title} and it shows what it found for every file before it fills anything in.

5And write the file names out of the tags

The same pattern backwards. The rename is planned in full first — what each file will be called, which ones clash, which are already named that — and nothing moves until it all makes sense.

6Artwork, including the cover sitting beside the tracks

View it, replace it, remove it, save it out. It finds cover.jpg and folder.jpg in the folder, and tells you the real size, so a 90x90 picture from a search result does not go into four hundred files unnoticed.

7Undo

Before it writes anything it writes down what was there. Any of the last twenty saves can be put back — including artwork, which is kept as real image files, because a replaced cover is the one thing nobody can type back in.

8It does not throw away what it does not understand

A field vTag has no box for — replay gain, an encoder’s private tag, an iTunes freeform field — is carried through a save untouched.

Why it is worth it

✓

Proved against Windows, not against itself

Any tag editor can read back what it just wrote. Before each release vTag writes a file of every format it saves and then asks Windows Explorer what the tag says, through the same property system Explorer uses for its own Title and Artist columns.

✓

Written for the tags every device actually reads

MP3 tags go out as ID3v2.3, because that is what phones, car stereos and hi-fis understand. Writing the newer version because it is newer is how a tidy library becomes a car stereo full of blank titles.

✓

It looks inside the file, not at the extension

A folder ripped years ago on somebody else’s PC has .mp3 files that are really M4As. Writing an ID3 tag onto the front of one of those destroys it.

✓

Nothing leaves the machine

vTag has no network side at all. It does not look anything up online, and it does not upload your collection to identify it.

How you use it

Right-click the folder

"Edit the tags in here", and vTag opens with everything in it listed.

Select what you want to change

One track, an album, or everything. The fields show what they have in common.

Type, or fill it in from the file names

Then press Save. It says how many files it wrote.

Rename the files to match, if you want

Same patterns, the other way round, with the whole plan shown first.

What it needs

Windows	10 or 11, 64-bit
Installs to	Your user profile — no administrator prompt
Saves	MP3, FLAC, M4A and MP4
Reads	Those, plus Ogg Vorbis, Opus, WAV, AIFF and Windows Media
Network	None — vTag never connects to anything

What it will not do yet, said plainly

vTag reads Ogg Vorbis and Opus tags but does not save them. Writing an Ogg tag is not editing bytes in place: every page carries its own checksum and sequence number, so changing the length of the tag repacks the whole file, and getting it slightly wrong makes a file that plays right up until the moment it does not. The same goes for WAV and AIFF. vTag would rather say "not yet" than hand somebody a broken album.

See vTag on your own machine

A short screen-share is usually enough — we open it on your PC, with your files.

Ask about vTag Download it

Or write to info@issmart.in.