Fast music-database editing

Bangkok Post – Thailand
May 11, 2005

Most multimedia players, from Winamp and Windows Media Player to Music
Match, allow you to edit the information and identity tags kept inside
most songs and some videos. As you scroll through your list of MP3s,
you can easily record or edit information such as the song title and
artist, the year of the song, the author and so on. There is even a
place for a comment of your choice.

There are a few excellent programs that allow you to “batch” this
process _ to mark many songs and note they all are rock or rap,
say. Monkey Media, reviewed in Post Database a couple or three months
ago, is excellent for this.

What was missing, until I found this week’s AppShot, was an easy, fast
way to do quick edits on song and video information without calling an
entire application to do it.

AudioShell, which only works with Windows 2000 and XP, does this at a
mouse click.

Find the song you want in Windows Explorer or similar. Right click
it. Choose Properties and you have a new, talented and complete
information editor.

With Windows alone, you can see the current details about the song,
and you can see where it could be edited _ but you can’t edit
it. Click on the new AudioShell Tag Editor tab and you can.

It’s a complete editor. It even lets you associate a photo with a song
or folder of songs, the idea being you will have a picture of the
album cover for that.

AudioShell is remarkably complete, and edits tags on Microsoft (WMA,
ASF and WMV) and Apple iTunes (AAC) files as well as more common MP3
and OGG file types.

There’s no actual program that you run. When you install AudioShell,
all the software is packed into the right click function. Just find
the file, right click and choose Properties as usual, and that is when
you finally see the choice to use AudioShell.

Generous author Eugeny Efimov of Armenia, Russia, has basic
information and the download link for the software at

Email: wandas@post.com