If you’re a musician, DJ, or music enthusiast, chances are you care deeply about your music. Meta helps with every aspect of managing a digital music collection, and saves you time when you rip vinyls or download music from third-party stores.
Key Features:
- Batch Editing of Tags & Cover-Art
- Batch Cover-Art Adjustments (scale, crop, compress)
- Batch String Transformations
- Batch Compose Track Numbers
- Find Tags & Hi-Quality Album Covers Online
- Find and Replace Text, Words, Regular Expressions
- Rename Files (based on tags)
- Create Directory Structures (based on tags)
- Extract Tags (from filenames, paths, other tags)
- Compose Tags (based on a pattern of text and other tags)
- Built-In File Management Tools (move to recent, preview, reveal, remove)
- Import/Export of Playlist
- Import/Export of Tags as CSV
- Talks to your preferred Music-library (iTunes, Music, Doppler…)
Broad Media Support
Meta supports all popular audio file formats such as:
- MP3 (ID3v1, ID3v2, APE)
- MP4, M4A, M4B, M4V (Atom)
- FLAC (Vorbis Comment)
- OGG, OGA, OPUS, SPEEX (Vorbis Comment)
- AIFF, WAV (ID3v2, RIFF-Info)
- DSF, DSDIFF (ID3v2)
Customisable Interface
Meta allows you to define tag-panel (sidebar) configurations: groups of tags you want to edit most often. Just pick which tags to display in each setting, and name it. You'll then be able to switch between each layout at will and edit the tags associated (ex: Publishing, Classical, Podcasts…).
Fast, Clean, Reliable
Meta is a native and robust macOS app powered by Taglib, a trusted and proven open-source tagging engine. Edits will be mostly instantaneous, and there will be no need for manual saving: what you see is what you get.
This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Does a lot of things right, but suffers with larger libraries; crashes
Anders Wallgren
For the price I expected better. As others have pointed out, the app hangs for long periods of time when music is added. This is especially painful when adding large amounts of music from SMB shares. Adding ~3k files takes 5-10 minutes and this needs to be repeated _every time you launch the app_. Adding ~30k files, I gave up after a couple of hours. Once the data is loaded, it’s a very competent tag editor. I have experienced multiple crashes while editing tags, and one crash when the app was just in the background. Annoyingly, if there are any hiccups with file shares, then the app produces an endless stream of modal dialogs (I had to force quit the app). If you have a small-ish library, I can recommend this app. If you have a medium-to-large library, the price of this app is not justified. Update: I received a reply from the developer regarding this, confirming that the app does indeed lend itself better to collections that aren’t massive. Upgrading to a fourth star for an honest and prompt reply.
Developer Response
Hello! Thanks for your feedback. Meta is indeed more apt at dealing with smaller batches, and was conceived for everyday, regular use: that is where it shines most!! It can handle large amounts of files, but as you said, 3K is a good upper limit to consider, at once. — Ben
You can trust Meta with your music
TLehman111
If you're reading this review its most likely because you have an music library that is very important to you. I did my research (and trialed as another reviewer mentioned) before purchasing this and have no regrets. If you care about your music library as much as I do then do yourself a favor and DO NOT gamble on free / cheap competitors of this software that are abundant on the itunes store. As a software engineer myself, I can tell you that the team behind this app takes their product seriously and will not harm your library. A small design flaw could mean hours of repair to your music data at least, or worse could cause permanant damage to your library. A couple suggestions:- The app is fairly intuituve but I definitely had to do quite a bit of trial and error before feeling comfortable and efficient. The website does a good job explaining the functionality of the app but the Pattern-Based Operations section could be expanded upon. An "app tour" might help users when first using / opening the app.- When performing operation on a track(s) I would sometimes get eror dialogs due to XYZ reasons. The error dialog might read something like "error 3002". Im guessing each tag engine has a documentation site of error codes and their descriptions which would be very helpful to display in the Meta error dialogs instead of the error codes. - Although its pretty user friendly, it would be nice if there was a option for advanced users to use real regular expressions in the "pattern based operations" windows as oposed to the watered-down pattern editor.
Does the job, but Derive Tags is a little buggy
campbellandy
It started working eventually, but at first the + button in the Pattern field in Derive Tags was not working. It was difficult trying to ascertain the expected behavior (especially with Copilot guessing and having me try using RegEx!). It did start working after closing the app a few times, but I’d recommend adding something to the documentation about how the Derived Tags work so that users know what to do.
Developer Response
Hi! Thank your review. Please report to me through the support email so we can look through the issues you mentioned, thank you! — Ben
poor experience (but growing on me?)
aut0maticdan
Doesn't save any sort of state so every time you open, you have to navigate to your files and load metadata for all your files from scratch. This can take hours.Crashes often, so then have to load all metadata from scratch, potentially costing you hours.Automates virtually nothing. You will get no assistance from web databases of music like Musicbrainz, discogs, lastfm. You will have to manually edit all metadata with no assistance.This app is probably ok if you just download or rip stuff and want to get it into itunes piecemeal, but is not great for managing a library you have no interest in putting into iTunes/Music.UPDATE after more time giving the app a chance:I may have been using it wrong or at least in a way it wasn't intended. It seems it is best used as a scalpel. In other words, don't load your full library into the app every time you launch, but rather go in and edit specific artists/albums. When I limit its use to manage a catalog of local music for my bluesound home audio system, it is much more manageable.Still occasionally the app struggles to save metadata to files and often gets stuck forcing me to cancel and close/reopen.With some stability improvements and future integrations of internet sources of info will possibly make this a 4 or 5 star app. Until then, it is just the best looking id3 tag editor, but not quite the best.
Developer Response
Hi! I would advise to update to macOS Big Sur, and Meta to v2.0.4 for overall stability and performance improvements. — Ben
- Fixed a possible crash scenario, when focus leaves the filter
- Fixed a localization typo (Play)
- Reverted Find Tags Keyboard binding to ⌘⇧F , by popular demand
- Moved Artwork Submenu, to Tags Menu
Version 2.3.9
The developer, Benjamin Jaeger, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
