Meta — Music Tag Editor 4+

How is this not higher up in the ratings?

This app is so good. I don't understand why it's not higher up in the app store ratings. Well anyways, this app does a lot of what you can with other simple tools, but better, and then it goes beyond into the area only people who produce music or have large collections will appreciate. I'm sure there are some features it could add, but I've been happy with it and consider it money well spent. It's not librarian, it's just an easy way to open a bunch of tracks and fix all the annoying metadata issues. Two of my most used features are 1) copy and pasting metadata and artwork for a new export/bounce (how many times have I said this is the one) and 2) using it to add tracks (once I've checked the metadata) to my local Apple Music library.

poor experience (but growing on me?)

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

Well designed app

I've been using Meta off an on for a few years. I had several hundred CDs that I imported into iTunes, but there was always something needing correction. Meta was perfect for this task, allowing me to change track name, album name, artist, cover art, etc. My only suggestion would be a change to the file naming process to have a token to allow automatic numbering of tracks, useful when combining double CDs. Other than that, perfect!