I used to require four pro­grams for get­ting all my tags exactly how I want them: The God­Fa­ther (with All­Mu­sicGuide patch), the MusicBrainz Tag­ger, Mp3tag, and foobar2000. The God­Fa­ther was always the first and worst part of my tag­ging pro­ce­dures, being slow, refus­ing to write APE tags, and rely­ing on the Inter­net Explorer engine.

Now I’ve elim­i­nated both The God­Fa­ther and MusicBrainz from the whole gru­el­ing process, boil­ing it down to just Mp3tag and foobar2000, thanks to an AMG-scraping script and a MusicBrainz-scraping script for Mp3tag. The only draw­back is that the AMG script doesn’t retrieve album descrip­tions (which I truth­fully won’t miss a bit), and that the scripts use dif­fer­ent tag field names (MOOD instead of TONES) to store some of the more friv­o­lous metadata.

How­ever there is some promise in the rel­a­tive sim­plic­ity of Mp3tag’s script­ing lan­guage, which, with enough knowl­edge of reg­u­lar expres­sions, seems to be capa­ble of pars­ing any­thing out of an http request.