Exceltagger

Utility for editing flac music tags in Microsoft Excel.

Download the zip file



I think the best place to edit music tags is in Excel and that is the purpose of this application. You can see it in use in the screenshot above. Notice the TITLE, ALBUM etc tags. Also Notice the ExcelTagger menu item just left of Help. Also notice the workbook contains two sheets, one has some helpful notes.

The installer adds just two little programs to your hard drive and has a no hassle uninstall. It does not talk to the internet or do anything even remotely dangerous / nasty. The reading and writing of tags is done inside a little c++ program called exceltagger.exe. That program imports / exports a text file containing the tags which is picked up by the excel workbook. The excel workbook is all you need to know about however and it's dead easy to use. If you know Exel VBA you can play with the import export code and if you make any great improvements please send me a copy!

There are two bugs:

(1) You can not import the directory "x:\", you must always have subdirectory in the path. This silly issue needs fixing in the vba. Anyone who does please send me a copy!

(2) Users who are not using English Excel have to replace “Help” in the VBA code with the translation of “Help” in the relevant language; for instance “Hjälp” in Swedish etc.

I don't think it works in Excel 95 but it should work with the rest.

The list of Tags it supports is shown above and includes TITLE, ALBUM, ARTIST, YEAR, GENRE, ALBUM ARTIST, COMPOSER, COMMENT. Adding a new tag is a code change to the C++ and don't even bother asking me to do that.

Oh yea and Excel 2007 users will complain the interface is ugly - to which I will respond with "so is your ribbon" :-)

I did have ambitious plans to extend this excel application / utility to read and write aac, wma, mp3 tags etc but it never proved popular enough to justify the effort. Also I made the two classic mistakes computer nerds so often do: I thought it needed to be fast so I wrote the thing in c++, also I had idiotic cross platform dreams. Had I used C# it would probably have been just as fast and ten times quicker to write. Also the import / export of the tags into a text file is clunky - I should have used a COM DLL in VBA that reads or writes tags in one file at a time. That more flexible approach would have been a little slower but probably worth it. Although it's not perfect I still think it's a great little tool and my flac based music collection would never have been as tidy without it. I guess most people who use this app will be squeezebox / transporter users.

If you want to thank me feel free to email - It's nice to be appreciated.

Recently I got an email asking for a tool I wrote to convert flac to aac. You can use dbPowerAmp to do this, but last time I checked it did not support album art which makes it pretty bloody useless. So I wrote a c# program to convert my collection that uses the command line Nero encoder. It works, but I never put a huge amount of effort into it. Here is a zip file with a windows installer and all the source code for this flac too aac conversion project. It tries to tell iTunes that albums are compilations, but I am not sure how well it works.