Meta offers the possibility to find & download high quality album covers and tag data thanks to the Discogs catalog, via the Tag Finder and Cover Finder features.

Meta is translated in the following languages:

🇬🇧 English 🇫🇷 Français 🇩🇪 Deutsch 🇮🇹 Italiano 🇪🇸 Español 🇷🇺 русский

Meta supports almost all tags defined in the ID3v2 Specification, across all metadata formats.
Here's the complete list:

• Album
• Album Artist
• Artist
• BPM
• Comments
• Compilation
• Composer
• Conductor
• Copyright
• Credits
• Description
• Disc №
• Discs
• Encoder
• Encoding Info
• Encoding Time
• File Owner
• File Type
• Genre
• Grouping
• ISRC
• Involved People
• Key
• Language
• Length
• Lyricist
• Lyrics
• Media Type
• Mood
• Movement
• Movement №
• Movements
• Original Album
• Original Artist
• Original Filename
• Original Lyricist
• Original Release Time
• Playlist Delay
• Podcast
• Podcast Desc
• Podcast ID
• Podcast URL
• Producer Notice
• Publisher
• Radio Name
• Radio Owner
• Rating
• Release Time
• Remix Artist
• Sort Album Artist
• Sort Album
• Sort Artist
• Sort Composer
• Sort Title
• Subtitle
• Subtitle for Set
• Tagging Time
• Title
• Track №
• Tracks
• Website
• Work
• Year

Meta takes a WYSIWYG approach to saving: it's automatic. There is no explicit “Save” command because changes are saved every time you commit editing. Of course, you can always undo any change you might not be satisfied with, using the “Edit” menu's command: Undo ⌘Z

To sort any data displayed in the main files list:

• Click a column's header once to sort.
• Click it again to reverse that sort-order.

A small arrow will be displayed to the rightmost side of the header to indicate the current sort order.

Note that the order in which columns are sorted, will have a last-to-first order of importance. Meaning that if you want sorting to be applied to Artist ▸ Album ▸ Track, in that order, you should start by clicking the header of Track, then Album, then Artist.

Starting from Meta v2.3, you can use the following filter syntax:

• Freeform Text: Nile Rodgers

  Type any text you wish to be present in the file

• Specific Field Names: artist: Chic

  Prefix your search with the field name and a colon

• Multiple Filters: artist: Chic, album: Savoir Faire, File Name: mp3

  Separate each filter component with a comma

• Excluding Terms: -Beatles, -Lennon

  Prefix the terms you want excluded with a minus sign

Combining those syntaxes allows for building complex filtering, like:

artist:Chic, album: Savoir Faire, -mp3

Which will return any file matching "Chic" as an artist, "Savoir Faire" as an album, and that doesn't fit the word "mp3", thus excluding mp3 files!

Find & Replace in Meta supports a feature called Patterns, which is equivalent to regular expressions matching. Patterns simply offer a more graceful and satisfying experience.

Pattern Matching

A pattern is a mix of raw text and capture groups, symbolised as blue tokens.

You can insert capture groups by clicking the magnifying glass icon, and selecting 'Insert Pattern', or by clicking the rightward 'plus' sign: A menu will show up at insertion point, offering various expressions to choose from.

What you then match using capture groups, can be referenced in the 'Replace' field, using the syntax:

Backslash + Index of capture group. ie: \1 \2 \3 etc…

Case Example

Here's an example showing how we can replace dashes by colons, for multiple occurrences and files, at once:

Replace: ✲ - ✲ ie: (Any) : (Any)
With: \1 : \2 ie: (Group 1 Match) : (Group 2 Match)

Music libraries like iTunes/Music work by maintaining their own internal metadata database: When you initially feed them with music files, these apps will copy the music files metadata to their database. The information that is displayed when when using those apps, is then read from there.

Requesting a Refresh

To ask those programs to re-read metadata from the files, you can use Meta's “Add to Library” function. For other music programs, you can also try:

• Closing and re-opening the app
• Changing the currently selected folder in the app's file browser.

Unfortunately, artworks or metadata might sometimes fail to be updated, leaving you with the remaining option of manually removing & adding the files to the library again, to force a refresh.

⚠️ About WAVs: iTunes/Music.app simply don't read any tags embedded in WAV audio files, at all. If you wish to preserve compatibility, your best option will be to convert your WAV files to audio formats such as AIFF or ALAC. See: “Converting lossless WAV audio files to ALAC”.

• Select the desired files in Finder
• Right-click / control-click selection, and select Encode Selected Audio Files
• In the conversion prompt, choose Apple Lossless as the encoder
• Click Continue

You can then optionally copy the tags over from the WAV files to their MP4 counterpart using Meta, by opening both WAV files and their ALAC counterparts in the same order, selecting Edit → Copy ⌘C on the wavs, and Edit → Paste ⌘V on the mp4's… Simple!

If you purchased via this website:

To retrieve your product license, first launch Meta.
Then under the “Meta” menu, select “Retrieve License”, and follow the given instructions.

If you purchased via the Mac App Store:

If you purchased through the Mac App Store and are prompted for a license, delete the app from your applications folder and install Meta from the Mac App Store instead, following this link.

To find any crash reports:

• First, open Console.app, located under /Applications/Utilities/Console.app
• Find the section called “User Diagnostic Reports”
• Click the preceding triangle to disclose the list, and show all the crashes that you’ve had on your machine
• Select the .crash files whose name begin with “Meta”, and drag them to your mail window to drop them as attachments

macOS's Finder won't be able to read tags from .flac and .wav formats, and as a consequence, a correctly tagged file of this type will appear as displaying the default icon in macOS's Finder.

Track number, disc number, track total, and disc total tags cannot be saved with a leading zero, because they are represented internally as integers, and not as strings.

To use zero-padding when converting tags to file names or directory names, enable the “Use Numeric Padding” preference in the “Converter” section of Meta's preference pane.

Meta reads and writes the 'Grouping' tag as defined by the ID3v2 Standard, to the frame TIT1.
iTunes behaved similarly until recently with the release of iTunes 12.5.4.42.
iTunes now writes "Grouping" values to a new, private ID3 frame GRP1.

Associated ID3 Frames:

This is a breaking change, as all other programs and music players have been using TIT1 to store grouping information.
Meta will by default stick to the standard in an effort to not break compatibility, but offers the ability to use iTunes/Music compatibility if desired.

To do that, please head to Meta's “Metadata” preferences, and enable the checkbox as pictured below.

There's a fair chance app “X” only reads metadata once upon startup, or when scanning files, and doesn't automatically detect live changes to the files you are editing with Meta. See Refreshing changes in your music library.