Meta offers the possibility to find and download quality album covers as well as tag information.
Data courtesy of Discogs.com, the online free music database.

Meta is available in the following languages:

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

Meta is distributed and sold on nightbirdsevolve.com via Paddle (our online reseller, that manages sales & licensing), but can also be obtained via the Mac App Store, and a monthly subscription, via SetApp.

Distribution Differences:

The Mac App Store version is run in a 'sandboxed' environment, which means that you might see several additional security access dialogs, each time you need to access a new location on your hard drive…

The Website Version is limited to 3 seats, so one license grants you usage on three different machines at most. Above this, you will need to purchase another license, or to manage license deactivation on any machine you leave behind. License resets can be requested via email.

Apart from those differences, apps will be identical in terms of features.
For a smoother experience, we recommend purchasing directly from this website.

Meta automatically saves changes when you finish editing a field.
If you’re not satisfied with a change, use Undo to revert it.

To sort any data displayed in the main files list:

Click a header once to sort per that column
Click it again to reverse its sort-order

A caret symbol located to the rightmost side of the header, indicates the current sort order.

When you click column headers sequentially, 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 then Album then Track, you should start by clicking the header of Track, then Album, then Artist.

Select Similar works by extending the selection to all files who's metadata is identical to the one you last clicked.

Here's how you use it:

1. Single-click Any Field's Value in the list
2. Choose Select Similar from the menu, or its keyboard equivalent: ⌘⇧A

You could click an artwork thumbnail, then choose Select Similar from the menu, and the selection will be extended to all the files with the same artwork. Or this could be a great way to quickly select an album by clicking its name once. Combined with the Select Inverse command, it becomes a powerful data-handling tool.

 Text
Displays files with matching text.
ex: Remix

 Target Specific Fields
Displays files with matching text, for that specific property.
ex: year: 2006

 Exclude Terms
Excludes files with matching text.
ex: -live

 Combine Filters
Combines the results of multiple filters, each separated with a comma.
ex: artist: Nile Rodgers, Chic, -Live

Patterns are a way to search for text that follows a rule, not just exact words.
If you’ve ever heard of regular expressions, this is the same idea presented in a more visual way.

Patterns are expressions made of Raw Text (letters, numbers, symbols) and Capture Groups (blue tokens).

Capture Groups

A capture group matches a piece of text and remembers it, so you can reuse it later when replacing text.

For example, a capture group can match: Tabs, Any character, A word, One character, Digits, etc…

To add capture groups click the plus icon right to the Find field, or click the magnifying-glass icon and choose Insert Pattern from the menu.

Replace using a capture group's matched text

Example:
Find: Word, Word (Digits)
Replace: $2 $1
—
Original: "Lennon, John (3)"
After Replace: "John Lennon"

Anything matched by a capture group can be reused in the "Replace" field, using the format: $ + index.

$1 refers to the first capture group
$2 refers to the second capture group

and so on…

After editing tags in Meta, you may need to tell your music player to refresh its library.
The 'Add to Library' operation asks compatible music apps to re-read metadata from the files.

1. Select desired files
2. Select File Add to Library
3. Wait until the operation completes

Preferred library application

Meta natively supports Music.app and Doppler, thanks to custom scripting, but any other audio program can be chosen. For that, head to Meta's preferences, and look for “Preferred Music Library” under the General tab.

Apple provide a proprietary audio format that deals with lossless audio and integrates well with its apps and technologies, namely Apple Lossless, or ALAC.

Convert to Apple Lossless

1. In Finder, select the desired files
2. Right-click (or Control-click) the selection, and choose Encode Selected Audio Files
3. In the conversion dialog, select Apple Lossless as the encoder
4. Click Continue

1. Open Menu Tags, then Derive Tags
2. In the “Derive Tags” window, under “From”, select CSV Document
3. Browse to your CSV document

The preview line will display results if it manages to parse your expression and match it to your CSV file's contents. Optionally toggle Skip First Line to ignore headers.

See the example below:

Depending on what platform you purchased on, the licensing system will be different.

Paddle / Web Licenses:

1. Launch Meta.app
2. Under the Meta menu, select Retrieve License
3. Follow the given instructions

Mac App Store Licenses:

1. Go to your Applications folder, and delete Meta.app if present
2. Open the Mac App Store App, and sign-in to your account
3. Navigate to the 'Mac Apps' section, browse for Meta, and click Install

In case Meta encounters a crash: brace yourself, grab a cup of tea, and please send us the reports for inspection.

1. Open console.app, located under Applications Utilities Console.app
2. In the sidebar, find “User Diagnostic Reports”
3. Click the disclosure triangle to expand the list
4. Select the .crash reports whose filenames begin with “Meta”
5. Send these files as email attachments, using the link below

Send Reports

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.

Meta supports Zero-Padding track & disc numbers when converted to file names or file paths, but does not support Zero-Padding in the Tags, as those tag informations 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 preferences.

Meta accesses the "Grouping" tag using the TIT1 frame, according to the ID3v2 Standard.
Whereas Music.app rather uses GRP1 for Grouping and TIT1 for Work.

—

To enable a Music-compatible mode in Meta:

• Open Preferences under “Metadata”
• Enable iTunes/Music Compatibility, as shown below

Third-party apps and music libraries such as iTunes and Music often have their own internal database. When you first add music files, the app copies the metadata into this database. From then on, the app usually displays information from its database—not directly from the files.

Because of this, metadata changes may not always be picked up automatically.

1. Add to Library

The first thing you want to do, is to use Meta's “Add to Library” function. View Help
If this does not work, you need to force a refresh.

2. Forcing a refresh:

• Close and reopen the app
• Change the currently selected folder in the app’s file browser

In rare cases, the only way to force a full refresh is to:

• Remove the files from the library / app
• Add them back again manually

This usually rebuilds entries using the updated metadata…

Note iTunes / Music.app do not read embedded metadata from WAV files!
If you need reliable metadata support and full compatibility, the recommended solution is to convert WAV files to formats such as AIFF or ALAC, both of which fully support embedded tags in Apple’s music apps.
See: Convert WAV files to Apple Lossless.