Given that the current (and past) Zune software lacks any decent metadata editing I’ve been using Mp3tag to adjust the various tags as well as grab album art. One cool feature of Mp3tag is that you can look up album information from a variety of online sources, most notably Amazon. From there you can grab track listings and album art to help flush out your metadata.
Only problem is that sometimes the Zune Marketplace files an album differently than Amazon which means it won’t show up correctly in your ZuneTag (see mine in the upper-right). After poking around with Mp3tag’s extensible "web sources framework" and using Fiddler to watch the HTTP traffic to and from zune.net I cobbled together a Zune source that will pull down the exact album information as listed on the Marketplace as well as the album art.
There is a bonus as well, I believe zune.net just made their 800×800 album art available via the back-end service I’m using so now you can grab full 800×800 album art even on tracks you didn’t purchase directly from the Marketplace.
Just download Marketplace.zip and extract the single Marketplace.src into your %appdata%Mp3tagdatasources folder and you’ll be rocking! I’d also suggest you download the very latest beta of Mp3tag because the tag sources (what Marketplace plugs into) dialog is much easier to figure out for first timers, plus I always include the artist in the track listing and version 2.39n supports splitting this into the correct tags.
If anyone actually uses this and needs help getting it up and running just drop a comment.
UPDATE #1:
Thanks to Scott for catching something I should have mentioned but completely forgot. The Zune software can’t read ID3v2.4 tags, instead it can only handle ID3v2.3 so after you first install Mp3tag follow these steps:
- Go to Tools | Options
- Navigate to the ‘Tags’, then Mpeg options in the left-hand tree
- Set Write to ID3v2.3 UTF-16
- For those that like pretty pictures:
UPDATE #2 (5/20/2012):
Updated the download link to point the latest source. A few search engines were still sending people here so I’m fixing up the link to the one that actually works .