Laura Nass, Spin it Again will help you separate and manually tag the songs. Not free. But, worth looking into. It's an old program, that hasn't been updated. But you can manually separate the tracks or it will do it for you which you can edit. It interprets the tracks by lulls in between notes as a new track to start and new track, which you can override. It also color shades the different tracks to distinguish them. It also can clean up audio noise in the recording(hissing, pops). I suppose you can argue that the compression compromises the music, that's up to you. But it has different profiles for cleaning up the noise.

Laura Nass,

I have the same problem when downloading audio books that are all one file, and I want to separate the chapters. To do this, I use Audacity's silence finder to locate the start of each song or chapter. Once a break is found, you can zoom in and add a label. Finally, use the "Export Multiple" feature to split your file up into separate MP3s, according to wherever you have labels.

To [ Laura Nass ], who want to record an album and then separate the songs later ...

... do you mean a VINYL PHONOGRAPH album, played on, say, a USB phonograph record player?

I ask because ALL CD albums ALREADY have their songs isolated in separate tracks.

For an old fashioned vinyl phonograph records, I found 2 ways:

1 - download from YouTube the tracks already recorded and identified by others.

2 - use the software that came with the USB turntable, it SHOULD have sophisticated intelligence settings to separate a recording at "so man seconds" of relative silence between tracks.

- - then manually record each track, starting recording and ending recording manually for ach song.

- - then edit the recordings in free audio editors to cut and copy and save portions that you consider to be separate tracks.

Note that some folks include a *.cue file that identifies where the tracks are in a full-album one-file recording, and programs like free MediaHuman Audio Converter can be told to convert to separate smaller files for each individual "track" as indicated in a cue file.

Fun, eh?
.

Laura Nass, ... tip ... Audacity is good to record album, then select each track, "Export Selection as mp3" and tag

Rosco Jones,
PLUS....mp3tag can be PORTABLE! Don't be put off that the download file is an executable setup unlike most portables that come in zip files. Once you run the setup.exe it gives option for portable install.

Rosco Jones, I agree. Mp3tag is both easy to use and very, very powerful. It's never failed me even when batch renaming a lot of wildly tagged music files, and even makes the use of complex regular expressions simplified. I use Mp3tag regularly to do things like add my own custom genres and notes to music files, etc. When my collection needs an overhaul (every few years), Picard + Mp3tag does it all.

I did a quick test of NeatMP3 with a several popular songs. With the default settings, it quickly organized my files into artist/album folders, but failed to add genre, track number and track year to the files. Description says you can "edit" and "modify" the tags, but doesn't say it will do it for you -- this is a feature I expect instead of the popup that tells me some tags are missing, prompting me to add all the info myself.

The wording is concerning. So NeatMP3 will assist you in organizing your files and will do some partial renaming based on very simple patterns, but you may end up doing much of the work for any less-than-popular track. Even clicking to retrieve tags from an online database simply opens your browser to the website. You still have to enter missing tags manually. Granted, no program will find some of your most obscure music, but my other programs do a much better job, and do much of it automatically.

Also, please all drag and drop of files and folders.

I'd recommend this program for smaller, quick, easier jobs (like with very popular tracks), and go with programs more capable of heavy duty tagging and organizing for larger, more complex music collections.

Digit64, I installed mp3tag Portable, but there's no .exe file to start it. How do you start it?

Never mind, I found it. Thanks Rosco.

I've searched about it: this app offers wma support, but not recognized any of my wma. Why? :(