JiaId3 0.8.0 is an information tag editor for your audio files. It currently supports editing the ID3 information associated with MP3 files, and I’ll add support for more file formats as I approach version 1.0.0. I first sat down to write this application when I found a directory on my hard disk with a bunch of “junk” MP3 files whose tag information was all messed up. Instead of throwing them all away, or having them mess up my audio libraries, I set about to write an application to let me fix them.

JiaId3 version 0.8.0 can be downloaded from:

http://chipmunkninja.com/download/JiaId3-0.8.0.dmg

Installing JiaId3

JiaId3 is a Universal Binary, so it (should) work fine on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. I don’t actually have an Intel Mac here, so if you have one and could let me know that it works, I’d hugely appreciate it.

• Double Click on the .dmg file you downloaded.
• Drag the JiaId3 application to your Applications folder or from wherever you’d like to run it.

Opening Files for Editing

When JiaId3 is run by itself, all of the controls are disabled until you open an MP3 file to edit its contents. To do this, you have two choices:

• You can drag and drop the file onto the JiaId3 application and it will automatically open the file
• You can click on the File/Open menu and open an MP3 file that way.

Note that when launching JiaId3 you can actually specify an audo file on the command line to be opened initially:

open /Applications/JiaId3.app/ ~/SuperFunkay.mp3

Navigating to Other Files

Once you have edited the ID3 information in an audio file, you can use JiaId3 to navigate to other files in the same directory. This is done by click on the “next” and “prev” buttons in the top right of the application window. If you have any unsaved changes in the current audio file, it will first ask you if you’d like to save these before navigating to the next file.

If you are unhappy with your changes at any point before you have saved them, you can always click on the “Reset” button and the file will be reloaded to its saved state on disk.

Localisation

JiaId3 is currently (mostly) localised into French, and I’m working on Italian, German, and Simplified Chinese support.

For even these languages, however, I will require some help for some of the more descriptive error messages: If you are fluent in any language other than English and would like to help out by localising about 20 text strings, please contact me at marcwan@chipmunkninja.com.

Source Code

JiaId3 will be open source under the BSD license. It’s my first Mac OS X Cocoa application (part of the motivation for writing it …), so I’m going to take a bit of time to clean up the code before releasing it. Look for it soon.

Comments, Suggestions, Bugs?

Got a problem with the program? Got a feature request, or have found a bug? Please send me an email with as much detail as possible, and if possible any files that caused the program problems to me via E-mail at marcwan@chipmunkninja.com.