Hi folks,

I wonder are there any tools to automatically tag audio files collections?
especially sound design samples but maybe even music or speech....

something like "this is a snare drum at this tuning and this sustain" or "this is water dropping in a cavern with reverb of x seconds" etc...

of course doesn't have to be perfect, but should work locally on a computer (or as self hosted server instance perhaps)

cheers

 

I’ve been experimenting with it too and found that the results can swing a lot depending on the source audio and how clean it is. What really helped me was pairing it with my existing setup for metadata tagging for audio management — makes it easier to sort, find, and organize stuff after the auto-description part does its job.

 

Last edited: Apr 15, 2025

Hi @tzzsmk, you should ask that question again in 15 years; it's a job for an AI!

I only know one program: MP3TAG - The universal tag editor and more ...--> www.mp3tag.de/en/

 

It's not automatic and can't recognise audio data, just a simple tag renamer for your media files, but as I remember right you may tune some scripts to get naming from various sources but tag information has to be somewhere already.

 

Thanks for the information.

AudioRanger --> www.audioranger.com/en/
AudioRanger is a powerful and versatile music tagger designed to automatically identify and organize your digital music collection.

Runs on Windows and Mac. Free version available. Supports all audio formats: Supports MP3, M4A, WMA, FLAC, Opus, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, AIFF and more file formats. Edit ID3, APE, Vorbis Comments, MP4, ASF and Lyrics3 tags.

 

It's far from perfect, but since I use it anyway it has come handy a couple of times: Ableton now does auto-tagging of sounds that are added to the library. Also the similarity search (using some sort of machine learning thingamabob) works a charm. Of course, it's Ableton, and I don't think it's worth just for that purpose.

ADSR sample manager does auto tagging as well, but for whatever reason I find it clunky: https://www.adsrsounds.com/product/software/adsr-sample-manager/ Worth a shot, it's free.

A dedicated sound server/mass storage unit would be awesome actually, now that I think of it. A transparent download plugin kind of like I guess how Splice works, but on your own library, automatically tagged.