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[Sir Finkus]

tl;dr
Every autotagger is shitty, so I have to tag all my music manually because I have ocd.

Why is simple data entry an apparently insurmountable task?  I have yet to find any auto tagging service that doesn't have SIGNIFICANT issues.  All I want is my music to be tagged with what is on the front and back cover of the cd case itself, is that too hard to ask? I don't even have a very extensive music collection and it's a problem.  Here are some small examples from my collection along with my various pet peeves with them.

<title> - <album> - <artist>
(I had to add the \ because the board seems to think that I want bullet points if I don't
Mies Del Dolor [\*] - A Night at the Opera - Blind Guardian
What the fuck is the * supposed to mean?  You MIGHT be able to justify a (bonus track) since that's written on the back of the cd, but I really feel that should be a seperate field or something.  After all, the song is called "Mies Del Dolor" not "Mies Del Dolor (Bonus Track)" and certainly not "Mies Del Dolor [\*]"  I've also seen the * put on everything from covers, to karaoke songs.

Drimo Victoria - Primo Victoria - Sabaton
Danzer Battalion - Primo Victoria - Sabaton
Ahh, the perils of "user submitted" tags.  The titles should be "Primo Victoria" and "Panzer Battalion" respectively.  The automatic cover art grabber also nabbed a terrible green tinted cover.  As far as I can tell, this wasn't featured on any special editions or anything.

All tracks - At the Edge of Time [Special Edition] [CD 1] - Blind Guardian
BIG pet peeve with me, as far as the " [Special Edition]" part goes, I've also seen this called "Bonus Tracks" and other things.  For "[CD 1]" there is no excuse.  There is a "disc" field for this exact reason.  The word "disc" or "cd" shouldn't be in the album title unless it's in the actual album's name.  It's especially fun when cd 1 and cd 2 are tagged with DIFFERENT FORMATS

All tracks - Touched by the crimson king - Demons and Wizards
I'm guessing these tags were user submitted as well.  I know the rules for capitalisation of names like this are a bit arcane (I mess them up sometime too) but this just seems lazy to me.  The exception I'd make is if the artist uses the capitalisation of their name, the name of an album, or the title of a track for stylistic reasons.  Japanese artists seem to do this a lot to place emphasis on a word, this can and should carry over to the tags.

coppelia no hitsugi [Noir OP] - Aristocracy - Ali Project (Bonus Genre: Anime)
Number of problems with this one, first off the song title is "コッペリアの柩", not "coppelia no hitsugi [Noir OP]".  The [Noir OP] bit seems to be because it was the opening them to an anime called "Noir".  This is also why the entire album is put in the genre "Anime".  I understand that whoever submitted this tag (from another tagging service that takes user submissions) watched this anime, thought "that sounds neat" and went ahead and labeled the genre "Anime".  As far as I can tell, "Anime" isn't a music drama, and I feel tagging every single artist you come across that has ever done a song that was in an anime is a bit disrespectful to the artist.  Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with anime itself.  It's usually not my cup of tea, but I recognise it as a legitimate form of art.   It just seems to me that a piece of music should be classified based up the music itself, not it if was featured in a television show.  It's a little like tagging every ACDC album "Movie" because they used a few songs in Iron Man.  As far as romanizations and translations go, they also seem disrespectful to me.  I have another song called "Tróndur Í Gøtu" that I can't pronounce by just looking at either, but this was tagged correctly the first time.  Once you get something with any Asian writing in it though, people want to pound that into a completely different alphabet.  Japanese, Chinese, and Korean music all suffer from this.  I don't have any Russian music (feel free to hook me up if you've got something good) so I don't know if this applies to the Cyrillic alphabet.

<artist>/<title> - <album> - <artist>
I've been running into more and more of these.  Every track will literally be called artist/title.  This doesn't make sense in the slightest, even if we didn't have tags and only used filenames ('/' is an illegal character to have in a filename for damn near every os).  There are separate fields for tags for a reason.  Use them.

Now, for some general gripes:
-Album art
Why doesn't there seem to be a standard for this?  Some players embed these in the files, some dump a "cover.jpg" in the directory, Windows Media Player seems to put them in the file AND dump a bunch of jpgs with random shit for names in the directory.  Some media players even keep all the cover art in their own mysterious database, so when you copy them to your player or use another media player it doesn't work.  The fragmentation causes a lot of issues.  I've opened the exact same media files in different media players and had albums with completely different cover art because one used "cover.jpg" and the other used embedded album art.
-General tag format shittyness
You can't even rely on tags being the same between media players.  It seems like there are 3 or 4 different version of the mp3 tag spec, and every media player seems to use a different one.  Some don't even use the tags and put their information in their database (all of my hate).  If you're lucky, the media player you use to sync your PMP will convert the tags to something it can use, but there's always "that file" that will refuse to display correctly, or that is missing cover art or something stupid like that.  I've actually done some reading, and it sounds to me that the entire id3 spec is a mess that nobody manages to implement "correctly".
-"Various Artists"
This is shitty.  I've had random tracks on cds tagged with this.  I'm not sure how you'd fix this for things like compilation albums, but I'd like it so albums stick together in a media player and credit is given to the artist(s) performing the song.

Anyway, I'm nearly done ranting, but am I completely alone in my hate of this?  The problem itself isn't a difficult one to solve.  Just copy what's on the back of the cd into the computer and you're done.  If you had enough grapes and dixie cups full of fruit juice you could probably train a chimpanzee to press the correct shapes on a keyboard when it isn't throwing feces at other chimpanzees.  I've pretty much given up completely on auto-taggers and just tag my music manually using the backs of cds and artist websites.

Oh, and because I have a feeling it will come up, some of my music isn't obtained in an entirely copyright friendly manner.  I actually do try and buy most of my music, but a lot of stuff I'd have to import and I can't justify spending $50 on a cd.  The problem seems to occur regardless of the source of the music.

[thatkid]

I too have seen the horrors of this issue.
Worse is when you've got the tags working fine in, say, rhythmbox but then when you move them over to iTunes (so that you can actually sync with your ipod, because Apple is full of jerks) the tracknames all change to ARTIST - TITLE or something similarly stupid and you have to manually do it all over again.

[SalmonGod]

I do wish there was more standardization.  Some of the problems you're pointing out are due to differences in how various devices, software, and skins display information, leading people to use tag fields in different ways to best suit whatever they're using.

It isn't that hard to deal with, though... just a nuisance.  I tag everything by hand, and my music library is pretty big.  Use mp3tagger, load up one album at a time, and you can mass edit every tag except for song title & track #.  It makes tagging a whole album take about 30 seconds once you get into a routine.

[Sir Finkus]

I do wish there was more standardization.  Some of the problems you're pointing out are due to differences in how various devices, software, and skins display information, leading people to use tag fields in different ways to best suit whatever they're using.

It isn't that hard to deal with, though... just a nuisance.  I tag everything by hand, and my music library is pretty big.  Use mp3tagger, load up one album at a time, and you can mass edit every tag except for song title & track #.  It makes tagging a whole album take about 30 seconds once you get into a routine.

Essentially what I do, but it starts taking a while when you do cover art and you need to track down the proper names of the tracks.  I only bother with artist, album, track number, and track title and it still can take a long time.

[SalmonGod]

Yeah, tracking down solid info can take a bit.  I generally check wikipedia first, and then discogs if it's not there.  Discogs has very solid and reliable information on even the most obscure stuff.  The only problem with it is they will have like 20 entries for a single album, based on minor differences between various printings and the like.  It's too deep.

I'm a ways away from bothering with cover art.  My music collection overhaul is laid out in stages, and the whole process will take many years

[Sir Finkus]

Yeah, tracking down solid info can take a bit.  I generally check wikipedia first, and then discogs if it's not there.  Discogs has very solid and reliable information on even the most obscure stuff.  The only problem with it is they will have like 20 entries for a single album, based on minor differences between various printings and the like.  It's too deep.

I'm a ways away from bothering with cover art.  My music collection overhaul is laid out in stages, and the whole process will take many years

Problem is even wikipedia is often wrong, or simply won't have any information if the artist is obscure enough.  Good example of a bad example here.

[Haschel]

Winamp's auto tagger usually works out ok for me, but yeah there are still issues. Specifically with stuff that isn't in English or not very mainstream. Album art's really been pissing me off lately, though. Ending up with album art that is way too small for the display it appears on, ending up being stretched and worse than looking at a blank area.

[ein]

I was going to say I've never had issues with auto tagging, then I realised I've never really used an autotagger.
I've gotten so used to tagging everything on my own using booklet scans if I have to.

What I have an issue with is when you grab a torrent with bad tags and want to seed.
Luckily, cue sheets.

[SalmonGod]

Problem is even wikipedia is often wrong, or simply won't have any information if the artist is obscure enough.  Good example of a bad example here.

Yeah, I don't even bother with Wikipedia on really obscure or non-english stuff.

[Sir Finkus]

Good god, where did this one come from?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Strife26]

I've never had that much trouble, although I certainly feel the pain. About half of my classical music is labeled in an eastern language that I don't read. Mostly though, I wish that there was an automatic lyric fetcher somewhere. All the ones I've ever been able to find seem to have been killed by King Copyright.

[Vector]

No, you aren't.

Final Fantasy 9 ripped straight from the disc?  "Untranslatable."  Final Fantasy 10 ripped straight from the disc?  "Fuck you, man, we aren't even going to try to tag it.

Hans Zimmer music?  "Let's put 'the' in front of every damned song for no discernible reason."

Oh, and my ripped Notre-Dame de Paris soundtrack... "Let's be completely wrong and call this song 'tu vas me d'amour.'"  That doesn't make any fucking sense!

The thing I hate the most is my Lost Odyssey track, which for some reason wants be alphabetical (and, of course, makes no thematic sense that way).  If I could just figure out how to make it go in the right order, even manually, in Winamp... oh, I'd be so much happier.

[G-Flex]

What about when iTunes decides to fill the "comment" tag with a completely meaningless (to anyone but iTunes software) string of letters?

[Sir Finkus]

I've never had that much trouble, although I certainly feel the pain. About half of my classical music is labeled in an eastern language that I don't read. Mostly though, I wish that there was an automatic lyric fetcher somewhere. All the ones I've ever been able to find seem to have been killed by King Copyright.

I'd imagine the problem is compounded for things like classical.  Is the artist the composer,the band who performed it, or the conductor?  I'd go with the band which performed it, but I'm sure you see everything.

[anzki4]

Just manually corrected track numbers to Nutcracker and now Swan Lake is to follow. Some moron had tagged those two correctly but in 3 different albums.

That means Swan Lake is divided in all the three albums and Nutcracker begins in middle of the third one