How to use Tagrid

Tagrid is a macOS app for editing the tags on your audio files — title, artist, album and the rest — in bulk. It lays them out in a spreadsheet-like window so that dozens of songs can be fixed at once.

Supported formats are MP3, M4A, M4B, FLAC, Ogg, Opus, WAV and AIFF.

Getting started

1. Add files Drag and drop them onto the window, or pick them with the Open button at the top left. Whole folders are fine too — Tagrid picks up the supported files inside.
2. Edit Double-click a cell, or press Return. You can also select a cell and simply start typing, which begins editing and replaces what was there.
3. Save The Save button, or ⌘S. Nothing on disk changes until you save.

Cells you have edited turn orange. The colour clears when you save.

Editing in bulk

This is what Tagrid is for.

Selecting a range

• Drag
• Shift-click (extends the selection)
• Shift + arrow keys
• ⌘A for everything

Putting the same value in many cells

Copy one value (⌘C), select a range, and paste (⌘V): every selected cell takes that value.

Handy for lining up an album name or an album artist.

Pasting in from a spreadsheet

Copy a range in Excel or Numbers and paste it in, and it arrives with its shape intact, starting at the top-left cell of your selection. Write out the running order and the titles first, then pour the whole thing in.

It works the other way too: select a range in Tagrid, press ⌘C, and paste it into a spreadsheet.

Clearing cells

Select a range and press Delete.

Undo

⌘Z. Redo is ⇧⌘Z. A paste or a bulk fill undoes in one step, not cell by cell.

Keyboard

Working with the grid

• Reorder columns — drag a column heading.
• Resize a column — drag the divider between headings. Double-click a divider to fit the column to its contents.
• Sort the songs — click a column heading. Click again to reverse it.
• Choose which columns are shown — the Columns button at the top right, or View > Columns in the menu bar.

File Name and File Path are there for reference rather than being tags, so they cannot be edited (they are shown in grey).

The numeric columns — Track #, Tracks Total, Disc #, Discs Total, BPM and Year — are right-aligned so the digits line up.

Artwork

Double-click an Artwork cell to open a small window where you can Replace…, Export… and Remove the image. Selecting the cell and pressing Return opens the same window.

You can also work without opening it.

• Paste — select an Artwork cell with an image on the clipboard and press ⌘V. Every selected row gets it at once.
• Copy — select an Artwork cell and press ⌘C, then paste into another app.
• Delete — select an Artwork cell and press Delete, the same as a text cell.

Supported image formats are JPEG and PNG.

What Tagrid does on its own

Two behaviours that can look like "it changed something by itself" if you don't know about them.

Filling in tags when files are loaded

Only empty tags are filled in, from the file and folder names. Anything that already has a value is left alone.

The separators are ., -, _ and a space.

So loading 03 - Spring Song.mp3 from a folder called Best gives you the title "Spring Song", track number "3" and album "Best".

A couple of things to watch for.

• A number with no separator after it is not dropped. 03SpringSong.mp3 keeps "03SpringSong" as its title, and the track number stays empty.
• Careful with file names that start with a year. 2019 Memories.mp3 ends up with a track number of "2019".

If this gets in the way, you can turn it off in Settings > Loading.

Tidying numbers when saving

• Leading zeros are dropped (01 → 1). M4A stores track numbers as whole numbers by definition, so this keeps 01 from surviving in one format and vanishing in another.
• BPM is reduced to the number (137 BPM → 137). BPM is defined as a whole number, and M4A can only hold one.
• Year keeps four digits. A file containing 2019-05-01 is shown as 2019. Editing the year and saving writes four digits only — the month and day are lost — while a file whose year you did not edit keeps them.
• A file that carries the same field more than once shows only the first. FLAC, Ogg and ID3v2.4 MP3 files can hold, say, two separate ARTIST fields. Tagrid shows and edits the first one only; editing that cell and saving leaves the field with just the value you typed, while leaving it alone keeps the others. A single field that lists several names with a separator, like A / B, is a different thing: it is one ordinary value and is kept exactly as written.

Saving safely

Tagrid does not rewrite a file in place. It writes to a copy and then swaps the contents in, so a write that fails part way through cannot damage the original.

When something goes wrong

Dropped files don't get added

The format may not be supported. The supported ones are listed at the top of this page.

Saving fails

The alert gives the reason in one line. The common ones are "The file is locked.", "The file is read-only." and "The file has been moved, renamed, or deleted." A lock can be cleared in Finder's info window (⌘I).

It says Tagrid no longer has permission

macOS sandboxing means Tagrid can only touch the files you opened. Add the files again and saving will work.