Unlike other cross-platform or open-source tag editors, Meta’s feature set is focused on one area – editing metadata for your digital music collection – and supports all the common interface paradigms you’d expect from a professional Mac app running on Catalina. Meta is exactly what I was looking for: the app is a modern Mac utility that supports all popular audio formats (from standard MP3 and MP4 to FLAC, DSF, and AIFF) and can write metadata formats such as ID3v1, ID3v2, MP4, and APE tags. I came across Meta a few months ago when, frustrated with the ugliness and bloated nature of other desktop metadata editors, I took it upon myself to find a polished, modern tag editor designed specifically with Mac users in mind. This is where Meta, an advanced music tag editor for Mac developed by French indie developer Benjamin Jaeger, comes in. One of the reasons I enjoy listening to my personal music library the old-school way is that the Walkman is completely offline, but that comes with the disadvantage of being unable to fix incorrect metadata via the web. Plex doesn’t have this issue: by virtue of being an online service, Plex can search various databases for correct metadata and automatically fill missing fields in my library. It’s particularly annoying when artwork is missing because it ruins the experience of looking at the now playing screen while I’m focused on enjoying music. But sometimes it doesn’t, which leads to the unfortunate situation of ending up with songs on my Walkman that lack album artwork or feature extra text in their titles such as “Remastered” or “Explicit”. Most of the time, FLAC music I purchase online comes with correct built-in metadata for fields such as track number, year, disc, and album artwork. The music library is stored on a 1 TB Samsung T5 external SSD that’s connected via USB-C to the Mac mini whenever I purchase new music, I manually copy it into the T5 as well as the Sony Walkman’s SD card via the Finder. However, I prefer to purchase and download FLAC music on my Mac mini because my music collection is also backed up and mirrored to Plex, and the Mac mini – as you might imagine – is running a Plex media server instance in the background at all times. 1 I then organize albums with a standard Artist ⇾ Album folder hierarchy in the Mac’s Finder, as pictured below:īefore you ask: yes, I could do this file organization with my iPad Pro alone because the Sony music player I use (this Walkman model) can be connected via USB to the iPad (with this adapter) and comes with a standard SD card for expandable storage. These days, when I think of an old album I want to repurchase in high resolution (either 16-bit or 24-bit FLAC), or if I come across a new release I instantly fall in love with, I go ahead and buy it as a standalone FLAC digital download. But this post isn’t about how I’ve been dipping my toes into the wild world of audiophiles and high-resolution music rather, I want to highlight an excellent Mac app I’ve been using to organize and edit the metadata of the FLAC music library I’ve been assembling over the past year. I detailed the entire story in the December 2019 episode of our Club-exclusive MacStories Unplugged podcast, but in short: I still use Apple Music to stream music every day and discover new artists however, for those times when I want to more intentionally listen to music without doing anything else, I like to sit down, put on my good Sony headphones, and try to enjoy all the sonic details of my favorite songs that wouldn’t normally be revealed by AirPods or my iPad Pro’s speakers. For the past year, I’ve been using a high-res Sony music player to listen to my personal music collection.
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