Guide

Music Tag Editors for Mac: An Overview

If you want to edit tags on a Mac, you'll quickly come across several tools that seem to do the same thing at first glance. But they work in different places: on the file, on a music database or on the library in Apple Music. This overview sorts them by type, not by rank.

File editors

A file editor opens music files from a folder and changes the tags directly in the file.

• Mp3tag is a tag editor, originally made for Windows and now also available in the Mac App Store.
• Kid3 is free, open source and runs on Mac, Windows and Linux.

This fits if your music is organised as folders of files and you want to decide every field yourself.

Database taggers

A database tagger matches your files against a music database and fills in the tags from there.

• MusicBrainz Picard is free, open source, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux and adds tags from the MusicBrainz database.

This fits if you want to complete a lot of files with details from one shared source.

Tools for the Apple Music library

If your music lives in the Music app, it's not only the file that counts but also what the library knows about it: covers, which album a track belongs to, duplicate tracks.

• The Music app itself changes the details of single tracks or of a whole selection in the “Get Info” window.
• Truffle is made for the Apple Music library on the Mac that has grown over the years. It checks eight sources and suggests one value per field; nothing is written until you confirm, and every change you apply can be brought back. Truffle can also work only on folders of local files that you choose, and it knows collections from rekordbox, Serato and Traktor without writing to their database.

Which tool fits when

• Folders of files, fields by hand: a file editor such as Mp3tag or Kid3.
• Filling in missing details from a database: MusicBrainz Picard.
• Fixing a few tracks in the Music app: the “Get Info” window is enough.
• A large, old library in Apple Music with missing covers, duplicate tracks and albums in several spellings: Truffle.

Many people use more than one tool. The only thing that matters is that two programs never work on the same files at the same time. You can try Truffle for free: analyse 100 tracks, write 20, no feature locked.

Updated: 8 October 2026