I’ve always used iTunes to manage my music, and just recently, I got a Zune HD.

Here’s how I fixed up my ID3 Tags, and transferred my music to Zune.

Step 1: Get all your music in one folder

This will make it easier for iTunes to fix your folder structure

Step 2: Let iTunes manage your music

1. Go to “Edit/Preferences”
2. Click on “Advanced” and go to the “General” Tab
3. Choose a folder where you want all of your music stored e.g. “C:\Users\Amir\Music“
4. tick “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library”
5. Click “OK”

Step 3: Fix your song names, add album art

This is pretty self-explanatory. Click a song once to edit, or select a few and right click to batch edit (“Get Info”). To add artwork to your songs,  just drag them.

Step 4: Make iTunes save new info to the MP3 tags

1. Select all of your tracks by pressing “Ctrl + A“
2. Right click on any song
3. Click “Convert ID3 Tags”
4. Pick version 2.4 and click “OK“

Step 5: Copy album art to respective folders

After you made iTunes manage your music, it turned your messy list of songs, into songs grouped by directories. A song is put into a folder named by its artist and album.

e.g. C:\Users\Amir\Music\ARTIST\ALBUM\TRACK.mp3

Zune doesn’t use the album art that is embedded inside the MP3, so we need to extract the album art that’s in the MP3 as folder.jpg and put it in the ALBUM folder. To do so, we will be using a shareware software called iArt. Download it here.

1. Click on “Options/Extras“
2. Mark “Overwrite existing folder.jpg files“
3. Click “Start Wizard“
4. Close iArt when it’s done

Step 6: Use MP3Tag to further fix the tags and art

1. Download MP3Tag here
2. Pick the directory on the left where you store your music, e.g. C:\Users\Amir\Music
3. Click “View” then click on “Customize Columns”
4. Click “New” then type in the following without quotes:   Name: “Art”    Value: “%_covers%”    Field: “%_covers%”
5. Click OK, MP3Tag will now display a 1 if the MP3 has a album art file.

Now we need to reset the album art. If you make a mistake at any point in MP3Tag, you can press “Ctrl + Z” to undo.

1. Select all songs with “Ctrl + A“
2. Click “View“, then click “Extended tags“
3. Click on the red X

Now we import the folder.jpg that we made with iArt:

1. Click on the “Actions (Quick)” button
2. Choose “Import cover from file as your action”
3. Type in “folder.jpg” as the Format string.
4. Click “OK“

Now we clean the tags and put them in a format Zune can read:

1. In MP3Tag click on “Tools” then “Options” then “Tags” and then “MPEG“
2. In “Read” only tick “ID3v2“
3. In “Write” tick only “ID3v2” and then selec “ID3v2.3 UTF-16“
4. In “Remove” tick “ID3v1″ and “APE” and then click “OK“
5. Select all your files with “Ctrl + A” and the click the “Save” () icon in the toolbar.
6. Then click on the “X“ in the toolbar. This will remove all bad tags from your files.

Step 7: Import your library into Zune

1. Open the Zune Software
2. Remove the songs that are currently in your library
3. Go to “Settings” and click “Collection“
4. Add the folder where your music is

If you do all of this successfully, you will now see perfect album art and working ID3 Tags on your Zune. It really improves the Interface on the Zune HD, which is picture based.

Comment if you need any help.

id3, itunes, mp3, zune

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