A product from

• Frequently asked questions
• News archive
• Blog
• Help and tutorials
  • User Interface
  • Functions and tools
  • Configuration and customization
    • Album sorting and grouping
    • Artist Grouping
    • Auto Enqueue options
    • Change Track Details columns
    • Customize toolbar
    • Customizing a Music Explorer node
    • Equalizer
    • Library management
    • Options
      • General
      • Player
      • Views
      • Tools
      • Plug-ins
      • Tags
      • Pictures
      • Advanced
    • Select Play Queue columns
    • Track List sorting and grouping
  • Detailed information
  • Tutorials, tips and tricks
• Forum
• Customer Center
• Contact us
• About us

Tags Options

These options control how Helium Music Manager should process music file tags.

General

• Apply tags in background
  If this option is enabled (which it is by default), tags will be applied silently in the background. If the option is not enabled tags will be written to files while showing a dialog that cannot be hidden.

• Show progress dialog when applying tags
  If this option is enabled you will see a dialog each time that tags are applied to your files. This dialog can be hidden by clicking the Hide button. If this option is disabled no dialog will be shown and tags will be silently applied in the background.

• Update modified date when tagging files
  When selected, Helium Music Manager will update the files modified date when writing tags.

• Ignore read-only attributes
  This option will tell Helium Music Manager to try and save tags to files even though a file is marked as read-only. A file can be read-only for several reasons:

  • The file can be on read-only media (CD, DVD or a protected network drive). These files can never be written to.

  • The file may have been copied from read-only media to your hard disc. This file should be able to be written to, when this setting is enabled.

  • You may have manually set it to read-only to disable programs from editing the information in the file.

• Use ID3v1, ID3v2 and Lyrics3v2 tags
  This is the default setting which will write these tags to MP3 files. This setting should be used unless you have special wishes to use APEv2 tags.

• Use ID3v1 and APEv2 tags
  This option will write APEv2 tags instead of ID3v2 tags on MP3 files. Also note that Lyrics3 v2 tags are not allowed and will not be used when using APEv2 tags.

• Save as ID3v2.3
  This option tells Helium Music Manager not to write any ID3v2.4 specific fields.

• Save in ID3 v2.4 compatible mode
  This option tells Helium Music Manager to write backwards compatible tags so they can be read in players not supporting the ID3 v2.4 specifications (the latest standard). This may also be an important option for many people who use portable music players (such as Creative's Zen or Apple's iPod), since some players do not yet support ID3 v2.4. Selecting this box will tell Helium Music Manager to write all ID3v2.4 tags but set the version to ID3v2.3 so players not supporting ID3v2.4 will be able to read all information (except the version 2.4 specific fields).

• Save as ID3 v2.4
  This option is default and will save tags in the ID3 v2.4 format.

• The Padding value controls how much extra space Helium Music Manager will write at the end of the ID3 v2.x tag. By adding a little padding (empty space) Helium Music Manager can add new information to the tags without slowing down the tagging process. If no padding is used Helium Music Manager will need to rewrite the entire file each time a tag is changed, which results in slower file writings. The padding has a default value of 2048 which should only be modified if necessary.

• Save iTunes specific tags 
  This option will save additional iTunes compatible tags. When this option is enabled the following things will be applied to existing tags:

  • When saving the Release Type field to Compilation, Sampler or Soundtrack the non-standard Part of a compilation (TCMP in ID3v2) tag specifically used by iTunes will be set to 1.

  • The Band/Orchestra field will be disabled in the tag editors.

  • The Album Artist field in the tag editors will save to the Band/Orchestra (TPE2 in ID3v2) tag field.

• Save play counter to tags
  This option will update the play counter (PCNT ID3v2 tag frame) in your files when they are being played. This is good to use if you are using other programs that supports this information.

• Save in Unicode
  This option enables you to save ID3v2 tags in Unicode format. This is usefull if your tags contains contents with foreign characters.

• Save BPM in PCDJ compatible mode
  This option will save the BPM field in a format that the PCDJ software can read correctly.

• Save rating to MusicMatch Jukebox
  This option will save all rating values set by you in both the tag format that Helium Music Manager uses as well as in MusicMatch Jukebox's tag format.
  
  Note:
  MusicMatch Jukebox does not support half ratings. A half rating in Helium Music Manager will be rounded up to the nearest star in MusicMatch Jukebox.
• Pad track/cd with a leading zero
  When enabled, track and cd values less than ten will be written with a leading zero (e.g. 2 becomes 02).

Custom Fields

This page enables you to set names for the five custom tag fields you can use in Helium Music Manager.

These custom fields are used on both tags and in the Database and you can use them for any content you like.

You can map a custom field to a specific tag field/frame by entering the name of the field in the Map to tag frame text box.
When a field is mapped, contents from this field will be mapped to the custom field when reading tags.
This can be usefull to increase compatibility with tag fields not supported by Helium Music Manager.

Word/Text Replacer

This list includes two texts; an Original and a Replacement and a setting to define whether to treat this text replacement as a Word.

1. Click the Add button to add a new text replacement.

2. Type the original word in the Original word box. Case will be ignored when doing the comparison.

3. Type the word that should replace the original word in the Replace with box.

4. Optionally select the Treat as Word box to treat the text replacement as a Word. This option should be enabled in most cases. When this option is not enabled, the text in the Original word box will be replaced in all texts, disregarding whether the text is in the middle of a word.
   
   Example:
   If you have the word dont in the Original word box and don't in the Replace with box, the word Mastodont would be replaced with Mastodon't if the Treat as Word option was disabled.

5. Click OK.

Note:
You can edit or delete word replacements by selecting an item in the list and clicking on the Edit or the Remove buttons.

Define the characters that should be used to delimit words, from the text box at the bottom.

Capitalizer

This page contains settings that control how text strings should be capitalized or case converted.

1. Sentence capitalization
   This option will convert the first character in each sentence to upper case and the rest of the characters to lower case.

2. Word Capitalization
   This option will convert the first character in each word to upper case and the rest of the characters in each word to lower case.

3. UPPERCASE conversion
   This option will convert all text to uppercase.

4. Lowercase conversion
   This option will convert all texts to lowercase.

5. No capitalization
   This option will leave all text as it is.

6. Custom capitalization
   This option will capitalize the character following the ones listed below. Type the characters after one another in the list. The default custom capitalization list is: -) ./:(

7. Custom capitalization list
   This list is used to define words that should always have a custom capitalization. Just enter the words that you want to custom capitalize, separating each word onto a separate line. To remove a word, just delete the line containing the word.

Note:
An example:

You have a title that looks like this:
last night a dj saved my life (from a broken heart)

By using custom capitalization a space (" ") and a parenthesis ("(") is included in the default list.
The above title would then be converted to:
Last Night A DJ Saved My Life (From A Broken Heart)

The space (" ") and the parenthesis ("(") tells the capitalize function to always capitalize the first character following the characters in the list. Also note that the DJ text is converted to upper case since it's included in the default custom capitalization list.

Multiple Artist Commands

Multiple Artist Commands are used in the Tag Editors during extraction of multiple artists. Extraction can either occur by manually invoking the operation from the Multiple Artist Editor (by clicking Extract) or if you have the setting Auto-extract Multiple Artists active in any of the Tag Editors.

The topmost list contains entries used to identify commands that will split a text into multiple artists. The value in the Original column will be used to identify the command. This can optionally be replaced during the split to maintain consistency, with the value in the Replacement column.

1. Click the Add button to add a new command.

2. Type the original word in the Original box.

3. Type the command that should replace the original command in the Replace box.

4. Click OK.

Note:

• You can edit or delete word replacements by selecting an item in the list and clicking on the Edit or the Remove buttons.

The input field at the bottom defines a list of word combinations that should not be split automatically. Enter any combination of words, separate entries on new lines.