Helium offers several powerful tools to modify and fine-tune the tags on your audio files:
- The Tag Editor
- The Advanced Tag Editor
- Direct editing
- Quick editor
The Tag Editor
The Tag Editor is the primary tag editor in Helium which enables you to quickly edit multiple files at once using a spreadsheet user interface.
The major benefit with this tag editor is that it shows a great overview of all your files' tags at once, as opposed to the Tag Editor (advanced) where instead you work with one file at a time.
The Tag Editors user interface is reused between different tools in Helium to give a similar user interface:
- Edit subtracks
- Split audio files
- CD Ripper
The Tag editor works in two modes, depending on your selection of input files: Album mode or Track mode.
If you select an album and start the Tag editor and all files from the album contains the exact same album name, it will enable access to the album mode.
This allows you to display an extra pane to the right in the Tag editor which lists fields that are common for all files in the album, such as album name, album artist, release type and more.
Changing one of these fields will automatically apply the value to all files from the album, which enables a very quick way of editing album information.
The track mode does not enable this right pane and its functions.
Working with the Tag editor
The tag editor displays one file per row and its attributes as a column. You can configure which columns to use for editing by clicking the Select columns... button on the top toolbar.
Select a column and start typing to start the editing of the contents in the columns. There are cells of different types adjusted for which data type they are connected to.
Some cells are more complex than other and can contain a button at the right with an ellipsis icon (...). Click this button to open the specific editor connected to the column.
Apart from manual editing of contents there are several commands available to help you to speed up the tagging process:
- Apply will apply the selected cell value to all cells in the selected column. This command is very useful for quickly copying a value to the entire column e.g. the album name. You can also access the Apply command by pressing CTRL+D.
- Apply Down works in the same way as Apply, but Apply Down will only apply the current cell value to the remaining cells in the column. You can also access the Apply Down command by pressing Shift+CTRL+D.
- Auto Track will fill the selected column with a value that starts at 1 and is incremented by one for each row. Use the auto track command to quickly generate track number series for an album. Please note that Auto Track only works in numeric cells.
- The Extract menu contain several methods to extract multiple data from one cell to other cells.
- The Switch menu contain several methods to switch data between cells.
- Calculate will allow you to calculate different data for the selected file/files.
These commands are available from the context menu and some of them from the top toolbar.
For more details about working with the Tag Editor, click this link.
The Advanced Tag Editor
The Advanced Tag Editor is used to add and edit information of your tracks with a focus of working with detailed information for one file at a time.
Working with the Advanced Tag Editor
When the Advanced Tag Editor is started, it will load the first file in the selected input files and presents its contents on multiple tabs, based on the information group.
Start to type within a field to change the value.
To avoid making the same modifications multiple times you can lock a certain field by pressing the lock icon to the left of the control.
When a field is locked, the data is carried over to the next file when a new file is loaded.
For more details about working with the Advanced Tag Editor, click this link.
Direct editing
Direct editing allows you to quickly edit and correct tag data whilst browsing.
This editing is available from all track list views except for the Play queue.
To activate direct editing mode simply right-click in the tracklist control and select Toggle edit mode. (This action can be mapped to a custom keyboard shortcut)
When this mode is active, it works similar to the Tag editor. Start to type within a field to change it's contents.
To apply changes that are made, click the Apply button at the bottom.
Quick editor
The Quick Editor is available from views with a track list and can be toggled on/off from View > Quick editor.
When you select one file with the Quick Editor visible, the fields will be populated with the tag data from the selected file.
You can directly change the contents and then press Save changes to apply them to the file.
Click this link to read more about the Quick Editor.
Tagging with dynamic content
In both the Tag editor and the Advanced tag editor you can use something called Dyanmic tagging.
Click this link to read more about this topic
Supported tag formats
Helium supports all standard tag formats for each supported file type. You will never need to think about which specific tag format that should be used during tagging work - Helium will control that automaticaly for you.
The following file types and file formats are supported:
- AAC - Ape v2 tags
- FLAC - Vorbis comments
- M4A/M4B/M4P - M4* Atoms
- Monkey Audio - Ape v2 tags
- MPEG plus - Ape v2 tags
- MP3 - ID3 v2.3/2.4 and ID3 v1.1 tags. Ape v2 tags are supported for reading and preserving replay gain information
- Ogg vorbis - Vorbis comments
- Wave - Wave (RIFF) tags
- WavePack - Ape v2 tags
- WMA - WMA tags
Click here for detailed information about each tag-format.