This is a set of personal notes and a tutorial for everyone about how to correctly organize and tag MP3 files using the id3 command line tool.

General way to tag MP3 files:

id3 -M -2 [-v] [-t title] [-a artist] [-l album] [-n tracknr] [-y year] [-g genre] [-c comment] file.mp3

Recursively tag with ID3v2 a tree with many directories containing MP3 files, setting artist and genre:

id3 -v -2 -R -a "João Gilberto" -g "Bossa Nova" *mp3

Rewrite the Title tag of each file capitalizing the first letter of each word:

id3 -v -2 -t %+t *mp3

Rename files based on track number and song name (as “02 – Song Name.mp3″) padding a zero to track numbers smaller than 10:

id3 -v -2 -f "%#n - %t.mp3" *mp3

The id3 program is available for multiplatforms, including Linux and Windows. You can find RPM packages for Fedora Linux on my site.