AudioShell is a Windows Explorer extension which enables viewing and editing of ID3 and other tags.

You may be able to do some of this already, depending on your Windows version and other software you might have installed, but AudioShell takes the idea further in several ways.

The first benefit is additional support for many more formats, covering both audio and some video formats.

Here’s the official list.

•mp3 (all ID3 tag versions)
•Windows Media (wma, asf and wmv files)
•Apple iTunes aac (m4a, m4p, m4r and m4b) and mp4 and aiff files
•ogg, flac, opus, speex (vorbis comment tags)
•mpc, mp+, monkey’s audio, wav pack, optim frog, true audio – APE tags, APEv2 tags
•wav – ID3v2.3 tag in ‘id3 ‘ RIFF chunk and LIST INFO chunk
•dsf (DSD/Direct-Stream Digital) – ID3v2.3 tag

Browse and edit file tags directly from Windows Explorer

The package also supports more tags, including lyrics and cover art (although it won’t find these automatically), and is able to display and edit the tags for multiple selected files.

AudioShell enhances Explorer’s native abilities by adding more tags to Windows Explorer columns, and includes a thumbnail handler which shows album art in Explorer.

The tag editor may be launched by selecting one or more files, right-clicking and choosing “AudioShell”.

The core editor isn’t just about typing lines of text– it’s smarter than that. URLs are recognised, and can be launched separately with a click; lyrics can be loaded to or from a text file; there’s drag and drop support for cover art, and more.

The package is completed with a tool which can rename multiple files to have a consistent naming structure, again using whatever combination of tags you like. This is very basic and can’t begin to complete with a full-strength batch renaming tool, but it’s a welcome extra and just might save you some time.

AudioShell is a freeware application for Windows Vista and later.