Lostify: Gotta Tag ‘Em All!

Most of us probably rip DVDs from time to time. iTunes can be a very powerful metadata tagger, but for some of us, it is just not powerful enough.

Yes, iTunes has many information fields that you can fill out, but there is still much more information that it does not let you add. For these, there is Lostify.

Lostify is a simple Metadata tagger for M4Vs (videos) and M4As (audio files), the perfect companion for Handbrake. It lets you fill out MCAA rating, Actors, Directors and every other piece of Metadata that iTunes can handle. The best part is that it is free!

The main window allows you to enter information about the TV show, movie or song. If you are tagging a TV show, there are more options such as production number, episode number, etc. These attributes are important for TV shows because they reflect how your episodes are going to be sorted. You can also add copyrights, encoding tools, full dates and ratings: features that iTunes has never let you have unless you bought directly from the iTunes Store!

If you are tagging a video (movie or TV show), you can add directors, producers, actors and writers in the side pane. In the long description of the video, it will list these people under the main description, just like on the movies you can get from the iTunes Store. Adding a description is a great part of Lostify because iTunes will not let you add one.

The preference pane has many options like how to write the tags and iTunes integration. Overwriting the original tags is dangerous, but it is also the fastest way. The rest of the ways take about the same amount of time. The time for them is based on how big the file you are tagging is, because it has to copy it. The advanced settings can help remove a little bit of space, but they are not that useful. You can save a few kilobytes by checking “reclaim free space in tags”, but that’s it.

The iTunes integration of Lostify is excellent. You can just select a song or movie in iTunes, go to the scripts menu, and choose “Lostify”. You must, of course, turn on “Add Lostify to iTunes Script menu” in Lostify to be able to do that. Automatically adding the files to iTunes only helps if you are tagging something, and then want to bring it into iTunes after. It does not help if it already is in iTunes.

Lostify is by far the best Metadata editor for songs and movies on the Mac platform. It is still in BETA, so it will only get better. It is based off of the shell program AtomicParsely. You can get Lostify for free, but I do suggest that you donate, because Lostify is an exceptional piece of freeware.