Atomic Parsley is the Missing Ingredient to All MP4’s

iPods are the one device that define today’s generation. As we all know, iTunes is Apple’s application for organizing media and importing it onto an iPod. When I bought my first iPod, I quickly realized iTunes was lacking some easy tools for batch tagging my MP4 videos. After time, without proper tagging, the MP4s in your iTunes Library can become disorganized and impossible to find when imported on the iPod. The command line program Atomic Parsley fixed this problem, but was unusable by some less intense computer users. After time, different GUIs were created from “Atomic Parsley”, all with slight differences in features. Today I will explain MetaX, vID Infiltr8, and Lostify.

vID Infiltr8 was the first tagger that was tested. It has the basic features that come with Atomic Parsley, for example, tagging the “Artist”, “Title”, “Album”, “Show Name”, “Episode”, etc. The reason I turned to this tagger first was its presets. It allows its users to set defaults for any of its tags including artwork and is located in the application’s preferences so it is impossible to change by accident. The one downside is its many bugs. Occasionally, after spending hours of time tagging, this program would not tag the MP4s. Along that disastrous bug, iTunes’s artwork tagger only occasionally complies with vID Infiltr8’s artwork tagging. As of now, I suggest only using this program if all others fail.

I stumbled upon Lostify shortly after I found vID Infiltr8. I switched instantly because vID Infiltr8 had exasperated me with its numerous bugs which outweighed what I had fallen in love with. Lostify was aesthetic, clean, and took up the least “screen real estate”. It has the same tagging features as vIDInfiltr8, but it has the ability to list the cast and crew of all actors in the MP4 which vID Infiltr8 lacks. Its interface is a big problem. With Lostify it is impossible to have real batch tagging. Lostify displays a tagging window for one MP4 after another, but never at the same time. With this “feature” you can not create all of the labels and then tag the MP4s, which would save you time. This is not horrible, but I began searching for a better MP4 tagger. For more information, read Joe Turner’s article on Lostify.

MetaX it truly my favorite MP4 tagger. It takes advantage of your Apple by using its iSight unlike Lostify and vIDInfiltr8 which truly sets it apart of the rest. MetaX has a bar code scanner which is great for anyone with a newer Mac, IMDb and Amazon compatibility to search for the information you need, a movie poster searcher for the perfect movie artwork cover, and if the poster search fails, a video screen-capturer to get the perfect artwork for your MP4. All of these features save me time and I would love to pass the savings on to you. When you are done with your encoding, you can have MetaX “moo” to alert you.

All three of the taggers, MetaX, vID Infiltr8, and Lostify, are available to download today for free. I encourage all who want to organize their iPods to download a copy of one of these programs today. If you know of any other worthy taggers that I might have forgoten, please include them in the comments below.

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