FrontRow Tips: Update (already)

Posted on | February 26, 2006 | No Comments

A day after I publish my first tip sheet on FrontRow, I find out that Lostify is not the only GUI interface for AtomicParsley. In fact there are several for the Macintosh and Windows platform. Since we are dealing with FrontRow, I’m only going to review the OS-X Applications.

Here we go!

AtomicParsley
This application that started it all. It was almost a year ago when AtomicParsley first showed up. It has improved its tagging abilities and its opensource code has brought about many interfaces on both PC and Mac platforms. Now, AtomicParsley was not designed with a user interface and it strictly a command line tagging tool. So if you don’t mind getting dirty in code its a great utility. Downsides is its non-exisiting batch capabilities and GUI. It is however the only utility to be able to overwrite the original document, so you don’t have temp files everywhere and potential duplicates in iTunes.
ID Infiltr8
This application was designed on AtonicParsley’s MP3 ID3 tagging abilities. Infiltrate’ batch process is great if you want to change individual tags (like track number, song name, etc.) for multiple files. The downside is that you may have to enter common information (such as artist, album) for each. For this reason I would probably recommend iTunes for editing the ID tags, for the common tags. Lastly IDInfiltr8 is designed to work on OS-X 10.4+

vID Infiltr8
Brought to you from the fine makers of IDInfiltr8 comes vID Infiltr8 (the v stands for video). This tagger is the compliment to IDInfilitr8; concentrating on the tagging of video files. Once again this tagger allows for the batch editing of individual files. Common tags will be have to be entered manually, as it doesn’t carry common tags from file to file. Another feature missing in other taggers is the artwork. Yes video can have artwork (even though FrontRow ignores it) This application is now my favorite when it comes to tagging files. Its easy to use and I like that I can skip between files, modify their tags, before the actually tagging process begins. This application is also designed for Mac OS X 10.4 +.
Lostify
My previous favorite tagger, is awesome. It gives you all the options available for a video file, including the artist and album fields which are important for Music Videos. The lock cell feature is perfect for carrying common data from one file to the other. The downside, while being able to do a batch of files and carry common data, Losity embeds the files one at a time, which can make tagging files a long process. The latest version of Losity 3.2 is up-to-date with the latest built of AtomicPasley, and it eliminated the Overwrite option which was flakey at best in previous version. Another advantage of Lostify is that it will work with Panther(OS-X 10.3.9) however FrontRow will not, so the advantage is trivial on a FrontRow Tips page.
Parsley Is Atomicly Delicious
The Best GUI interface goes to this application. The no-nonsense clean PAD is great for modifying individual video files. Selecting the video type bring up the relevant tags for that file, so your not inundated with fields. Streamline to only include present relevant tags, PAD’s only drawbacks is its inability to do batches. The overwrite original option didn’t work for me, but this seems to be a draw back for all the applications.