← TagWax

TagWax — User Guide

Tag and organise your audio files, built with DJs in mind. Everything runs on your own machine.

What TagWax is for

Every music file has text stored inside it alongside the audio: the artist, the song title, the album, the year, the cover picture. That information is called the file's tags. It's what your music player, your phone and your DJ software read to show you what a track is — so when a song appears as Unknown Artist, or with the wrong album, it's the tags that are wrong, not the music.

Tags arrive messy, incomplete or plain wrong more often than you'd think, particularly on tracks bought from download stores. TagWax opens your files and shows you what's stored inside. You can add artwork and change or correct any information, and save it afterwards. It can fill gaps from the internet, rename files to match their tags, and — by listening to the audio — work out a track's speed and musical key.

Nothing reaches your files until you have seen a change list of every update and you have confirmed it.

Some words used here come from the world of DJing. If one is unfamiliar, there's a short glossary at the end.

Getting started

Add tracks multiple ways:

• Click ＋ Add Files and pick your audio files.
• Click ＋ Folder to add a whole folder at once — TagWax scans it all the way down, including subfolders.
• Drag files from File Explorer straight onto the window — a green outline shows it's ready to drop.

Tags can be read and written for MP3, M4A, FLAC, OGG, Opus, WAV, AIFF, APE and WMA.

Detection — BPM, key and energy — works on everything except APE and WMA, which can't be decoded for analysis. Their tags still edit normally.

Playback covers the same list. If a track ever can't be played, TagWax says so on the track rather than leaving you guessing, and tells you whether detection is affected too.

Your tracks appear in the list on the left. Click one to edit it. An orange dot on a track means it has unsaved changes; in the Multi table a changed value is followed by a small ⋯, so you can see at a glance which fields are unsaved.

Search in the top bar narrows the list to tracks whose title, artist, album, label or filename contain what you type — press Esc to clear it. Everything you can see is what the app acts on: Detect Missing scans the tracks on screen, not the ones hidden behind a search, and anything hidden drops out of the selection so a batch can't reach a track you aren't looking at. Save is the deliberate exception — it always offers every changed track, so a search can never quietly lose work.

Selecting several at once

• Ctrl-click to add or remove individual tracks from the selection.
• Shift-click to take everything between the current track and the one you click.

With several selected, the editor header shows how many, and typing into any field changes it on all of them. Where a field already differs between them it reads multiple values — type over it and they all match; leave it alone and they all keep what they had.

The track with the green edge marker is the primary one: its artwork and player are the ones shown. In Sunshine mode the edge marker will be dark orange.

Tidier names on the way in

TagWax tidies the messy filenames that download stores and DJ pools produce — 01_beat_mongrel_-_echoes_of_tomorrow(original_mix) arrives as artist Beat Mongrel, title Echoes Of Tomorrow (Original Mix). It only ever fills Title and Artist when they're empty, so it can't overwrite a tag the file already carries, and it lands as an unsaved edit you can review or revert. Turn it off in Settings → Importing.

Energy from comments

Energy isn't a standard tag, so most files arrive without one — but some DJ tools write it as text into the comment instead, like 10A - Energy 8. TagWax reads that on import and fills the Energy field from it, but only when that field is empty, so it never replaces a real value.

Otherwise, Energy appears when you run Detect. TagWax doesn't analyse automatically on import — a folder of a few hundred tracks would take a long time before you could touch anything. Use Detect Missing in Multi mode to do a whole crate when you're ready.

Your files stay where they are. TagWax opens the file you picked, edits the tags inside it and writes it back in place. Nothing is copied, moved or uploaded.

The four modes

Switch with the buttons at the top:

• Simple — the everyday fields: Title, Artist, Album, Album Artist, Genre, Year, Track, Comment.
• Pro — every tag the file carries, including Label, Catalogue Number, ISRC, Remixer, Producer, Copyright and Comment 2. Add field at the bottom takes any tag name and gives you an editable row for it, so you can fill in something the file hasn't got yet. It stays until you leave the app; once you've saved a value the tag comes back from the file itself.
• DJ — the focused fields that DJs reach for first: BPM, Key, Energy, Genre and Comment. Detect BPM, Key & Energy, plus a harmonic helper.
• Multi — your whole collection in one sortable table. Click a column heading to sort; click again to reverse. Edit any cell directly.

When the tempo comes out half or double

Beat detectors sometimes lock onto the wrong multiple. Drum & bass is a regular victim: a 174 BPM track often reads as 87. In DJ mode three controls sit beside the BPM field:

• ÷2 and ×2 halve or double the tempo across every selected track, as a single Ctrl+Z.
• ▶ Click starts a metronome at whatever tempo is in the field. Play the track underneath and the click sits over it, accenting every fourth beat so you hear the bar rather than just a pulse. Press ÷2 or ×2 while it's running and it retunes without stopping — flick between the two and you'll hear straight away which one locks.
• − / + push or pull the click onto the beat. Catching the downbeat with the start button is tricky, so start it roughly and nudge it into place.

The click stops when you stop the track, pick another track, or leave DJ mode.

Detecting in bulk

• Detect Missing works through every track on screen that has no tempo or key yet. It is lit while there is something to find and sits quiet once the crate is complete, so "is there anything left to do?" is answered by looking rather than clicking.
• Detect Selected re-analyses whatever you have highlighted, whether or not it already has a tempo and key — which is the point of it, since a reading you doubt is exactly the one Detect Missing skips.

The bar under the table shows how many tracks are loaded, how many are selected, and the shortcuts worth knowing.

Working in the grid

• Ctrl-click cells to select several at once — they highlight green.
• Then just type. Whatever you type into any one of them goes into all of them as you type, and the whole lot is a single Ctrl+Z. Esc drops the selection — though while you're typing in a cell, Esc throws that edit away first, so press it again to drop the selection.
• Or use the bar that appears: Fill… (type one value into every selected cell), Paste (drop your clipboard into them all), Clear, Whole Column (widen the selection to every row of the columns you've picked from) and Deselect.
• Building a harmonic set — switch Harmonic on in the toolbar first. It starts off, so the table stays plain until you ask for it. Then click a track and it becomes your reference, shown in the bar above the table. Now, at a glance down the list: a Mix column appears beside Key with a coloured swatch per track — green for a safe mix through to red for a clash, and a + or − for which way round the wheel (blank where direction means nothing). Matching tracks also carry a coloured edge bar, and everything else fades back so it's easy to skip. The bar counts how many will work. It goes on key alone — tempo is yours to judge.
• Pin locks the reference. Normally the reference is whichever single track you have selected, so it moves as you click around. Pin holds it on one track, so you can work through the rest of the crate and keep seeing what mixes with that one rather than with whatever you just landed on. Click it again to release.
• Art shows the cover for each track, and the rows grow to fit it. Click the Art heading to sort by whether a track has artwork — the quickest way to find everything still missing a cover. Untick it in Columns and the tight rows come back.
• Type and Time show the file format and length. They come from the file itself rather than from a tag, so they can't be edited.
• Column widths — columns size themselves to their contents and to the window, and the two you read most, Title and Artist, are the last to be squeezed. To set one yourself, drag the line between two headings. A column you've sized keeps that width whatever the window does. Double-click that same line to let it size itself again, or use Reset column widths in the chooser for the lot.
• Column order — drag a heading sideways to move that column, and a marker shows where it will land. Put the fields you actually work with next to each other and leave the rest out at the end. The order is remembered, and Reset column order in the chooser puts it back as it came. (Mix always follows Key, since it has no meaning away from it.)
• Choosing columns — right-click any column heading to open the chooser. By default any tag with a value on at least one track appears automatically; tick one to keep it visible even when empty, or untick a populated one to hide it. Your choices are remembered, and Reset to populated only puts it back. Title always stays.

How far you're willing to go

Keys that sit close together blend easily; keys further apart make a bigger statement and take more nerve. The buttons in the middle of the harmonic bar pick how adventurous you want the table to be, and the colours run green to red as the jump gets bigger.

• Safe (green) — the neighbouring keys and the relative major or minor. These are the blends that just work, and it's where TagWax starts.
• Shift (yellow) — two steps round the harmonic wheel. Still comfortable, but it lifts the energy going one way and eases it going the other.
• Acute (orange) — three steps round. A noticeable change of mood rather than a smooth join.
• Wild (red) — half an octave away. The furthest you can get from where you started, and a genuine gamble.
• All — every one of the above at once, each still in its own colour. The four buttons light up in their own colours here rather than All lighting on its own, so the row doubles as the key to what you’re looking at.

Whichever you pick, the tracks it covers stay lit and everything else fades back, so what's left on screen is the answer to the question you asked.

While Harmonic is on, a Mix column appears between Key and Energy. The colour repeats the group, and a + or − says whether the jump goes up or down the wheel — useful when you're deliberately building or releasing energy. The same key, its relative, and the half-octave jump have no direction to give, so those show the colour alone. Click the Mix heading to sort the crate by how far each track sits from your reference.

These four colours mean the same thing in every appearance, so orange is Acute whether you're in Dark or Sunshine.

Wheel, beside Pin, opens this guide at the harmonic wheel below — the circle these colours are measured round, if you want to see where a jump actually lands.

Editing & saving

Nothing is written to your files until you preview and confirm it. This is a core feature of TagWax.

Type into any field to change it. Enter finishes with a field and Escape puts back what was in it — useful in the Multi grid, where clicking elsewhere to get out of a cell usually means landing in another one. When you're ready:

• Save to file (or Save Changed in Multi mode) opens a preview listing every change, old value struck through, new value beside it.
• Check it, then press Write to Files. Only then does anything touch your disk.
• Cancel, or press Esc, and every file is left exactly as it was.
• Revert throws away unsaved edits and goes back to what's on disk.
• Delete (or Backspace) removes the selected tracks from the list. Your files on disk are never touched — if any have unsaved edits you're asked first, because those edits would be lost.
• Undo and Redo — the ↶ ↷ buttons at the top of the window, or Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z (Ctrl+Y works too). They step through your last 10 edits — a typed change, a key pick, a detection, a whole batch. A burst of typing counts as one step, not one per letter, and resting the pointer on either button tells you what it will reverse. It's a safety net while you work: it isn't saved to disk, and it resets when you close the app.

If one file fails to save — it's open in another program, say, or marked read-only — the preview stays open, the files that did save drop off the list, and the one that failed tells you why. You are never left guessing which files changed.

Batch Tools

Select some tracks and click Batch Tools… (it's in the editor header, and in the bar at the top of Multi mode, where it acts on the whole list). Six tools, each showing a live before → after preview before you commit:

• Find/Replace — swap text in one field or across all of them, optionally matching case.
• Trim — chop a set number of characters off the start or end of a field.
• Sequence — number the tracks in list order. Numbers can be padded with leading zeros (01, 02, 03) so they sort correctly, and can carry an optional “/total”.
• Copy — copy one field into another, e.g. Artist into Album Artist. Optionally skip any that already have a value.
• Filename — pull tags out of the filename with a pattern like %artist% - %title%.
• Clean Up — trim stray spaces, collapse repeated ones, optionally apply Title Case, across every field.

Applying lands everything as unsaved edits, so it still goes through the save preview before touching your files — and the whole batch is a single Ctrl+Z, however many tracks it touched.

Rename from Tags

Click Rename… to build filenames out of the tags you've just tidied up. Pick a preset or write your own template from these tokens:

%artist% %albumartist% %album% %title% %track% %year% %genre% %bpm% %key%

A / in the template creates folders, so %albumartist%/%album%/%track% - %title% files a whole release away tidily. Track numbers are padded with leading zeros to the width you choose, and characters Windows won't allow in a filename are swapped for the replacement you pick.

The preview shows every old name beside its new one before anything moves.

Renaming automatically after detecting

If you'd rather not open the dialog each time, Settings → Rename Files can rename a track the moment detection finishes, using one of five ready-made patterns. That renames in place in the same folder and never creates folders; use Rename… when you want full templates.

Running detection again replaces what it named before rather than adding to it, however many times you re-analyse it.

Try a template on a copy first. Renaming moves the real files. Duplicate one track, add it, and check the result before running a template across your library.

Export a playlist

Export Playlist… in Multi mode writes an .m3u8 of your crate — the selected tracks if you've picked several, otherwise everything in the list. It carries each track's artist, title and length, so players show proper names rather than filenames.

Paths are written relative to the folder you imported from, so save the playlist at that folder's root and it stays portable — move the whole folder somewhere else, or onto a USB stick, and it still resolves.

Artwork

• Click the cover in the editor header to choose an image.
• Remove art deletes the embedded artwork.
• Online Lookup can fetch covers for you.

The player

Space plays and pauses wherever you are — unless you're typing in a field, where it stays a space.

Under the track title: play/pause and the track waveform. Click anywhere on it to jump to that point; the part already played is filled in.

The three kill switches — Bass, Mid, High — fully cut that band when you tap them (they light red); tap again to restore. Useful for hearing what a track is actually built from.

You can change the frequency of the bands in Settings → EQ Kill Crossovers. Changes apply instantly.

DJ features

• Key notation — type a key in any format (Am, F#m, 11A, 4m) and TagWax understands it, then shows it in whichever notation you chose in Settings.
• Mixes with — the row shows the keys that blend well with the current one, with the track's own key filled in among them so you can see where it sits. Press and hold any of them to hear that key played, so you can check a blend by ear.
• Coloured bars in the track list — the list on the left carries the same bars as the Multi table, measured against whatever track you're on, so you can see what to reach for next without leaving the editor. All four colours show at once here and nothing is dimmed, because the list is how you reach a track. Tracks with no key, or a key that doesn't relate, simply get no bar.
• Detect BPM, Key & Energy (DJ mode) analyses the track and fills in all three, with a confidence figure and the alternative keys it considered. It runs entirely on your machine — no audio is sent anywhere.
• Energy is a 1–10 reading of how hard a track hits, blending loudness, rhythmic drive, brightness and high-frequency content. Warm-up material tends to land low, peak-time techno around 6–8. Like the key, treat it as a suggestion rather than a fact.
• In Multi mode, Detect Missing scans every track that has no BPM or key yet. The button is lit while there is something to find and fades once the crate is complete, so you can see whether there is work left without clicking it.

Detection results arrive as unsaved edits, so they go through the save preview like anything else.

The harmonic wheel

Everything TagWax does with keys rests on one old idea: the circle of fifths. Musicians have arranged the twelve keys this way for three hundred years, long before anyone thought of mixing records with it.

The arrangement isn't arbitrary. Each key sits next to the two keys that are most like it — step round by one and only a single note in the scale changes. Step round by six and you've swapped half of them. That single fact is the whole of harmonic mixing: keys that sit close together share most of their notes, so two tracks in neighbouring keys can play at the same time without fighting each other. Keys on opposite sides of the circle share the least, which is why a jump across it is a statement rather than a blend.

Each position also holds two keys — a major and a minor built from exactly the same notes, like A minor and C major. They're called relatives, and because the notes are identical they always work together. That's why the wheel has two rings.

The DJ notations are simply this circle with the music theory taken off the front. Instead of remembering that G♭ minor and A major go together, you read 11A and 11B and the answer is obvious. Same circle, easier labels — which is the entire point of them.

Here is that one circle written four ways. They are the four notations in Settings → Key Notation, and they describe identical keys — only the labels change.

Click any key to light up everything it relates to — in all four wheels at once, since they are the same circle.

Read any of them the same way: your neighbours either side, and your opposite number in the other ring, are the safe moves. Everything further round is a bigger jump, which is what the Safe, Shift, Acute and Wild buttons let you ask for.

About key detection (please read)

Key detection is a best guess, not a fact — and for electronic dance music it is genuinely hard. That is true of every key-detection tool there is, not just this one. Here is why, so you know when to trust it.

Why it's hard for techno and house

• There is often no single correct key. A lot of dance music is built on a riff, a stab and a bassline rather than clear chords. When the harmony is that sparse, trained musicians tend to disagree too.
• The tools disagree with each other. On real-world techno, even the most respected tools agree only about half the time.
• Major and minor get confused. A key and its relative (A minor and C major, say) share the same notes. On the wheel these sit right next to each other, so it is usually a small and still-mixable error.
• Drums and processing muddy the picture. Big kicks, hats and risers add energy that is not part of the harmony.

How to work with it — your ears are a tool

• Treat the detected key as a strong starting point, then hold the key pills to hear them against the track. Your ears are the final judge — that is the intended workflow, not a workaround.
• Watch the confidence figure. High means a clear tonal centre. Low means it is genuinely ambiguous, so lean on listening.
• Mixes with is forgiving by design: even if the key is one step out, the neighbours still line up for mixing.
• For a set, aim for what sounds good rather than what might be technically correct.

Online Lookup

Click Online Lookup… in the editor header to fill in details from the web. The search box is pre-filled from the track's artist and title; edit it and press Search, then Apply a match.

• iTunes — no setup. Good for title, album, genre, year, track number and cover art.
• Discogs — the deeper source for electronic and underground releases: label, catalogue number, year and styles. It returns release information rather than track information, so it fills the album-level fields and deliberately leaves your track title alone.

Cover art from Discogs

Discogs won't hand out cover images to anonymous searches, so artwork is switched off for that source until you add a free personal token. It's a one-off:

• Switch the source to Discogs and click Get one — it opens your Discogs developer settings.
• Choose Generate new token, copy it, paste it into the box and press Save.

The token is yours, it stays on your device, and it's only ever sent to Discogs to authorise your own searches. Remove takes it back out whenever you like — searching still works without it, just without covers.

Applied results are unsaved edits, so you review them in the save preview like everything else.

Online Lookup is the only part of TagWax that uses the internet, and only when you ask it to. Only the words in the search box are sent — never your audio files or any other information.

Settings

The gear icon in the top bar — the Guide button beside it opens this guide at any time:

• Text size — Small, Medium or Large. It scales the whole interface, not just the words, so the table and its columns grow with it. Medium is the default, and matches the Mac.
• Show hover tips — the little pop-up labels on buttons. Turn them off once you know your way around.
• Importing — whether to tidy Title and Artist from the filename as files come in.
• Update Tags — see below.
• Key Notation — read keys as Camelot (11A), Open Key (4m), Flats (G♭m) or Sharps (F♯m), with an optional second reading shown alongside. This changes what you see; the tag written into the file stays in Camelot so other DJ software still recognises it.
• Detection — whether detection is allowed to fill the Key, Tempo and Energy tags. Only fill missing tempos is the useful one: detection occasionally lands on half or double time, so once you've corrected a BPM by hand this stops a later bulk detect undoing your fix while still filling the gaps.
• EQ Kill Crossovers — where the Bass/Mid and Mid/High frequency splits sit.
• About — which version of TagWax you're running. Worth quoting if you ever report a problem.

Writing key and tempo into your tags

Some DJ software reads the dedicated Key and BPM tag fields; some only shows you the artist, title and comment. Settings → Update Tags covers the second case by writing the same information as plain text into whichever field you choose.

Pick what to write — the key on its own, the energy, the tempo, or a combination — and where to write it: in front of the artist, in front of or after the song name, in front of the comments, or replacing the comments entirely. Each option shows an example of exactly what you'll get.

There's also a switch to put the energy level in front of Comment 2, the field Traktor calls the grouping tag.

Re-running detection replaces, it doesn't stack. TagWax recognises what it wrote last time and removes it before writing again.

The key is written in whichever notation you've chosen — so if you set Open Key, that's what goes into your files as well as what you see on screen. Choose Camelot if you want the widest compatibility with other DJ software.

Glossary

• Tag — text stored inside a music file describing it: artist, title, album, year, artwork and more. Editing tags never changes the audio.
• BPM — beats per minute, the speed of a track. A slow ballad might be 70; house music sits around 120–130; drum & bass around 174.
• Key — the set of notes a piece of music is built from, such as A minor. Two tracks in related keys sound pleasant played together; unrelated keys can clash.
• Camelot / Open Key — shorthand systems that give each musical key a short code (11A, 4m) so related keys are easy to spot at a glance. Same information as “A minor”, quicker to read.
• Harmonic mixing — choosing the next track so its key fits the one playing. It's why TagWax shows which keys go together.
• Circle of fifths — the traditional arrangement of the twelve keys that harmonic mixing is built on, and what Camelot and Open Key are shorthand for. See The harmonic wheel.
• Energy — TagWax's own 1–10 rating of how hard a track hits. Not a standard tag; useful for ordering a night from gentle to peak.
• Crate — a DJ's word for a collection of tracks, from the days of carrying records in one. Here it just means the tracks you've loaded.
• Beatmatch — lining two tracks up so their beats land together. Easiest when the two tempos are close, which is why TagWax highlights near matches.
• Bar — a group of beats, usually four, that music is counted in. The downbeat is the first beat of each bar.
• Waveform — the picture of the sound over time. Loud parts are tall, quiet parts are short.
• Playlist (.m3u8) — a small text file listing tracks in order. It points at your music rather than containing it, so the audio files must stay where they are.

Appearance

The picker in the top bar switches the look: Light, Dark, Minty and Sunshine.

Installing & offline use

TagWax installs from the Microsoft Store and behaves like any other Windows application — its own window, an entry in the Start menu, and you can pin it to the taskbar. There's nothing else to install, and no account to create.

It works completely offline. The key-detection model and the tag engine are part of the app and sit on your machine, so analysing a track never needs an internet connection. Online Lookup is the only feature that reaches the internet, and only when you ask it to.

Updates arrive through the Microsoft Store like any other app.