Most audio files carry metadata right inside them — artist, album, title, year, genre, and sometimes much more. This information is stored in ID3 tags (for MP3 files) or equivalent metadata formats for other file types. The Embedded Info sub-tab reads those tags and copies the data into your library.
If your audio files came from a well-organized source — a music store purchase, a professionally tagged music service, a broadcast library — there's a good chance this sub-tab will fill in most of your metadata in one click.
Select the songs you want to process in the middle pane (use ⌘A to select all visible songs), then click Dig for Data!. Librarian reads the embedded metadata from each selected audio file and compares it to what's already in your library.
Before the import runs, you choose how to handle conflicts — cases where a library entry already has a value in a field and the embedded tag has something different:
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Fill blanks only | Only writes to fields that are currently empty in the library. Existing values are left untouched. This is the safer option if your library already has carefully edited metadata. |
| Override existing values | Writes the embedded tag value to the library regardless of what's already there. Use this when you trust the embedded tags more than the current library data. |
Librarian reads the following fields from embedded tags, if they're present:
Fields that don't have a corresponding library column — or whose embedded tags are blank — are simply skipped.
Genre tags in particular can be surprisingly inconsistent — one file might say "Rock", another "Classic Rock", another "rock" (lowercase). After running an embedded info import, it's worth filtering by Genre in the song list and doing a quick scan for anything that looks out of place.
The status bar shows a summary when the scan is complete — how many files were processed, how many had useful data, and how many fields were updated across the batch. If you want to review the changes field by field, switch to the Edit Attributes sub-tab and select individual songs.
If a file's embedded tags are corrupt or in an unexpected format, Librarian skips that file and moves on. It won't crash, but it will note any problem files in the status bar. If several files seem to have been skipped, they may need their tags repaired in a dedicated tag editor before Librarian can read them.
Some audio files — particularly older recordings or files ripped from CDs without a proper ripper — have no embedded metadata at all. If that's the case, the Embedded Info tool will run without error, but nothing will change in your library. You'll need to fill in the metadata manually via the Attributes tab, or try extracting it from the filenames using the Filenames sub-tab.