Zune Thoughts: AudioShell ID3 Tag Editor

“I come across a lot of forum postings where people ask how to change the thumbnail art (or cover art) for video files. By default, most video conversion software don’t specify the cover art for a converted video file, so the Zune Software will simply use some random frame from the beginning of the video. The standard tools that people use for setting the meta data for a video file (e.g., TigoTago, zMeta, dSHARPIE) don’t have provision for editing or defining the cover art.”

The Zune Tips Webblog spotted this great utility and it was worth mentioning here. The main thing that caught my eye was the ability to change the album art for a video file - which would make AudioShell a very non-standard tool! This is a great feature since the random frame that you usually end up with isn’t always what you want to see. Especially nice is the fact that this isn’t really a program you run on its own: after you install it, you can edit the ID3 tags by right clicking the file itself! Pretty nifty and free.