# Yate Help

Yate is an application dedicated to people who are serious about tagging their audio ... and video files. The application will tag mp3 (includes mp2), m4a (AAC, ALAC), mp4 (AAC, ALAC, video), m4v, flac, aiff (aifc, aif), dff, dsf and wav files. Note that Yate being primarily an audio editor, will only tag video files which contain at least one audio track. Yate is especially proficient in its handling of the ID3 specification. The ID3 specification describes how tagging information is encoded and interpreted in mp3 files. There is very little in the ID3 specification that Yate does not implement.

Your audio and video files are important to you! Yate allows you to completely revert to your initial file contents and to back out of all changes you've made since selecting files to edit . . . in any order.

Yate allows the linking of files to iTunes, either by dragging files from iTunes or by using the link menu item. Once a file is linked, you can import or export rating, play count and other information between the two applications. You can even have Yate add new files to iTunes, automatically creating the link along the way.

Any file's metadata can be output to a text file or to a plist which is a Mac formatted XML file. Tagging information can also be imported from plist files.

All of your settings, customization and user defined components can be exported for backup or for sharing with other users. This is especially important when defining your own actions which you might want to share with others.

For more information, please read some of the topics found below. Context sensitive help for the current panel that you're viewing may always be obtained by using the Help>Help for current context menu item. You can even place an icon for this function on the completely customizable toolbar!

Access to our forum and to online resoures including sample actions, templates and additional documentation is available from the Help menu.

Happy Tagging!

Topics:

Getting Started

The Main Window

Opening files

The Open Mode ... Controlling what gets opened

The Current Selection, the Editing State, Red Light Green Light and What's With All Those Round Colored Buttons?

What's With the Blue Text?

Multiple Items and Multiple Values

Previewing Tracks and Other Files

Interacting with iTunes

Actions

How Actions Execute

Automatically Running an Action When Saving Files

Action Pending Window

Variables

Lists

Escape Sequences

Alphabetic Case Transformations

How Ratings Work

Text Encoding

Application Preferences

Mapping FLAC comments to fields

Syncing Preferences Between Multiple Copies of Yate

Batch Processing, the Batch Processor Wizard & Data File Processing

The Multi Field Editor

The Combined Credits Editor

The Custom Panel Editor Editor

The Artwork Viewer

Logging Data and the Log Viewer

Snapshots

Copying Metadata from One Album to Another

Rename Templates

File to Tag Templates

Linking and Adding Files to iTunes

iTunes, Classical Metadata and the Grouping Field

Using iTunes to Look for Missing Artwork

Discogs

Authorizing Yate to Search Discogs

MusicBrainz

Beatport

Authorizing Yate to Search Beatport

The Movie DB

Unattended Metadata Lookups

Search fanart.tv

Databases & CSV/TSV Files

Apply Track Database Metadata Changes

Query Databases

Locating Missing Tracks in an Album

Duplicate Identification Using Track Databases

Deprecated Items:

Things you can do, but shouldn't

Reference:

Help indexed by Menu Items

Tag Mapping Table

Fields, Frames and Atoms - What's In and What's Out

Functions Affected by Modifier Keys

Action Functions

Escape Sequences

Regular Expression Metacharacters

Regular Expression Operators

Regular Expression Replace Template Format

Regular Expression Flag Options

ICU Regular Expressions

MusicBrainz Cover / Art Types

The ID3 specifications can be found at: www.id3.org. Yate reads all ID3 formats and by default writes to the latest specification which is ID3V2.4. Yate can be configured to write to the ID3V2.3 specification. The Main Structure document describes the overall structure of an ID3 tag while the Native Frames document describes the components (frames) of a tag.

Credits

More information:

2ManyRobots homepage

Forum

Resources