Spongefork has announced ShadowTag 2.1, an update to its free audio metadata editor for macOS. Version 2.1 adds Find and Replace across a whole project, read-only MXF support through Apple’s Pro Video Formats package, immediate loading for large playlists, and faster tag saves to large MP4 and M4A files.
Find And Replace
Find > Find and Replace opens a floating window that searches text across every playlist in a project, the current playlist, or a selection. A search can cover all metadata — tags, custom tags, BEXT, and iXML text fields — or only the fields the user picks, with Match Case, Whole Word, Regular Expression, and Ignore Accents options. Ignore Accents also treats full-width and half-width characters and curly and straight quotes as the same, variants that turn up in tags written by Windows tools and older Japanese software.
Results list every file and field that would change, with old and new values side by side and the playlists each file belongs to, before anything is written. Replace All applies the full set; Replace Selected applies only the rows the user chooses. The window stays open so several searches can be tried in turn, and a replace undoes in a single step. BEXT dates, times, UMID, and loudness values are left out of the default All Metadata scope so a broad replace cannot break their format, though they can still be targeted by name. Replacements become unsaved edits like any other change in ShadowTag.
MXF And Protected Files
With Apple’s free Pro Video Formats package installed, ShadowTag opens MXF files read-only: audio playback, waveforms, technical details, and the container’s own metadata, including vendor, application, operational pattern, spoken language, and creation date.
Files protected by Apple’s DRM, such as m4b and m4v purchases, are now labeled Protected and say they cannot be played, instead of reporting a generic playback error.
Large Playlists And Everyday Work
Large playlists now appear immediately, each row showing its number and filename first while the remaining columns fill in behind, and selecting a large playlist no longer re-reads every file’s bookmark. Tag saves to large MP4 and M4A files no longer rewrite the whole file on disk.
The File tab’s media preview now sits on a draggable divider whose height is saved with the workspace. The Rename to UCS Convention dialog lists every file in the playlist with its status and counts of what will be renamed, what is already named, and what has no category. The window for files changed on disk now shows thumbnails, playlist membership, and paths. Each of these lists offers Show in Finder from its contextual menu.
Version 2.1 also restores toolbar and menu icons that were blank on older macOS versions, handles audio files with unreadable sections, reports the specific reason when a file cannot be saved, and fixes memory leaks.
Availability & Pricing
ShadowTag’s playback, organization, and analysis features — including full-text search, Find and Replace, Apple Music library import, and on-device batch analysis for loudness, BPM, musical key, and UCS category detection — remain free, with no time limit or file-count restriction.
ShadowTag Pro, a one-time $99 purchase that covers every future version, adds writing metadata to files, batch audio conversion, CSV export, renaming files to the UCS filename convention, and working with multiple projects.
ShadowTag 2.1 requires macOS 14.6 or later and is available in 11 languages.
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