How to organize music?

Question

You might also have the problem that the music on your computer is a mess. Programs like WMP or iTunes are not capable to identify the music and sort it into categories.

Is there a solution (a program, a mod or a add-on) which scans my computer for music, erases duplicates, adjusts volume, categorizes in genres & quality, adds missing titles and artist names?

I don’t want to spend a year doing it on my own.

Answer 1

I use MusicBrainz' Picard Tagger which allows you to add tags and move files to sorted folders and rename files. It not only uses your existing filenames and tags but also the audio footprint of any music. The database is quite large and collaborative.

MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site. You can use the MusicBrainz data either by browsing this web site, or you can access the data from a client program — for example, a CD player program can use MusicBrainz to identify CDs and provide information about the CD, about the artist or about related information. You can also use the MusicBrainz Tagger to automatically identify and clean up the metadata tags in your digital music collections.

It will not scan your entire hard drive and do the entire work for you but it still removes a lot of pain when sorting music.

Answer 2

There's no software available which can do everything you want unattended, but there are a lot of tools and utilities which can make life easier for what you want.

That said, I've been very happy with Mp3 Tag Tools, an open source mp3 toolset with the following features:

• ID3v1.1 & ID3v2.x support
• Tag mp3s even while playing them
• Mass ID3 tagging
• Custom Filename Format specification like "() - - - " using shortcuts "(*1) - *2 - *3 - *0" or selecting checkboxes
• Write ID3 tags from Filenames using Custom Filename Format
• Rename Filenames From ID3 tags using Custom Filename or Directory Format
• Remove All ID3v1.1 or ID3v2.x tags
• Remove All Non-ID3 tags
• Create ID3 tags using Directory Formats
• Create Directories and organize mp3s from ID3 tag info
• Selectively Copy or Synchronize ID3v1.1 & ID3v2.x tags
• Sort and export tag data as Tab delimited text files for import to spreadsheet programs
• Lyrics and Picture tagging
• Cleaning Filenames of unwanted charachters such as %20 and underscores "_", remove excess whitespace, Correcting their case to capitalize the first letter of each word or after symbols or prefix words
• Accurately read all MPEG info and append bitrate and mode to filenames
• Recursion - All these tag operations can be carried out by individually selecting one or more files from a mp3 tag list, created by searching a specified directory with or without recursion.
• Use MTT as a hard drive mp3 search tool and virtual playlist

Answer 3

For volume adjustment, MP3Gain and AACgain are great - they adjust metatags so there's no loss in quality. In addition to that I use Mp3tag for mass manual adjustment of tags, and MusicBrainz Picard for songs I don't know.

Answer 4

I used to use Helium Music Manager long ago, when it was called Helium2. It is very complicated and has a lot of features, and I cannot be bothered with stuff like that anymore.

Answer 5

Only a partial solution, but Media Monkey will add all files under a specified root to your library. From there you can select a number of files and then:

Tools > Auto Tag From Web...

which will retrieve a lot of information for you.

From this page on their site:

Identify Tracks

Automatically identify tracks that are missing information, whose tags are not synchronized, or that are duplicated elsewhere.

Fix Tags with Automatic Lookup and Tagging of album art and other track information from Amazon.

Lookup CD information on Freedb or via CD-TEXT, and find missing track details through music-related sites such as Allmusic.

If you have a large music collection, MediaMonkey will help you update your tags quickly and accurately.

If you have tracks tagged but with incorrect filenames then it can generate names based on tags too.

It has a number of search and filter options so you can find "Files to Edit" with missing Title, Artist, Album, Genre, Year etc.

It will also do the the volume levelling and as above you can find the "Unleveled" tracks in your library.

Answer 6

If you're comfortable with the command-line, you might consider giving beets (an open-source project I'm working on) a try. Like Picard, it automatically corrects tags based on the MusicBrainz database, but beets has more focus on keeping your music organized after the initial import. (It has a very flexible directory structure feature, for example.) Being a command-line MusicBrainz client, beets might be best for more technically-inclined music nerds.

Answer 7

Along with Picard for filling in blanks, I generally use Softpointer's Tag&Rename to do the actual renaming.

It allows creation of folders on the fly as part of the rename, using variables to define the target folders.

So using something like G:\Mp3s\%1\%3(%4)\%1_%6_%2 as the file name mask results in files named like G:\Mp3s\<Artist>\<Album>(<Year>)\<Artist>_<Track #>_<Title>.mp3.

Other bits I like:

• It can get full album info and art from a couple DB's (freeCDDB and Amazon mainly), without the full album.
• Supports many/most file types.
• File name cleanup (capitalization, etc.).
• Really nice multi-file manual tag editing as well as batch edits.