Organising a Music Library

[Feek]

Having been handed collections from friends, I've now got 190Gb of MP3 files, a huge chunk of which is badly organised.

I'd like some decent software that can sort it all out, tidy it up, maybe pull album tracks together if they're split in different places, delete duplicates if appropriate and just end up giving me a nice decent library to choose tunes from.

Is there such a thing? I suspect there are plenty of packages that _might_ do what I want but I'd like advice from those who may already have done this.

Any suggestions?

[Kell_ee001]

I had a nice little program that did just that but I can't remember what it was called :D

Edit; was a program from MusicBrainz, tagged all the files properly which made it all a lot easier to sort out :)

[Justsomebloke]

I was only reading the other day about a prog that Auto sets the Levels & auto organises tunes using Artists/tracks/Titles.
Head memory borkage stops me relaying the name of it though :D
It'll come back to me though or i would have saved a link or doc somewhere, I'll try to fish it out.

[Zirax]

I even think that ITunes does this? It automatically organises it to
Artist -> Album(s) -> Tracks
There are bound to be others that do this as well.

Personally mine could do with going through, my current collection is split all over the shop, but is more organised into a general time it was released and where I was. IE "uni" directory will contain stuff pre 01

[Feek]

MusicBrainz looks as though it will try and identify the track by the contents, if it works and works well then that's very cool.

[Kell_ee001]

MusicBrainz looks as though it will try and identify the track by the contents, if it works and works well then that's very cool.

Iirc it got at least 95% of mine, only didn't identify the really obscure :)

[Feek]

Can you remember which app(s) you used, there seem to be quite a few on their site?

[Desmo]

I've used The Godfather before. Works well enough to organize and rename/retag. Doesn't tag automatically though although I think it can read stuff in from cddb etc.

[leowyatt]

Not sure if this is what you want but you can get iTunes to organise the music for you.

[Kell_ee001]

I used the classic tagger but I don't think the others were available when I originally DL'd it :)

[Feek]

A lot of the tracks I've got are badly tagged and organised, neither iTunes or the Godfather will do anything with them, I've tried. The app Kelly has suggested sounds perfect and I'll be trying that tomorrow once I've changed the controller card in the appropriate system :)

[Daz]

Did you get a chance to try it Feek? :)

[Davey_Pitch]

Did you get a chance to try it Feek? :)
I've just had a quick go, and I like it, it seems to work quite nicely :)

[Daz]

Does it look like it could organise a large library (fnar?) without too much hand holding? :) Need to sort mine out soon so it can go on the server, and while a lot of it is ok to look at in Joe media player, it's pretty inconsistent, which makes searching it from the 360 (or whatever) a bit fiddly sometimes. In particular I have a load of Now CD's gifted to me that are in a right state.

[Feek]

The free one is a bit slow but it's working well for me, I'm doing an artist at a time and have retagged about 25Gb worth so far. I've got a lot of 'best of' albums though and it struggles there with some tracks as it can't decide whether they're from the 'best of' or the original album.

The pay version works a lot quicker and I think has better recognition, but I didn't feel the need to pay. I suspect I've got the same collection of Now's and it's doing a reasonable job with them, although it does need some manual track selection.

On the whole, it's nice to have a good collection of MP3s now with good tags, all standardised and tidy. I'm using an app (can't remember the name) to generate playlists as well :cool:

[Daz]

You using classic tagger or that PicardTagger? The Picard one looks more clevererer (on paper, not looked at any of the GUI's yet).

[Feek]

Classic. I tried one other that needed paying and it's limited to 5 tracks written at a time. It may have been Picard, can't remember.

[Daz]

Picard is open source so it couldn't have been. I'll have a play anyway, ta :)

[Mark]

Your mention of Now CDs raises a question. What do you lot do with compilation CDs - artist? album? something else? :huh: :)

The default seems to be to file the album under 'Various Artists' or some other name (depends who is submitting the data it seems) and then put the artist in the filename with the title. That's a pain when you want to find tracks by a particular artist.

[Daz]

Folder structure is 'Various - Album Name' or just 'Album name', and each file is tagged with the correct artist. At least that's how I did it when I was only dealing with a few files.

[Mark]

May well go through and re-tag my 'Various' collection then. I changed audio formats and started again a while back so though time consuming it won't be too bad.

[Davey_Pitch]

Part of me hates having all my Now type albums in their own folder as I do like to organise my collection by artist so I can just play everything by a particular artist if I feel like it. I may re-structure it all so it's "Artist Name - Album Name" with an additional folder for "Singles" or something for the songs that don't fit into an album folder.

[LeperousDust]

Guys use PicardQT with album art and disc plugins, much better than the classic and standard picard tagger by far :)

I've just done the same (http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17777870)

[Daz]

How did it work Alex? Did you point it at the root of your music and let it go do it's thing or is it only useful album by album?

[SidewinderINC]

I let iTunes do all of mine but I find when I use "add folder to library" it adds it twice and duplicates all of the files.

Does anyone know anything about this?

[Joe 90]

Feek if you still havent got anything to tag files then i used to have ripping and tagging software from back in my irc days that i got from one of them big ripping groups ;) ( :evil: keep it on the hush)

if i still got it then i could pass it on :)

[LeperousDust]

How did it work Alex? Did you point it at the root of your music and let it go do it's thing or is it only useful album by album?

It's better if you do it yourself in chunks of albums you know well, because with a few thousand songs you start to confuse yourself. But technically its pretty good, and is scalable to thousands of songs at a time, apart from the QT beta (only thin available) is a little tempramentle after 1000 or so songs without closing the app and restarting i found...

Point go, make sure the output folder is different so you keep what youve sorted and not separate. Make sure the album plugin and disc plugin work before unleashing it on everything too. Give it a test run basically.

[Joe 90]

Guys use PicardQT with album art and disc plugins, much better than the classic and standard picard tagger by far :)

hows this album art thing work...launches an amazon window and looks to enable javascript on the album cover, but i can't drag that cover anywhere - just always 'no chance' kinda icon. :huh:

[LeperousDust]

With PicardQT if you can see the art in the little window when you save it'll embed the art automatically, job done :) Only bad thing is you don't have any choice over what image it uses, but its not actually chose any bad examples for me yet after about 400 albums...

[Feek]

Have you got a link to the plugins? I'll give it a shufti, ta. Still loads to do so it may well speed things up for me.

[Davey_Pitch]

Have you got a link to the plugins? I'll give it a shufti, ta. Still loads to do so it may well speed things up for me.
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardQt/Plugins :)

[LeperousDust]

Davey got there first, only thing with the plugins is you will manually have to make the %sppdata% folder or at least i did. But it works fine after that.

It's simply a case of dragging and dropping a few confused files with PicardQT and the interrface is MUCH better IMO :)

[Davey_Pitch]

Davey got there first, only thing with the plugins is you will manually have to make the %sppdata% folder or at least i did. But it works fine after that.

It's simply a case of dragging and dropping a few confused files with PicardQT and the interrface is MUCH better IMO :)
I just made a "plugins" folder in the PicardQT directory and it worked fine in there :) I do agree though, compared to the classic tagger Picard is so much better. I can see me spending a fair amount of time this weekend properly organising my music collection :)

[Daz]

I just made a "plugins" folder in the PicardQT directory and it worked fine in there :) I do agree though, compared to the classic tagger Picard is so much better. I can see me spending a fair amount of time this weekend properly organising my music collection :)
Agreed on all points :) Will take me ages but it looks to be pretty painless, it's pretty clever.

[LeperousDust]

It was gonna take you ages either way, when you have shed loads of music, whatever you do it'll take a long time this just makes it less of a chore, i ran it in the background and checked up on it every 5 minutes, dragging dropping files around and removed the "empty" double albums etc... then after all that save them in a big chunk and start again. Took me 3 days almost solid but was well worth it :)//Edit: And now i've got, PicardQT it's a matter of just dropping my fresh album in there as i acquire them now, so there is NO more sorting out ever. :D

[Joe 90]

lovin this app...
although its a little annoying when it doesn't find an album cover or it stops looking up properly and needs restarting :(

any way of editing the albumcover python file to improve chances of picking up covers?
I have far too many mixtapes to do (50gb) and so far its not been great at even the most common ones...

[Davey_Pitch]

lovin this app...
although its a little annoying when it doesn't find an album cover or it stops looking up properly and needs restarting :(

any way of editing the albumcover python file to improve chances of picking up covers?
I have far too many mixtapes to do (50gb) and so far its not been great at even the most common ones...
What plugins do you use Alex? I'm only using the album cover one but I'm going through an album at a time to make sure I tag everything properly. Any others to make it all easier?

[LeperousDust]

Theres nout much that amkes it easier than album by album, alls i can say is you will begin to trust its judgement more as you go along i guess. I just check the album has all its tracks filled and i KNOW it will get the right tracks now, it's not stepped out wrong once yet. Worst it does for me is creates multiple albums both partially full because theyre technically different releases...

I use Album art and disc plugin, which basically removes "disc x" from the album tag and puts it in the correct ID3 disc tag, so your albums are all as one on your iPod/Folder etc...

|Show| I've got no clue as to where to start editing the plugins i'm afraid, check the members forum though see what they've got to say?

Edit:// Forgot to mention I use tag&rename in some cases to add album art, that or once they're in iTunes i force add album art, it finishes off the few stragglers with the custom album art i want :)

[Davey_Pitch]

It seems to be working okay, like you said for some albums (generally Greatest Hits albums) it'll create different albums, but it's simply a case of dragging and dropping them into the correct album. All I need now is a simple way to make playlists of all my full albums, and I'll be a happy boy :D

[LeperousDust]

Why would you want to create playlists of full albums? Any jukebox software or DAP worth its salt will be fine with just playing a whole album etc...

[Davey_Pitch]

Why would you want to create playlists of full albums? Any jukebox software or DAP worth its salt will be fine with just playing a whole album etc...
It's more for when I'm listening to music on the 360, it's easier selecting a playlist than it is scrolling through everything to find whatever album I want to play :)

[LeperousDust]

I think you can set up Tag&Rename so it doesn't rename anything or edit tags but just creates playlists. So the 360 isn't really worth its salt then i say :p

[Feek]

Why would you want to create playlists of full albums? Any jukebox software or DAP worth its salt will be fine with just playing a whole album etc...

I like playlists - Browse to the directory with the album in it, double click the playlist and it opens in WMP. I know there are better ways but that's how I've always done it.

[Daz]

You can search a music library by album name on the 360. At least you can with TVersity.

[LeperousDust]

But feek why not browse by artist or album in WMP and then just play the whole artist/album from within WMP? It's barely any different surely? Saves making a million and one playlists anyhow...

[Feek]

Just because I never have I suppose - I don't use the library in WMP.

Kicked in PicardQT and out of 50 albums, it only identified 5 of them, the rest appeared in 'unmatched files' :(

[Davey_Pitch]

You can search a music library by album name on the 360. At least you can with TVersity.
My problem (at least currently) is that I have a lot of songs that have album tags, but without the full album. If I make playlists of full albums then it helps me know exactly what albums I have :)

[Feek]

Just because I never have I suppose - I don't use the library in WMP.

Kicked in PicardQT and out of 50 albums, it only identified 5 of them, the rest appeared in 'unmatched files' :(

Ahhhh, I get it - I can select the group and click 'scan' and it then bogs off and sorts them all out, then I can manually drag and drop stuff around in the right hand window to get them in the right albums. Neat.

[Davey_Pitch]

Ahhhh, I get it - I can select the group and click 'scan' and it then bogs off and sorts them all out, then I can manually drag and drop stuff around in the right hand window to get them in the right albums. Neat.
Heh, it took a little while for me to figure that out as well :D

[LeperousDust]

Yeah its not the greatest UI, they even admit that themselves! But they're focusing on its backend first.

[Davey_Pitch]

That's the main thing, if the backend works great then I can work around the UI. :)

[Desmo]

Don't know if you guys know this so I'll say it anyway. If you call the album cover picture "folder.jpg", it will show as the folder image in windows :)

[LeperousDust]

Yeah i set PicardQT to make those as well, it speeds windows folder album art up immensely. But that trick doesn't work for a lot of Jukebox software so i embed the album art as well :)

[Daz]

It's working a treat on my mess, thanks Alex :) I've not used the disc number plugin though, I quite like them :p