How to organize huge MP3 Collection

[med1234]

I have a huge MP3 collection, tag information is sometimes not correct, some tracks in a album are missing, covers are sometimes missing...

is there a program, that recognizes all albums with no missing tracks and good sampling rate, corrects the tag information and downloads the covers from the internet. ---> automatically.... I would then delete all other songs and albums with missing tracks....

can you help me?

 

[med1234]

no suggestion

hope anyone has a good suggestion

 

[SeanEE89]

I personally would recommend using iTunes, and having it organize your music collection for you.

It has a pretty neat way of organizing all of your music and if you change information in the songs like artist, album, and album artist it makes sure to change that in the way it is organized in your system to make everything easily accessible.

 

[med1234]

okay

but is there no program/app that goes automatically through all the albums and checks sampling rate, tag information and missing songs from an album, cover availabity.... in itunes would have to change tag information manualley, check manually if songs are missing in an album etc.... therefore I look for an mp3 organizer who does this automatically.... any idea and suggestions?

 

[DAMAC3]

but is there no program/app that goes automatically through all the albums and checks sampling rate, tag information and missing songs from an album, cover availabity.... in itunes would have to change tag information manualley, check manually if songs are missing in an album etc.... therefore I look for an mp3 organizer who does this automatically.... any idea and suggestions?

www.fixtunes.com

I have never used it myself, but I listen to Leo Laporte on various tech podcasts (The Tech Guy, MacBreak Weekly), and he says this is the BEST tool for most of what you are wanting to do. I just got a new Macbook Air, so I haven't had time yet. But I plan to purchase it myself because my collections sounds muddled just like yours. It costs $25, but I think it has a free trial version.

If you do use it, please post back so I can see how it works out. Good Luck!

 

[staccato83]

I say you do it yourself with iTunes.

Even if it takes you a month or so, you will have all of your music organized EXACTLY how you want it.

Don't forget to backup after you do this though.

 

[frankblundt]

there is no easy way, not if you want to be thorough, and avoid deleting anything that you wanted to keep.

Once it's in iTunes, in list view you can sort by bitrate, so that will identify those ones, you can also show duplicates, so that will help with those.

If some have the tags the wrong way round (like the artist in the title and vice versa) but others don't, nothing is going to help you there but time.

It's not too bad doing it manually - it only took me a year and a half

 

[med1234]

eyperience

thank you....

 

[riciad]

If you do decide to use an organiser, make sure to do it on a back-up copy of your drive. I was very thankful that I did this.

For various reasons I decided to clean up both mine and my daughter's libraries together and I tried a few demoes and settled on Jaikoz. Although the interface isn't very Mac-like and kind of clunky, I was delighted with the job it did on a few albums I tried out on the demo version. It does an acoustic ID and then tries to match the song with the Music Brainz database. Although my own music was fairly well organised, my daughter's had an unbelievable number of albums with missing or misspelt info, no cover art, etc. It was like magic watching all the info coming up and the cover art as well even on fairly obscure albums. It will also show you the missing tracks for the album. So I bought the full version and set it to work. (The demo will only process 20 tracks at a time.)

I loaded up about 4000 tracks at a time and saved without really checking the results as i had been so impressed with it. It was a bit too diligent though, as it seems to source out the original version and seldom identifies single artist collections, so as a result I went, for example, from 23 Johnny Cash albums to about 35. This happened wherever there were Greatest Hits collections or differing international versions. It did however do a great job on most of my daughter's various artists compilations. So I started over again and went through an artist at a time and tried to make sure the albums stayed as they were.

So if you go the organiser route be careful, do it on a back-up and keep an eye on it.

 

[cellocello]

I say you do it yourself with iTunes.

Even if it takes you a month or so, you will have all of your music organized EXACTLY how you want it.

Don't forget to backup after you do this though.

+1

To be honest, I kinda like sitting down with my intoxicant of choice, playing some tunes and getting my music library all pimping.

Delete the crap you don't like anymore, get nice hi-res album art, rate your all tunes, listen to stuff you haven't heard in a while, clean up compilations and what not. It's a nice process.

Sure, if your collection is hardcore FUBAR'd then yeah it's gonna suck to fix. But once you do it the first time, every subsequent clean-up is just a nice trip through your music.

My 2cents.

 

[Cryptic1911]

I agree with the do it yourself comments.. I did this about 6 months ago to about 60gb of mp3's that were horribly tagged and all that. I just started at "A" and selected them by artist, and then updated the tags with the artist, and blanked out others that weren't needed, and then applied, then did the same again and scrolled through each track and plopped in the right albums. Once you get one done, the albums auto-fill once you start typing the name

did all that, and gathered alot of album art (itunes doesn't sell alot of the stuff I listen to) from amazon mp3, and images.google.com

its all great now

 

[Chase R]

I say you do it yourself with iTunes.

Even if it takes you a month or so, you will have all of your music organized EXACTLY how you want it.

Don't forget to backup after you do this though.

X2

I was up for 12 hours straight doing my whole 30GB music library and everything is PERFECT just how I want it. I'm a little OCD when it comes to organization lol but it's definitely worth it.

 

[KettyKrueger]

I agree that you should do it manually. I've played with those 'fix' programs before and they are never accurate.

Do it yourself, then you'll know it's all correct.

As for album artwork, I highly recommend Cover Scout. The program can search the internet for your album covers and embed them into the file itself. I think the latest version even has some basic editing tools which is perfect for perfectionists, like me.

 

[andyloc]

I was in the same boat as you, a huge library littered all over. I looked and looked for an app tat would do it all tried loads of demos/trials etc. (I take it you have a iMac btw)

In the end I plumped like a few in here for the manual route, ie iTunes. But I also used something called Musicbrainz to, if after importing it has names like track 1, track 2 etc, using Musicbrainz it analyses the music and suggests albums, and then rights to the tags direct with album name, artist,, track number etc.

It has taken me the best part of a year to get it all done, but its now the way I want it.

As an addition the main tags I wanted for organising i iTunes is this, Album Name, Artist, Cover art, track Number, genre, year, disc No, Lyrics

Can I ask others what they "needed" to have on there organisation?

ps To get Cover art and lyrics I use widgets, amazon art one and Canto Pod, and harmonic for lyrics, they auto find the songs.

Hope this helps
cheers

 

[glasserp]

I feel your pain, OP. I too was in the same boat as you. So last summer I made it a project to go through and try my best to perfectly tag everything. I second using MusicBrainz as they have a pretty nice database that always seems pretty accurate (manually enter vs. using a program). It'll take a long time, but it looks nice in the end.