Music Management

[MuffinMan]

Well I finally stopped putting it off and picked me up an mp3 player. Problem is I've never messed with ID tags and now I have 6g of music that needs them, specifically the Album tag since my player displays it. Is there a program out there that can autotag all of my music? What does everyone else use to manage their collections?

I've been using MediaMonkey so far for ripping all of my CD's but I can't get it to autotag the songs I already have.

[Trippy]

Well I finally stopped putting it off and picked me up an mp3 player. Problem is I've never messed with ID tags and now I have 6g of music that needs them, specifically the Album tag since my player displays it. Is there a program out there that can autotag all of my music? What does everyone else use to manage their collections?

I've been using MediaMonkey so far for ripping all of my CD's but I can't get it to autotag the songs I already have.

Hmm...have you already ripped most of your CDs? If your files are already named in such a fashion where the album name is included in the filename you can run something like TagScanner to add the MP3 tags automatically. If the files are just the song titles I'm not sure how to do it since I always start from the CD. If you start from a CD, something like Exact Audio Copy will do what you want -- it can rip to WAV, convert to MP3 (assuming you have an MP3 encoder like LAME) and tag using the FreeDB info.

[MuffinMan]

Well, alot of the CD's I ripped I had about half of the songs already on the computer so I could at least have it stick the album in the tags when it ripped those. All the rest is in <Artist> - <Title>.mp3 format.

[Strazos]

That's odd...whenever I ripped, either with WMP, or the suite that came with my player (Rio Karma), it handled all that stuff.


Having to manually fill in the fields would be a pain.

[Trippy]

Well, alot of the CD's I ripped I had about half of the songs already on the computer so I could at least have it stick the album in the tags when it ripped those. All the rest is in <Artist> - <Title>.mp3 format.

Well the brute force method to handle the second batch is just to copy and paste in the album names by hand but if you have hundreds of albums that's probably too much work. If you know how to program with Web services you could try something like this:

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/audio/V1/songSearch.html

and write a little script to rename the files (where the album is unambiguous). Otherwise hopefully somebody else here can offer some suggestions on how to handle those.

[vex]

FixTunes is a not free solution but looks pretty smooth.  You can get a trial that will do 50 songs to try it out.  I haven't tried it.

[stray]

I'll just say right now that this will be a lot of work. Not as bad as manually typing in everything on your own, but still a lot of work. I don't care what nifty program someone is using. Some of these can be convenient, but they still need a human eye to really work.

If you want to do it for free, just use WMP to manually update through CDDB.

However, before you import your tracks there, turn off the auto update feature. You don't want that, believe me. It'll get things wrong sometimes (for example: sometimes an album you might have is a US edition, while WMP might auto default the track listing for the UK edition). Manually go through album by album and update the info that way. It'll bring up a menu of options of what it thinks an album is, and as long you know what the album is yourself, you'll be fine.

That's just a first step though. WMP can update the tags OK, but you need to do some fine tuning (like correcting genre categories, spelling, etc..). Also, it won't update the actual file names, only the tags.

So, after using WMP, get another prog like Real Player. Import your MP3 library in Real, and correct whatever mistakes you see. After that, select all your tracks, right click, and then choose the option in the contextual menu that lets you update file names according to what's contained in the MP3 tags.

Last step: Get rid of WMP and Real Player. Don't use them. Delete the library database in each program (just the listing, not the actual tracks) and never open these programs again for music. Find something else.

[Trippy]

So, after using WMP, get another prog like Real Player. Import your MP3 library in Real, and correct whatever mistakes you see. After that, select all your tracks, right click, and then choose the option in the contextual menu that lets you update file names according to what's contained in the MP3 tags.

Last step: Get rid of WMP and Real Player. Don't use them. Delete the library database in each program (just the listing, not the actual tracks) and never open these programs again for music. Find something else.

A program like TagScanner can rewrite the file names based on the ID3 tags (i.e. it works in both directions) if you don't want to infect yourself with the RealPlayer crap. I just checked the latest version and it can do an album search using FreeDB as well if you feed it the complete list of tracks for an album in the right order.

[Righ]

Six gigs is nothing, rip them again with a useful program and it will create the tags for you. If the source was analog, nothing is going to help you, and you should have created the tags at the time, start typing. If the source was naughty downloads of songs you dont have personal use rights for, bad boy. Pay the artists some money by buying a CD, then rip the songs.

What do I use? Currently iTunes, but I'm messing around with Cog at the moment. The latter won't help you, as its a Mac thing.

[Strazos]

Durr, ripping all those CDs again would take forever. I don't even own 6gigs of music, and ripping my paltry collection of albums took....

Awhile.

[Merusk]

I use a version of Music Match Jukebox I bought, oh.. 6 years ago now.  It has the ability to bulk-tag stuff, or pickup tags from the file's name.  These are only available through the purchased version, though. However, like Stray mentioned you still need to do a 'reality check' because it'll pick funky albums fairly often.  The last one I can recall it doing so with was tagging the 80s collection stuff I wanted to put onto my iPod with multiple different collections and "Various artists" for the artist instead of their albums of origin and the actual artists.

[Hoax]

Durr, ripping all those CDs again would take forever. I don't even own 6gigs of music, and ripping my paltry collection of albums took....

Awhile.

Really?  I've got a relatively small music collection and I'm easily pushing 30gigs.

[Strazos]

I don't think I actually owned any of my own albums until some time in high school. I didn't really start to buy anything myself until I got to college...when I had my own money...

I still don't really buy much myself. I only really pay attention to a select few bands/artists, and I really only use music as background noise when I am doing something else, so I don't even need it to be "fresh" stuff.

Also, I've never been one to just sit around and listen to music. I never understood how people could do that.

EDIT: Heh, actually, all of the stuff I have bothered to rip (re: most of what I own save for a handful of albums which either refuse to be ripped, or I haven't bothered) comes in at about 2.6gb. It would be less if some of the stuff I really like wasn't in OggVorbis format.

/shrug

[stray]

I thought I couldn't go any further than 30 gigs, but I'm approaching 70 now. Over a month's worth of continuous play.

There was a time when about 20 gigs had to be reorganized. Must have taken me a whole weekend to do it.

Also, I've never been one to just sit around and listen to music. I never understood how people could do that.

Because some people actually like music.

Crazy idea, I know.

[Strazos]

It has nothing to do with liking or not liking music...I would just become painfully bored if I was just listening to music for any length of time.

I become bored extremely easily.

[stray]

I become bored extremely easily.

It has everything to do with liking music.

The closest thing to sex to me is just sitting in the dark, with my mind awash in some beautiful song. Hearing a great song is like rediscovering life itself. I remember when I was taken to a symphony on field day when I was 9, and hearing Beethoven for the first time. Every other kid may have acted up, but I was completely blown away. It conjured up a whole new world of images and feelings in me. It was an epiphany. And when the situation is right, the same thing happens now and with other artists too.

If you get bored and have never felt that, even just once, then you simply do not like music very much.

[Strazos]

I'm not sure if you're being elitist or incredibly obtuse.

It has nothing to do with not liking music. I get pretty bored with a lot of things "normal" people find to be very enjoyable - clubs, drinking being chief among them. And simply listening to music too.

To me, sitting around and Just listening to music is, to me, akin to meditating, which is something else which I simply cannot do.

Maybe I just few music a lot differently than you. I just listen to it. Hell, I get crap sometimes from friends because of the stuff I listen to, because the "lyrics are retarded" or somesuch thing - I couldn't care less, as long as the sound itself is good to me.

[stray]

I'm not sure if you're being elitist or incredibly obtuse.

No, like I said...For the third time. I like music. You don't.

Listen to your replies. You get "bored" with things "normal" people find very enjoyable (who's the elitist again?). While I'm simply expressing the joy and pleasure I get from liking something. If I was elitist, I would have told you to piss off and never shared my story with you to begin with. If you liked it, then you wouldn't get bored with it at all. Nor would you call someone obtuse for saying what I did.

Maybe I just few music a lot differently than you.

I don't know what that sentence means, but my theory is: You don't like music and your mom is a Vulcan.

You're probably low on serotonin as well.

[Strazos]

Yeah, bad typo...3:15am...

Maybe I just see music a lot differently than you.

I don't know what that sentence means, but my theory is: You don't like music and your mom is a Vulcan.

You're probably low on serotonin as well.

And anyway, why do I get bored if I just sit around and listen to music? I'm not sure. Perhaps it's just too passive an activity to me. Maybe it's because I've always associated it with other activities, such as reading, driving, etc.

You don't know what I like. Stop pretending as if you possibly Could know. Maybe you just like it More, just like I like hockey more than everyone else here (save perhaps Nix and the other Canadians).

[stray]

And anyway, why do I get bored if I just sit around and listen to music? I'm not sure. Perhaps it's just too passive an activity to me.

Hence where my accusation comes in. Someone who likes music would never see it as a passive activity. Ever. Not only do you not like music, but you can't even experience it for it is. You barely know what it is, let alone like it. Here you are treating it with the same aesthetic value as a set of window drapes, when it's so much more than that. Whether for listener or performer.

[edit]

I need to add though: You seem to be taking this hard, but I didn't say it was necessarily a bad thing. When I said your momma is a Vulcan, I meant it. You're wired differently. Just like I'm not wired for....Hmm...I don't know? Getting my rocks off by looking at charts and statistics?

Just do me a favor: Ask yourself what it is that you DO like about music. Whatever answer you get, you don't have to make an excuse about it. If you do happen to find that you're interest is really low, nobody is going to shoot you. Just don't try to say that that low interest is "real" interest.

[Strazos]

Why do I have to like it like you do in order to like it? It's kind of arrogant to assume you know something about a person better than the person themself knows...especially when you don't even know them. At all.

It's still a passive activity to me, just like watching TV is most of the time, for me.

And it's not like I can Never just listen to music. I do sometimes...at work, late at night...I might not be able to meditate, but listening to some of my favorite music (you have to like music in the first place to have favorites, right?) is about as close as I get. I just don't do it a lot.

I've just never been able to do it as a social activity, just sit around with a group of people and just...listen. it's not something me and my friends ever did - we either played sports, indoor/outdoor games, or video games.


Oh, and you don't have to remind me that I'm wired differently. My complete aversion to beer is the most obvious sign of that. 

EDIT: Clearly, it's way too late at night to be having this debate....or is it early...who cares. This conversation has nowhere to go, and the bed is calling.

[stray]

(you have to like music in the first place to have favorites, right?)

People can have a favorite pillow too. Doesn't mean they're pillow enthusiasts.

[Righ]

It's still a passive activity to me, just like watching TV is most of the time, for me.

You don't like TV, do you? Not really.

[Samwise]

 

[Furiously]

It's still a passive activity to me, just like watching TV is most of the time, for me.

translator!
I think you are talking about watching porn here, but I'm not sure.

[Strazos]

Hockey, actually.