How do I nicely organize my library of 80 gigs of MP3s?
If your mp3’s are already organized like you say they are, then you can use The Godfather to fix all the tags at once. Just scan your root music directory, and then tell it to fill in fields based on file and folder names. For example, my music is like this: D:\Music\Beatles, The\[1969] Abbey Road\[1969] Abbey Road – 01 – Come Together.mp3 D:\Music\Beatles, The\[1969] Abbey Road\[1969] Abbey Road – 02 – Something.mp3 …and so on so I can tell Godfather that the album is the name of the folder that the mp3’s are in, the artist is the name of the folder one level up from that, the track name is the third token in the file name, etc. You set these rules up depending on how your stuff is organized, but if it’s all organized the same you just do it once and run it on all your mp3’s at once.
On preview: Most of this has been said already. If your directory structure is as impeccable as you say it is, any good free mp3 tagging application (I use mp3tag) will fix your tags if you simply set the variable conditions to match those of your structure (Artist/Album/Track# – Name). If you need tagging, I again vote for Musicbrainz, which is simply amazing. The old individual song tagger was recently moved to unsupported status in favor of the newer version (Picard) which tags based on album. Once you read the quick-start tutorial and figure it out, it’s actually quite good, and should work perfectly for what you need, actually better than the old version. iTunes – clear iTunes, tag everything FIRST, make sure the iTunes settings are how you want them, then import once you have everything perfect. After years of tagging my collection (over 200gig) and battling iTunes, I finally broke down, wiped, re-imported, and voted to let iTunes manage eve
Small point, but I think you are referring to “id3 tags”, not “m3u tags”. An m3u is a playlist, and id3 tag is a small header at the beginning of an MP3 that identifies it with things like artist, album, genre, etc. I use winamp’s “autotag” feature. It is, in a word, amazing. It will identify your song even if it is untitled, with no other information other then the structure of the file itself. Totally mind-blowing. I used it to tag over 15 gigs of music with 98% accuracy. Very few songs did I have to go back and fix.
Thanks for all the answers. And the gentle correction; I did mean ID3 tags, not M3U. I got three kinds of suggestions. Use a “smart’ retagger like Musicbrainz or Media Monkey that looks things up online. Or use simple tagging tools like The Godfather, EasyTag, Mp3Tag, etc to set tags myself with some degree of automation but not much smarts. Or just use a media organizer like J. River, Songbird, JuK, or iTunes. All good solutions. The “smart” retagger appeals to me most, so I’ve started playing with them. Media Monkey is very good, but not quite good enough. In particular I can’t seem to select a bunch of different MP3 files from different albums and have them all retagged automatically. MusicBrainz Picard is also impressive, but the UI is awfully complicated and I can’t quite figure out how much it’s doing for me. Need to experiment more. One thing I’ve realized is the basic li
And mine would have to be MediaMonkey. Import MP3s into MediaMonkey. Mine are all in a similar folder structure as yours. Right click on an album folder and click on ‘Auto-Tag from Amazon.’ A new window comes up and searches Amazon. If it matches, it shows you the album, tracks, art, and a little blurb about the album. Click ‘Auto-Tag’ and the tags are updated. The album art can be saved to that folder or to the tag itself. So now your tags are all pretty. Next thing I like to do is ‘Auto-Organize Files.’ Auto-Organize allows you to move and rename files based on track tags. So mine is setup like so: \Music\__Complete CDs\[Album Artist>\[Album Artist] – [Year] – [Album]\[Album] – [Track#] – [Title] Which in return produces a folder/file structure of: T:\Music\__Complete CDs\Nine Inch Nails\Nine Inch Nails – 1989 – Pretty Hate Machine\Pretty Hate Machine – 01 – Head Like A Hole.mp3 In all, it takes me about 20 seconds to fix the tags and import
