Blogs Big Media Collection, Big Headache

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2010/02/18/big-media-collection-big-headache/

 

My mp3 collection is a mere 30gb and most of that is recent acquisitions from Jamendo, I lost about 60gb when a previous hard drive failed and looking at the mountain of CDs on my shelves it seems like such a mammoth task to re rip them all.

What I do have is as tidy as I can make it, the beauty of starting again, everything with tags and even album art built in where possible.

 

I'm a huge audiophile. I got more than 10 thousand songs (100gb+) and organizing them is a really painful process.
Usually I'm just using something like "File Renamer" (batch renaming tool), I'm still not brave enough to go in and modify the ID3 tags (mostly because I don't really use them).
And then there's always "well. yea. I cleaned them up a while ago. but now I need to do that again", because a while ago I organized most of them, but by now I got so much more music, that I just can't seem to get myself to finish organizing the new stuff.
I guess this is what comes with being a huge media junky these days.

 

I wasn't overly fond of Mp3Tag. I prefer MediaMonkey.

Life hacker did an article on tagging tools a while back http://lifehacker.com/5266613/six-best-mp3-tagging-tools

 

I clean up manually, but then again about 70%* of my collection is ripped CD's that I own...a painfully slow process, but giving the same results and naming convention every time.
ID3 tags on music I didnt extract personally seems to be messed up generally.
I'd prefer it if music players would just diplay filename and (maybe) folder name. Especially in-car mp3-radios seem to be stuck with the MP3 tag though

Xir

*and growing

 

Thunar's Bulk Rename tool for file names and GTKpod or Prokyon3 (and MySQL) do the job for the tags. Exaile for album art.

 

I've used a mixture of mp3tag and tag & rename tos ort things out. I got a squeezebox which works fantastically once you have all your tags right. i haven't realy bothered renaming my files but i could just get tag & rename to do that.
for albumart i've been using albumart.org to find the art and tag & rename to copy it into the relevant folder as folder.jpg.
for ripping i've been using dbpoweramp which also applies regain values to the id tag and i used foobar2000 to apply regain tags to all my existing files.
i've even added musicip tags so i can use that if i wish
all this took ages! but now it's at the state where it's pretty quick to add new music with everything how i want it. just need to sort out genres though.

I've been trying to go through my movies now cos i just got xbmc on my xbox and a popcorn hour. queue more mass renaming. I ended up writing an hta to do bulk renames based on the exisitng filenames in a similar method to how tag & rename works - quite useful. then i came across www.therenamer.com which mostly would do everything i wanted it too. and indeed ember media manager also does the renaming for me too - ah well...

 

iTunes keeps mine tidy and allows me to mass edit id3 tags if needed.

 

tag&rename for me its slow (ish) on large collections but gives full flexibility and gets 95% of tracks so far.

after building my new home server in nov last year i have spent tons of time organising both Visual Meda (movies / tv) and audio
i'm up to C on audio now (after completing the Movies / tv) aim to complete before the end of the year.

 

Word to the wise - Foobar2000 can screw up ID3 tags on MP3 files when calculating and applying gain, as I have discovered to my cost! There seems no rhyme nor reason to which files get screwed up, but if you then go back and correct the ID3 tags, you can end up losing the gain. Unless they've fixed this in a more recent version of Foobar2k (I tried this about 12-18 months ago) I'd steer clear for calculating gain. Better to use mp3gain (http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/) (for the audiophiles - by album, of course, not by file)

 

Just out of interest why are you against using itunes. I use it for my 50gb+ of music and it works fine. Most is from CD rips, some is legal downloads and some involves torrents, but itunes keeps it mostly nice and neat and easy to access. A little tweak here and there, but most of it is exactly how I want it as soon as I add it.

 

I have a similar problem. The wife said she was going to sort it all out before christmas, so far she got to D.

In my experience if you don't do it almost as soon as you download it it gets left and the problem grow exponentially.

 

Hi

'Media Monkey' is a tool designed to manage massive music collections, I'm using it to manage a library of nealy 250 gigs. It's fast, stable, flexible and easy to use.

It has a 'windows explorer' type of view which I use exclusively, but you can do the usual view by artist, album etc - but views like that are only good once you've tagged everything.

I use the 'Auto tag from Amazon' to repair tags on albums, inserting images etc. I then use the 'Auto organise' with my own custom rules to clean up the folder structure into /Artist/Album/1 Track name.mp3 etc.

There's also a plugin script available to batch find covers, and scripts for all sorts of things actually.

I cleaned up my entire collection using it, put everything into a "_to sort" folder, and once I'd verified an album was OK or fixed I used the auto organise to move it to the final location.

Basic version is free, but I have the lifetime 'gold' which monitors preset folders so I don't have to 'add new tracks'

Oh and it syncs with my iPhone just fine, and will convert formats / rip as you like. It's also compatible with winamp plugins (Remember winamp!)

Only 'down side' is they don't produce an OSX version and it doesn't like wine. If you're PC exclusive this won't be an issue.

 

I have recently undertaken the mamoth task of sorting through my music and making sure all of it has perfect meta-data. My task is compounded by the fact that I my storage drive failed last year and, not having an up-to date backup I've had to try and rebuild my music collection from a variety of different hard drives, dvds and mp3 cds. What I ended up with is 3 different versions of my music folder each containing 6000+ tracks in a combination of mp3 m4a and wma formats.

I'm using a combination of MusicBrainz Picard, BonkEnc, MP3Tag and iTunes to identify, tag, embed album art and move files. Picard is an absolute lifesaver as it can lookup files based on existing meta, or do an in-depth scan of the file if meta is missing or wrong. It also moves and renames files based on customisable rules, embeds album art and doesn't mind me loading up thousands of files and letting it work over night. BonkEnc is great for converting files and it also accesses different online databases (than Picard) and moves/renames files. I used to use Format Factory for converting, but recently I'm not entirely convinced it's not malware.

MP3Tag allows me to load up 18000+ files across different folders and quickly (?) cull multiple copies of the same file/album.

I use iTunes as my media player because I love cover-flow and I havent found anything which does it better/as well. I tried Songbird but I found it clunky, buggy and sometimes plain weird. Winamp was my player of choice for years, but recently i've found it quite slow and crash-prone. Foobar requires far too much work on my part to get it to do the things iTunes does well. Zune seems interesting, but not as mature as iTunes at the moment. I like the tag editor in iTunes, especially being able to embed album art into my music from image files on my computer, but I don't like the fact that iTunes doesn't seem to embed the album art it finds itself into the file (instead it seems to save it into the itunes folder for its own use). I also don't like the fact that I have to install quick time in order to get itunes, I don't like all the extra services it adds (bonjour, ipod support etc) and I don't really like the fact that it's an apple product (and as such customisation is not really built into it.

So there you have it.

 

I use a drobo s to store my 2.5tb of MP3's and itunes across the network.

completely disregarding the best free music library manager/player (itunes) is nothing short of moronic.

at least give it a decent shot before knocking it for no reason.

ohh and I will admit, about wha, 7 years ago or something I was also against itunes, wouldnt have any of that thank you very much, tried it as other producers said it was good for organising your music library and i havn't looked back since.

 

MP3Tag rocks. I've tried many tagging applications over the years but non have been as easy to use and reliable. I normally perform musicbrainz lookups with the application.

I only have 42Gb of music.

 

I use tagscanner for my music organising. I found it relatively easy to use and not had any problems using it. My favourite feature is downloading song titles and tags from internet sources, instead of manually entering data.

The website says:
TagScanner is a multifunction program for organizing and managing your music collection. It can edit tags of mostly state-of-the-art audio formats, rename files based on the tag information, generate tag information from filenames, and perform any transformations of the text from tags and filenames. Also you may get album info via online databases like freedb or Amazon. Supports ID3v1, ID3v2, Vorbis comments, APEv2, WindowsMedia and MP4(iTunes) tags. Powerful TAG editor with batch functions and special features. Playlist maker with ability to export playlists to HTML or Excel. Easy-to-use interface. Built-in player.

Brads

 

As a couple have mentioned already, MusicBrainz Picard is the way forward. It will, Make It So.

 

I have to say, I am totally against the iTunes haters.

I use it, and it's got (built-in) pretty impressive organising tools, so that everything you add to iTunes (say you're copying across a LAN from a mate) gets copied to your libraries in an organised, regular format, which you can even customise I think.

And the built-in batch ID3 tagging isn't half bad, just a shame iTunes doesn't support FLAC files.

Also, with iTunes Agent, you can sync any iTunes playlist with any removable drive. I use it for my Android phone (never got Doubletwist to work).

So there's my argument for using iTunes

 

But iTunes is such a dog on the PC! It's not much better on Snow Leopard either.

It's a shame Media Monkey had a few too many glitches for me under Wine as the main UI ran quicker on a Mac than iTunes does.

Trust me on this, google media monkey and large libraries. The two are a perfect match