can anyone recommend a good id3 tagging program ? I need to organise the mess that is my other halfs music collection + mine although named correctly contains very little info in the tag. Im shifting all our stuff to XBMC next week and im trying to get prepared so i can set it up right first time. Batch conversion would be greatly appreciated as i have around 20-30GB worth of music to check.
Depends a lot on how 'mainstream' your music collection is. If all your stuff is pretty common there is a bunch of programs that do matching/best guessing and automagically populate the id3 fields. I've never found one that does not make a LOT of mistakes though. If you're like me, and your music is not common stuff, then I use the old trusty mp3tag and do it by hand. Yes, it takes ages, but I know for 100% sure that it is tagged properly since I did it. Then once I have all tags fixed, I always do a convert file name operation on the lot, so everything is named like artist - track name - album. I like doing this since if in the future something decides to delete all of the tags for no reason, I only have to load up mp3tag and select 'tags from file name' and it's all ok again.
i think my music is pretty mainstream, nothing you cant find in any music shop anyway. ill give that mediamonkey a go and see what happens. thanks guys
I also tag everything by hand using mp3Tag. It can be a bit of a chore, but as long as you keep up to date, then it doesn't feel to bad doing a few albums at a time. I make sure everything uses the ID3v2.3 version, because I've found some programs don't read newer versions properly. I do a couple of things to make tagging easier. First I make sure all my songs are named in a specific manner. For me that's artist\album\number name e.g. Linkin Park\A Thousand Suns\01 The Requiem. This makes it easy to use the filename -> tag function of mp3tag. Secondly I download a copy of the album cover of every album, and place it in an album art folder. I started doing this in order to get a functioning zune rainmeter skin with album art, but it's come in quite useful for tagging aswell. In mp3tag I set up an action which fetches the correct album cover from the specified album art folder (all covers are named artist - album.jpg). With two clicks I can get get all the information I require bar album year and genre (and that could easily be set up if I included that in the folder structure) but I don't find it difficult to add these manually. I find this quite a neat way of doing things, and it makes sure that everything is as I want it (I'm just a tad OCDish here).
well ill give it a go if the info doesnt pull down automatically. got all my DVDs to do first though !! XBMC seems to be pulling down the info on 95% of them so far, well the ones ive ripped anyway (108 i think now). Got about 200-250 to go. only issue ive had so far is some times it retrieves a Spanish or french DVD cover !
MusicBrains Picard has been good to me... gigs and gigs of inconsistently tagged music in different folders.... It's not fool-proof, but it brought SOME order to chaos...
I'd suggest Media Center Master for grabbing metadata for movies and tv shows. It grabs the data from a few different sites, but tends to use imdb for the movie overview (this can be changed), for dvd covers it uses TMDb.org, and always get's English ones, it also pulls plenty of background pictures aswell. For tv shows it uses thetvdb.com for everything. There are usually plenty of different dvd covers to chose from if you don't like the default (voted the best by the users), it's just a matter of manually changing it. Each movie needs to be in it's own folder for it to work. The release year doesn't have to be in the filename, although when there are more than one movie with the same name, a release year helps sort out confilcts. All metadata is then stored in the same folder as the movie/tv show, so it doesn't need to be re-pulled if something happens.
Adam I would suggest you use Ember Media Manager for your movies as it's far and away the best app for sorting out your films. It will download, covers, posters, trailers, subtitles and you can generate your own thumbnails from the film if it's a compatible format. It adds all these to your movie folder so XBMC does not have to do any scraping at all. With your current setup if you remove and re-add your library you will have to do all the scrapes again.
