Organizing MP3s and Other File Collections?

Anonymous Coward asks: "After trying to merge several sets of media files that I've had laying around across several PC's (and looking at the short-comings of my own Perl script), I began looking at some commercial products and was overwhelmed. Does Slashdot have advice for organizing MP3 collections and what software works well for them?"

Comments

itunes does it for me

[FiDooDa]

Just use it with the option "Keep itunes music folder organized"

it does a great job for me.

Re:itunes does it for me

[node 3]

iTunes could do a great job for me, if Apple didn't miss to implement support for FLAC, Musepack, Monkey's Audio and some other formats.

iTunes supports FLAC, OGG, and any other format for which there is a QuickTime plug-in. Unfortunately, QuickTime plug-ins are (it's said) really annoying to program. The release of QT 7, though implies that this might change for the better.

Unfortunately Apple made the design flaw that you can't simply drag audio files in a special folder and they are useable, so I have to install iTunes to put music on my iPod.

This is intentional. When the iPod came out, the main HD-based player was the Nomad, which suffered from horrible performance. This was because the songs were just stored as files with no database. The reason the iPod can search through many thousands of songs instantaneously is because of its song database, which iTunes creates (you actually don't need iTunes for this--any program can read/write the iPod database).

You could easily write a program that lets you just drop songs on it from your filesystem, which will automatically copy them to the iPod, and update the database.

Re:itunes does it for me

[CableModemSniper]

Oh, thank you for pointing out one more huge PITA in iTunes: it installs QT, even without asking, and ceases to work for no reason if you remove this useless annoyancy called Qicktime.

That's because iTunes IS QuickTime (more or less) + some playliist, organizational functionality and a different interface.

Dspace.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://dspace.org/introduction/index.html

"What Kinds of Content Does DSpace Accept?

DSpace accepts all forms of digital materials including text, images, video, and audio files. Possible content includes the following:

* Articles and preprints
* Technical reports
* Working papers
* Conference papers
* E-theses
* Datasets: statistical, geospatial, matlab, etc.
* Images: visual, scientific, etc.
* Audio files
* Video files
* Learning objects
* Reformatted digital library collections
"

MP3 Tag Tools

[dotgod]

I use MP3 Tag Tools. It hasn't been updated for a while, and I'm sure there's newer stuff out, but this does everything I need. You can manipulate both tags and filenames automatically. I don't think it supports OGG though.

Re:MP3 Tag Tools

[Albigg]

Be careful, tag tools does some odd things. For example, EAC put an "Encoded By" tag in my MP3s with the 'Exact Audio Copy (Secure mode)' as the value. Tag Tools stripped that. Also, the track numbers got re-formatted. Instead of "X/Y" (where Y is the number of tracks) Tag Tools just redid the track number to X.

Re:MP3 Tag Tools

[DisKurzion]

FYI...it does do OGG for tagging, but other features (like NFO generation) don't work for OGG.

MP3 Tag Tools is AWESOME. It's a little quirky at first, but once you have everything configured the way you like it (No ID3v1 tags or misc tag nfo thanks!), you can have it automatically generate playlists, sfv files, and more.

Also, configuring CDex properly for ripping your own stuff goes a long wait to good management of your MP3s (or OGGs).

The GodFather

[Tozog]

The GodFather is by far my favorite. It has mass tagging, renaming, organization, and handles mp3/ogg/mpc/ape/flac/aac/apl/wv/mp4/ofr/spx tags, scripting abilities, pull info from online sites, and free, but not open source.

http://users.otenet.gr/~jtcliper/tgf/

ID3-TagIt

[Winterblink]

ID3-TagIt is a FANTASTIC application for managing MP3 metadata, as well as filenames. I used it to completely overhaul my collection so the filenames and tags were what I wanted them to be. Unfortunately it's only a windows application, but it really helped me when I put my collection into iTunes and the browse panes had everything all nice and neat. Best of all, it's free. :)

Re:ID3-TagIt

[Albigg]

After surveying many MP3 tag programs ID3-TagIt was the one for me too. Once I straightened everything out, I imported everything into iTunes. iTunes works well once you have the major things sorted out. Just make sure that you have the directory laid out correctly and most of the mass tagging complete. Here is the link: http://www.id3-tagit.de/

er...

[samjam]

so what you are saying is that you have never had to ask the question!

I have, and after a lot of searching I settled on Amarok (KDE project).

Sorry GNOME folks, but your music player sucks. Its a bit like Amarok but it doesn't even work on RH FC3.

Amarok beats windows media player for usability and functionality in everything EXCEPT it won't read TAGS from WMA files, and it only plays audio. Yes I miss playing video but its search facility is so good, I don't care.

Just point Amarok at your music wherever you put it, and enjoy!

Sam

Cantus?

[Mad_Rain]

There is a tool called Cantus that can be used for mp3 organizing. And of course, once you get them organized, you can set them up to be streamed over the web with Jinzora.

MusicBrainz for acquiring and checking metadata

[oldbox]

Use MusicBrainz!

I have just started to use the MusicBrainz Tagger to organize my mess of mp3 files. It does all of the normal re-tagging functions, but it will also make an AcousticFingerprint of the music file, and check your it with their database. This solves the problem of tags that are incorrect or missing altogether. It is a little slow, but otherwise a good program. It is available as Windows, MacOS X, and Python. Works with mp3 and Ogg. It's free & GPL'd.

tagbox

My gripe

[numbski]

I can't allow iTunes to manage the music for me. It won't allow me to control how it names files. It insists on reading the song title from the id3 tags, and then creating this structure:

Artist Name/Album Name/Song Name.mpg

That seems fine, but for me, I want it to come out this way (which has been the standard since, oh Napster):

Artist Name/Album Name/Artist Name - Song Name.mp3

That way if I'm using something OTHER than iTunes or my iPod, maybe something that only reads filenames, I'll know what the song is. You wouldn't believe how many songs have similar or identical names, and if you don't prepend the artist's name, it gets very messed up.

That said, I use MP3 Rage to manage my mp3's. Very nice tool.

Re:My gripe

[Elektrance]

My friend did this a few times on a very large iTunes collection, and decided to write a perl script to fix it... I'll shamelessly promote it on here, cause well, its not my script. It's called iTunes Dupeblaster Source is available as well, so you can modify to suit your needs.

My pr0n example.

[Pig Hogger]

I have 59,224 pornographic files (including 879 movies and clips), all organized by category (sex acts performed, races involved, clothing worn, kind of kink, etc.).

Since I have several of those that span more than one category, I put everything on a Linux server and I put hard links to directories containing the various categories the pictures are into.

So whenever I crave for a particular kind of kink, I have no problem locating the series of files I want to look at.

Tag and Rename

[Jjeff1]

Tag and rename handles a bunch of different files, and has a pile of tools for editing tags.

GnuMP3d

[fiori]

If you always have network access to a server, drop your music files on the server and point GnuMP3d at the directories. GnuMP3d has ACLs and password moderated accesss.

Myself...

[Shadikka]

I use foobar2000+Masstagger for that. It does the job just great with my structure being: Artist\Album\## - Song.mp3 I recommend that one :o)