I have a few thou mp3 songs on my hard drive and they need to be organized so I can back the up, or delete them or whatever. Is there a program I can use to simplify this or will I need to manually change the filenames of the errant ones?

1/4/2006 10:15:54 PM

iTunes

1/4/2006 10:25:21 PM

mediamonkey

1/4/2006 10:28:01 PM

wmp

1/4/2006 10:29:12 PM

A little more explanation would be helpful in making a recommendation. There's probably going to be a manual component no matter what, but I don't really know what kind of organization you are talking about.

1/4/2006 10:34:13 PM

lets say i download two issac hayes songs, the first one is in the format:

title - album - artist

and the second:

artist - title - album

that makes finding my issac hayes songs a huge pain in the ass. not to mention when i burn a CD the titles show up ass backwards in my car.


manually editing and organizing thousands of files into one format is extremely tedious, but i want to be able to sort my music out.

even a program that could organize the obvious ones, and allowed me to easily sort out the leftovers would be a help

1/4/2006 11:04:29 PM

its called



iTUNES




and it has been mentioned. jesus christ.








or try id3-tagit (some german program) it works pretty well and can rename files

1/4/2006 11:08:49 PM

If you have your tracks organized by album its really easy to retag them with media monkey, it'll go compare the names of tracks to amazon.com's cd library and usually come up with a match (or you can pick the correct cd from the list) and one or two clicks later it has set the tags correctly on all the files on that album. Theres another option to batch rename files based on tags

1/4/2006 11:13:23 PM

^^^So are you talking about ID3 tags or filenames? I would strongly recommend ID3 tag organization over a manual folder and filename hierarchy.

[Edited on January 4, 2006 at 11:23 PM. Reason : ]

1/4/2006 11:22:45 PM

^i honestly do not know what an ID3 tag is

^^ my songs are not organized at all currently

1/5/2006 1:22:45 AM

An ID3 tag is information contained within an MP3 file such as title, artist, album, genre, etc. It has nothing to do with the filename.

1/5/2006 1:37:25 AM

i hate ID3 tags. manual organization in Windows Explorer for lyfe, playa.

1/5/2006 3:04:23 AM

There are programs that will tag your mp3s based on the file structure. ID3 tags are the best.

1/5/2006 3:08:17 AM

i don't trust other people's ID3 tags, so there would be no point in tagging my own based on my file structure.

1/5/2006 3:23:01 AM

windows explorer? psshh windows for workgroups v3.11 file manager is where its at.

cmon this is 2006 man, kids are writing 75k aim clients and I have to manually rename 2000+ songs?

1/5/2006 3:28:27 AM

You people are hopeless. You're a dying breed. ID3 rule the world.

^^I think you have the concept reversed in your mind.

[Edited on January 5, 2006 at 10:17 AM. Reason : ]

1/5/2006 10:02:55 AM

i have had the same problem.... i am def. going to try out media monkey, but just as a suggestion windows media player works decently, it has a few quirks but if you can play with it, it will rename them so they appear right when you use mediaplayer.

1/5/2006 10:08:58 AM

tag&rename

1/5/2006 10:36:21 AM

No, I understand the concept of using ID3 tags to search and sort a playlist, and all the other lovely things it can do. I just still prefer my own organization and don't trust songs obtained from p2p networks or music shops to be tagged correctly, because I'm anal retentive like that. I'd rather just have an actual file structure in place than let the music player create a pseudo- or hidden structure for me based on tags.

if i strip mp3's of their tags and rename the files correctly as soon as I get them, why should i then bother retagging them according to the filename and directory structure and then have to worry about whether it was done correctly?

i also use winamp 2.91 and prefer to see the track number in addition to just the artist and title. i also don't want my file structure altered to have separate folders for [Artist], [Artist featuring other Artist A], [Artist featuring other Artist B], [Artist misspelled], etc. hell, there are a lot of reasons i prefer to do it my way, even if it means spending a little time getting things right when I first rip a CD or download a song.

1/5/2006 12:24:32 PM

Yeah, but you said,

Quote :

"there would be no point in tagging my own based on my file structure"

If you trust your own file structure, why wouldn't you want to correct the tags based on that? I think you just transposed the order or something. You may have it right in your head, but that didn't read correctly to me. The tags are frequently wrong or nonexistant, which is why I correct and standardize them first thing on all incoming files.

[Edited on January 5, 2006 at 12:31 PM. Reason : ]

1/5/2006 12:29:34 PM

because it wouldn't be uniform if i did that, and my anal retention demands uniformity. I have stuff divided at the top level of my hierarchy based on genre, but I don't have enough songs of some genres to justify their own full folder, so I have them lumped with similar genres (ie. Drum 'n Bass, and Hardcore are in the same folder; Ambient and IDM are in the same folder). There would be no way for a program to intelligently decide which Genre to label in the tag. Also, for my Misc folder, it should instead go another folder into it to label the genre as Comedy, Video Game Music, etc. I also have a Metal folder which is further subdivided into Black and Death, Heavy, Power Metal, etc.

Basically, if I trust my own file structure to do what I want, I see no reason to take the time to also tag the files. It wouldn't give any added benefit, either in providing information or in helping sort playlists, but would take a lot of time to get right.

1/5/2006 12:36:12 PM

look I understand the love for prehistoric music organization based on file structure, but it doesn't work with MP3 players or the XBox.

1/5/2006 12:37:15 PM

neither of which i use, so it's adequate for my purposes.

if i got an mp3 player, i'd temporarily tag them just before uploading, and tag them only to pick up album, artist, song, and track number.

1/5/2006 12:49:05 PM

I don't understand the resistance to tags, really. Move on with your life. You're going to get left.

1/5/2006 2:11:44 PM

give me a compelling reason to use them, and i'd consider it. but i see no reason why i need them, and i've got some 16,500 files in 1500 folders, so the time required to tag them correctly would be considerable.

1/5/2006 2:17:58 PM

musicbrainz

1/5/2006 2:19:03 PM

I'm a big fan of organizing your mp3's the way you see fit.

1/5/2006 2:19:05 PM

bogosort

1/5/2006 2:19:58 PM

itunes really did a good job w/ my heapload of craptunes.

it even finds duplicates! that deleted like half my mp3s...

1/5/2006 2:19:59 PM

^^^for real.

1/5/2006 2:23:35 PM

my fear about setting up iTunes is that it will screw up my limewire, or something else. anyone know about that?

1/5/2006 9:01:40 PM

2nd musicbrainz

usually does all the work for me without any hassle.

1/5/2006 9:19:28 PM

this is why a long time ago I made all my downloaded songs go to a small directory where I would preview them and then rename them and their ID3 tags before I put them in my music folder.

I know this doesn't help you... I just thought I'd share.

[Edited on January 5, 2006 at 10:45 PM. Reason : .]

1/5/2006 10:44:38 PM

ok im messing with this musicbrainz, cant I make it search the whole computer for all mp3's?

1/5/2006 11:18:56 PM

tag&rename

1/5/2006 11:44:32 PM

i dont see that button

1/5/2006 11:48:39 PM

even musicmatch can rename the files (not just tags) and organize them how you want

1/6/2006 12:09:10 AM

Quote :

"don't trust songs obtained from p2p networks or music shops to be tagged correctly, because I'm anal retentive like that."

Then, ummm, well, .... you're kind of allowed to ... you know ... fix the tags if you want.


You can do whatever you want to do, but I see two options:

Option One:
Step 1 - Download song.
Step 2 - Strip ID3 tags off of song.
Step 3 - Rename file.
Step 4 - Place into proper directory.

Option Two:
Step 1 - Download song.
Step 2 - Fix ID3 tags.

1/6/2006 1:06:50 AM

Like I said also about having uniformity, if I was correcting tags, I wouldn't want some fields left blank on some mp3's and filled in on others. Anal, I know, but I would be sitting there looking up every album title even for random stuff I don't have the full album a song belongs to. I guess you'll just have to trust me that for me, option 1 is much faster.

There's also a convenience factor if you share files with anyone else, via WASTE or any other means. File-sharing programs don't all sort or filter based on id3 tags, so you end up in situations where file names just have song titles and not artists, or 20 albums that are all listed mixed together because the file name starts with 01 - for track one, 02 - for track two, etc. Having good, uniform file names and a systematic folder structure makes downloading much easier as well. Yes, you could use a program to fix id3 tags and then fix file names according to the tags as well, but I find that most people don't bother, so if I'm only going to fix one of them, I'm going to fix the file name.

1/6/2006 4:24:42 AM

http://www.download.com/Music-Management/3150-2141_4-0.html?tag=dir

1/6/2006 10:12:23 AM

Quote :

"my fear about setting up iTunes is that it will screw up my limewire, or something else. anyone know about that?"

What do you mean? You mean your shared files?

1/6/2006 11:38:51 AM

ok ive been playing a little with musicbrainz, its tough to use. plus it totally balked when it hit willie hutch.

1/6/2006 8:43:01 PM

it cant find the info for a lot more of my stuff than i expected

plus its slow and agonizing to lookup all the unrecognised tracks. not as slow as renaming them manually or anything, but still

1/7/2006 7:50:10 PM

if you can afford like $20 or so check out MOODLOGIC

organizes id3's filenames etc

and generates playlists of songs that "feel" like you want them to

1/7/2006 10:22:21 PM

I just tried musicbrainz - that shit is sweet.

1/9/2006 8:13:09 PM