is there any program that can go through a directory of songs and compare them to a database and add the albums? each ID3 tag has artist and song, some have the album.... most don't

I'm guessing not...

oh shit, maybe so...ieatbrainz or picardtagger... anyone used those?

[Edited on August 20, 2010 at 6:34 PM. Reason : .]

8/20/2010 6:30:29 PM

i used picardtagger to clean up my music collection

took freaking forever, but it worked

8/20/2010 6:37:37 PM

i used musicbrainz a few years ago to help tag a ton of songs (thousands).

it's not perfect, but i thought it was pretty good. Like ^ said, it takes a long time. I would just run it whenever i'd be at my computer for an extended period of time. It was slow, but steady. But it sure beat doing it all manually. You'll have to monitor it some, and it will ask you to approve some of them if there are conflicting tags. But it gets my recommendation.

[Edited on August 20, 2010 at 6:40 PM. Reason : .]

8/20/2010 6:38:18 PM

hmm, thus far piccard is sucking ass for adding albums. it keeps grabbing some random compilation album instead of the artist's album. maybe I'm doing something wrong

8/20/2010 6:43:58 PM

yeah probably around 20-30% of albums would end up under compilations or something. if i saw it under a compilation, i'd look at the duration of my mp3 and compare it to all the albums it appeared on and find the closest

8/20/2010 6:46:09 PM

of 10 songs I tried, 9 were compilations. and I'm talking about popular rock songs. hmm...

8/20/2010 6:51:25 PM

I used TuneUp last year and it worked pretty good.

8/20/2010 6:56:50 PM

is there a setting that makes it ask you if there are multiple matches instead of it just picking what it thinks is right?

I remember having to pick between 2-4 albums on A LOT of stuff. But it didn't mis-tag much on it's own.

from searching around, I think i used an old program called MusicBrainz Tagger, which appears to be the predecessor of Picard.

8/20/2010 7:17:15 PM

MediaMonkey is pretty solid but back before the iTunes days I always organized my Albums Artist\Album\TrackNum - Title so it was pretty easy to tag after the fact when I started using iTunes and MediaMonkey.

What type of "compare" are you needing? Do you just have song names in the title, partial ID3 tags, etc?

8/21/2010 12:17:41 PM

^^not sure, I just played around with it for a little bit. i'm going to look again today.

^I just want to add the albums (and then album art) to each tag. each one already has artist/title.

while we're on the subject, is there a good media player with a simple UI, smart-playlist capability, etc. that can sync to an ipod... I despise itunes, but if there's no other choice, I'll just use it again.

[Edited on August 21, 2010 at 1:47 PM. Reason : .]

8/21/2010 1:43:23 PM

Try MP3Tag - I've tried most of the other ones, but that one, while not entirely automatic, tends to be a lot more accurate. I've used it on a several hundred, if not over a thousand files, and have no real complaints.

8/22/2010 7:28:28 PM