I've got about 100gb of music, but I've got albums from artists spread out all over the place.

I just want a program that will organize all my music into folders(Artist->Album).

Deleting duplicates would be a nice touch. Anyone know of a great tool for this?

2/24/2009 6:26:44 PM

itunes will consolidate and do everything you've asked for.


i've read about a few more, but i can't remember them off hand.



but even if you didn't want to use itunes you could install it and have it consolidate everything into one location and then just delete itunes afterwards. you can have it consolidate to any location you want (E:\My Music for example). It will then build artist folders with album subfolders for everything.

2/24/2009 6:32:24 PM

iTunes will work provided you have all necessary information in the tags. If you don't, nothing works - at least I have yet to have something work.

2/24/2009 6:52:03 PM

Music Genius I think?

Tune up + Itunes is supposed to work really well, but I use Windows Media Player 12 and it finds just about everything that you could potentially buy in a store.

For obscure Icelandic Trip-hop, you're going to be SOL...

2/24/2009 10:42:41 PM

I think that Media Monkey and SongBird are the two best music programs out there (with MM being no.1). I think it deals with tags and organization much better than itunes. Also requires far less resources.

2/25/2009 3:52:08 AM

Quote :

"I think it deals with tags and organization much better than itunes."

i'm curious about what exactly these programs could do that is better at organization than iTunes.


If you need to tag your MP3s, try TuneUp or any of the MusicBrainz programs like Picard

2/25/2009 9:32:42 AM

I don't really like the Itunes consolidate since it copies all your music into the itunes folder....I don't have enough space to have double of everything before I can delete it.

2/25/2009 1:57:51 PM

Quote :

"i'm curious about what exactly these programs could do that is better at organization than iTunes. "

Instead of doing all the thinking/organization for you, MediaMonkey gives you awesome flexibility to sort by tags or filename, and even auto-name/create directories to organize your mp3s based on tags or filename structure. There are many other benefits too.

Give it a whirl, you'll see.

[Edited on February 25, 2009 at 2:26 PM. Reason : .]

2/25/2009 2:25:23 PM

^but does that just sort within MM? I'm looking for an actual folder organization on my new HDD.

2/25/2009 4:04:22 PM

It has the ability to organize within nested folders automatically based on tags and filename. The actual options and method of organization is completely customizable.

2/25/2009 4:07:35 PM

^^how many gigs of music do you have that you can't make consolidated copies and delete the old ones?

you could put the files back on your main HDD and have itunes consolidate them to a new location on your exHDD.




i just read this about MediaMonkey, which is very awesome

Quote :

"Use MediaMonkey for Parties or other public places with Party Mode, which allows users to make requests while protecting your library from being modified. Use the Auto-DJ to automatically play tracks when manually selected tracks run out. "

[Edited on February 25, 2009 at 4:15 PM. Reason : i'll be giving that a try]

2/25/2009 4:13:00 PM

has anyone used TuneUp?


http://www.TuneUpmedia.com


it says its a plug in for iTunes, but isn't this exactly was iTunes already does???

3/3/2009 4:01:53 PM

I've used it.

1) it's not, per se, an iTunes plug-in. There is no API for iTunes to make such plug-ins. It is a standalone program that attempts to tie itself as much as possible to iTunes, but is not actually fully integrated with iTunes

2) if you read the description, you will see it does a lot of stuff that iTunes does not, namely look up and apply ID3 tags for your iTunes music based on the musical fingerprint of the file. It also pulls album cover art and has other features like giving you access to youtube videos of the song you're playing, if possible, and finding concerts and other albums for the artist you're listening to.


I used it to go through and re-tag the several thousand MP3s I had that were not properly tagged. I found it worked quite well for this, if not a bit slow and buggy. But once I got through it all, they were all tagged properly and had the correct art. I have not found any real use for the other features. Plus, since it's not a real iTunes plugin but tries to dock itself next to iTunes, it messes up some of the windowing features on Mac, like Expose and Spaces.

if all you want to do is tag your files, it should work fine. But you might want to try some of the free options first like Picard from musicbrainz

3/3/2009 4:11:02 PM

Yeah, i was mainly concerned with tagging. Does iTunes not tag well enough on its own?


I don't currently have my music tied to, and tagged via iTunes (waiting on new computer). Right now its all been tagged through WMP.

3/3/2009 4:19:12 PM

Yes, you can use iTunes to tag your files, and yes, iTunes reads those tags to organize your files.

But iTunes will not automatically tag your files. TuneUp and MusicBrainz will take a file with no tags, incomplete or incorrect tags, analyze the file, then do a lookup on an online database, then re-tag the file with all the correct information. You only need these programs if you have a lot of MP3s that are not tags or are incorrect, and you want to retag them in a semi-automatic way.

3/3/2009 4:26:56 PM

i found tuneup to be a waste of time. you have to go through and approve every change, select the right cover art pic from the bunch that it found, etc, etc. it still requires you to sit and click and check, etc.

I honestly find it easier to delete mixed up crap and re'd/l full albums that are already properly tagged. if they have the right artist/album name, itunes will find the cover art automatically.

3/4/2009 2:19:46 AM

do WMP and iTunes uses the same tags?

3/4/2009 7:50:22 AM

^^ if you really trusted TuneUp, you could just "save all". but then you run the risk of something getting tagged incorrectly

^ yeah, ID3 tags

3/4/2009 9:44:38 AM

one thing i didn't like about iTunes tagging when i was playing around with it was when i let it tag some of my hip-hop albums. For example, i sync'd up T-Pain's Epiphany album and it had like 10 different artist tabs T-Pain/Lil Wayne, T-Pain/artist 1, T-Pain/artist 1/artist2, and on and on.


I guess the only way to change this is to manually override and change them all to just T-Pain?

3/4/2009 9:57:40 AM

yeah, but you can select all of the songs at the same time (Shift + Click, or Ctrl + Click) and right click and "gett info", then change the artist to whatever you want

3/4/2009 10:09:49 AM