Anyone who has seen my iTunes Library would know that I have a huge collection of music - well over 12,000 songs. But over the years, the collection has grown and become a complete mess of incorrectly tagged music, and folders that just have random songs bunched together in no semblance of order.
So yesterday Chris and I decided to fix this problem and began the task of combining, retagging, and resorting all of our music. This seems like a daunting task, but it isn’t as difficult as it seems once you are armed with some very useful tools.
- MP3 ID3X
A really handy tool that allows you to view and change ID3 tag information en masse. It also supports renaming the MP3 files which makes sorting them a whole lot easier. - Amazon.com
Amazon is great for finding all the missing album art for those songs you ripped years ago and have long lost the covers for. - iTunes 5
Of course, you couldn’t have a music collection without the world’s best media player to organise it all. Just make sure you don’t let iTunes manage your music into folders!! Eek, what a mess that creates.
It’s still a big task to organise them all. Some of my music doesn’t even have album details on the songs, which means manually looking up each one and matching it to an album. We even found a Pink Floyd album that had the wrong song titles on each track!!
September 12th, 2005 at 12:10
I’ve been doing something very similar. My iPod now plugs into my new Mac and I have been “ID3-ing” and “Album Art-ing” for hours now.
I think my iTunes has been sorting my MP3s into folders - but it shouldnt be a hastle for me as I keep my full MP3 collection on my server at home (Mel uses it too).
September 12th, 2005 at 12:13
Yeah the folder thing is bad. It makes copies of all your music files and imports them into its bizarre folder structure. Wastes your disk space and is generally a pain in the arse!
September 12th, 2005 at 15:14
I hope you still have our massive Xmas collection, we’ll have to release an updated version this year :-)
September 13th, 2005 at 15:41
You may also like to look at http://musicbrainz.org/, or IeatBrainz for mac - or all of the other 3rd-party music-brainz enabled applications :)
Good luck! (When you finish you can do mine muhaha!)
September 13th, 2005 at 15:42
If one is looking for ID3 –> Filename or vice versa under Windows (uggh), then Magic File renamer can do this for you also.
September 13th, 2005 at 15:58
I used to use Tag and Rename on Windows - back in the day that is!
September 13th, 2005 at 21:03
Ya MP3 ID3X is good. :) glad i recommended it to you? :)
itunes folders arn’t to bad as long as any of your compilations are set to compilations in the id3 tags, if they are there not randomly put in stupid folders.
makes sense. ie it files them under album name then song.
September 14th, 2005 at 09:06
omg richy, don’t even get me started with your mp3 file system :P
September 14th, 2005 at 16:15
Im with you Richie it isn’t that bad……..it follows a basicically logical system.