MP3 organizing/tagging

[CAIRATH]

This is for people who are obsessive about neatly cataloging/tagging and organizing their digital music collections (like me). What program do you use for the purpose of editing the ID3 tags of your music files? I'm looking for features such as easily being able to apply certain fields to all songs on an album (so you don't have to tediously edit them one by one), support for embedding album art into the mp3 file, parsing filenames into ID3 tags, etc.

I've used mp3tagtools in the past but that program kind of sucks in some ways and it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore so I'm looking for something new (preferably freeware). A lot of the programs I've looked at seem kind of bloated and cumbersome and appear to have bad user interfaces.

Any suggestions?

 

[panzerfaust666]

If i fully understand what you are looking for, Itunes can do it quite well. Just highlight a certain amount of songs( album), and right click-get info, and go from there.

 

[supseudonymous]

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/ - very much worth the few dollars

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ - also very good, not quite on par with db, but free

 

[ShredHeadJHJ]

I'm not 100% on what you are getting at, but I use Windows Media Player. I never have any problems categorizing my collection. Everything is neat & tidy, only problem is it's slow sometimes to start up... I know I didn't help you, I just wanted to throw that in there.

 

[Zephyrus]

iTunes ftmfw.

 

[Valerie]

iTunes ftmfw.

It's good enough for me.

 

[Matt]

iTunes is for the gays.

 

[The Ozzman]

iTunes ftmfw.

Do you even have a choice on a Mac?

 

[mutantllama]

ur gai
*edit* at Mathias

 

[Zephyrus]

Do you even have a choice on a Mac?

Probably. But I had iTunes back when I used a PC with XP, and I preferred it to all other such programs I tried.

 

[Astrum]

You would think that iTunes would be one of those computer-eating-suckfest programs. Most ultra commercially popular computer programs tend to be, like AOL and everything that has to do with it. But I love iTunes.

 

[V.V.V.V.V.]

I organize my mp3s by genre in separate folders. Within these folders are band folders, then in those are the album folders, with the release date of whatever album and the title.

My music is divided into these sections:

Black - Symphonic Black - Blackthrash
Brutal Death - Deathgrind
Death Metal - Melodic Death - Blackened Death
Doom - Sludge - Stoner
Folk - Epic
Grind - Goregrind - Pornogrind
Hardcore - Metalcore - Deathcore
Melodic Black - Postblack - Gothic
Noise - Industrial - Ambient
Power - Symphonic Power
Progressive - Technical - Experimental
Progressive Death - Technical Death
Rock - Classic Rock
Splits
Thrash - Speed - Heavy

I manually tag all my stuff...hardly ever use iTunes because I hate the program and its horrible resource-hogging. It also gives me something to do I guess, and lets me learn song titles and connect them to the music quicker to some extent also. I download things to my Unsorted folder, where they arrive with whatever format other people had them in, and I switch them to my formatting for albums and bands. Sometimes this can take a while as I don't keep up with my downloaded music well enough and let it accumulate for months.

I'm a Winamp enthusiast by the way.

 

[The Ozzman]

Mine is in a music folder on my external and is separated by artist and by album

 

[supseudonymous]

Black - Symphonic Black - Blackthrash
Brutal Death - Deathgrind
Death Metal - Melodic Death - Blackened Death
Doom - Sludge - Stoner
Folk - Epic
Grind - Goregrind - Pornogrind
Hardcore - Metalcore - Deathcore
Melodic Black - Postblack - Gothic
Noise - Industrial - Ambient
Power - Symphonic Power
Progressive - Technical - Experimental
Progressive Death - Technical Death
Rock - Classic Rock
Splits
Thrash - Speed - Heavy

I always just tagged it "Metal". I never make use of the genre tag and it would be ludicrous for me to go back through everything for specificity now.

 

[V.V.V.V.V.]

Yeah, well I like it like that...it's how I've been sorting downloaded music for 4+ years now, so I don't see the necessity to change it. I also use Soulseek, and the user list system is best viewed when you have a branching organization system like mine. Makes it easier for everyone.

 

[CAIRATH]

I have an entire harddrive dedicated to music with directories for each artist/band and filenames named in "artist - album - track# - trackname" format. Anything I download or rip goes into my big unsorted music directory and I always manually rename them and strip all tags and redo them myself manually (ie. not with CDDB or some awful thing like that) because I like to keep them all uniform and also remove extraneous stuff like rip signatures and lyrics and whatever else people embed into their files.

But I still tend to use features like the filename parse thing after I've renamed the files. So that it will automatically fill in certain fields based on the filename (based in my case on the pattern of dashes). Then after that I correct/tweak them and add any other info like release year and such. It just saves you some typing and copy/pasting work.

And I am also a Winamp user. Always have been and never saw a reason to switch. Infact I am really liking the new Winamp version where they finally got rid of the awkward docking window setup and really improved the media library a lot (well, since the version I was using before which was quite old).

 

[V.V.V.V.V.]

I'm too lazy to fix the filenames manually, but I always have the id3 tags right or I feel like a douche.

I might switch to the new Winamp...it keeps pestering me about it. I heard bad things. Does it still support skins? I use the really nice black WinShady skin and would like to keep it.

 

[CAIRATH]

Genres are also a pain when it comes to music cataloging. I never liked how the ID3v2 standard doesn't really have a standardized way of specifying multiple genres because so many bands I listen to are hard to pin down to one genre for me. That is the same reason I never used a genre directory hierarchy either. I tried it out for a bit once but just ran into trouble constantly with bands that could fit easily in 2 or more genres.

I think the most ideal system for specifying genres is a tag-based system like the ones that sites such as RYM and last.fm use where you can have many-to-many relations between genre and band.

 

[supseudonymous]

I have a 500GB drive mostly just for music using the Artist\Album\Track## TrackName system. I never really download anything anymore. Instead whenever I get a CD I make properly tagged lossless (flac) and lossy (vbr mp3) rips. At first I wasn't in the habit of embedding the album art in all my files, so probably about half my digital collection lacks the art for now. I find it unnecessary to go back and fix this as eventually a program will surface capable of scanning all my files and (theoretically) embedding the correct art, reducing my work to merely double checking for accuracy. Also, yes, WinAmp > iTunes. I see no problem with auto-tagging either. As long as you double check to make sure the information is correct and in your desired format it's still more efficient than and as accurate as completely manual tagging.

 

[CAIRATH]

I might switch to the new Winamp...it keeps pestering me about it. I heard bad things. Does it still support skins? I use the really nice black WinShady skin and would like to keep it.

Yeah it's still has skin support. But I'm guessing since they did a complete UI overhaul the old skins will probably not be compatible with it anymore. One of the default skins that comes with is pretty nice though. You can see it in the main image on http://www.winamp.com

It is a major new revision so I'm sure there will be some issues with it but I've not run into any so far and am actually really pleased with it. And to me the new UI is a definite improvement over the old one.