The Ultimate Music File Organizer

[tinjaw]

I started a few months ago to organize my music files. I made much progress but didn't complete the project. I want to get that project finished.

I am wondering if there is currently a way to automate much of this process. Ultimately I would just like to move all of my music files to a directory and have a program that takes the files (irregardless of the directory structure or naming convention) and processes them by a combination of technologies like MusicBrainz and MusicIP to identify songs, and other utilities to grab cover art, lyrics, etc. as well as fill out mp3 tags.

Has somebody glued all this together yet?

[cmpm]

Here's some that look like what you want.
I guess you would need to test them.

http://www.freedownl..._organizer_software/

[tinjaw]

  Obviously something fishy is going on here. Does anybody recognize the program? Is it an open source program some jerk is trying to sell for $40?

http://www.idealsort...lMp3MusicSorter.html
http://www.automatic...music_organizer.html
http://www.x-organiz...music_organizer.html
http://www.powersort...out_PowerSorter.html

[app103]

Be careful with any automated tool to do this as identifying songs and tagging them can result in mistagged songs and ruin your collection and make a lot more work for you in the end.

MusicBrainz and MusicIP are not 100% foolproof and will misidentify songs.

[cmpm]

I only did a search for 'best music organizer'.
What do you see there tinjaw.
The same program with different names,
but it's a free program that these sites are charging for it?

Anyways there were a lot of hits, that's just one.

[tinjaw]

I have been surfing the net looking at programs to do this. There are some programs that you can use to fix up your tags, but they require human intervention. However, as App says, from all the commentary I have read you really need to do this with human supervision any way.

I guess the part that I don't see out there is some glue to use several of these together to get better results with less human intervention.

There might be enough FOSS stuff out there to build a suite of tools and automate them to some degree.

Now I am also wondering what web-based frontend to put on my collection after I get this sorted out.

[Curt]

Obviously something fishy is going on here.

-tinjaw (June 29, 2008, 03:33 PM)

The Ultimate Music File Organizer  The Ultimate Music File Organizer


The Ultimate Music File Organizer  The Ultimate Music File Organizer

HUNDREDS of other media formats

-Program 1

HUNDREDS of other media formats

-Program 2

HUNDREDS of other media formats

-Program 3

HUNDREDS of other media formats

-Program 4

He did use two templates, but I guess you are right.

[tinjaw]

I am going to see if mp3tag is good enough or if I need to use one of the commercial ones like Tag&Renamer. I also came across two which appear to be new.

FixTunes

TagTuner

[kartal]

mp3tag is great!

[PhilB66]

Audio Tagging Tools is a tag editor that will automatically create title numbers and clean filenames/tags for you. It supports features like filters, filename cleaning, tag generator, tag editor, filename creator, output templates, scripting etc.

The most common audio formats are supported, mp3, wma, ogg, vqf, ... playlist formats like m3u, pls and wpl, and even filetypes like html, csv, rtf and many many more can be used for output.

Here's an older screenshot...



More screenshots (Info on the Website is mostly in German still)

Freeware and works on Win2K, XP and Vista

Another option is TagScanner.

TagScanner is a multifunction program to organize large music collections. It can edit tags of mostly state-of-the-art audio formats, rename files based on the tag information, generate tag information from filenames, and perform any transformations of the text from tags and filenames.

Features:

• Rename files based on the tag and file information
  
• Powerful multiple files tag editor
  
• Import tag information from an online database (freedb)
  
• Manual text-search for information in freedb
  
• Generate tag information from file/foldernames
  
• Words replacement and case conversion from tags and filenames
  
• Full support for Unicode
  
• Supports MP3, OGG, Musepack, Monkey's Audio, FLAC, AAC, OptimFROG, SPEEX, WavePack, TrueAudio, WMA, MP4 files
  
• Supports ID3 1.0/1.1/2.2/2.3/2.4 tags, APE v1 and v2 tags, Vorbis Comments, WMA tags and MP4(iTunes) metadata
  
• Supports for lyrics and embedded artwork
  
• TAGs versions conversions
  
• Playlists editor
  
• Write extended playlists like Winamp or Sonique
  
• Playlists export to HTML, Excel and CSV(e.g. for MySQL)
  
• Built-in multiformat player

Freeware and works on Win2K, XP, 2003 and Vista

Also search DC for The Godfather.

[Target]

the weak point of automating the process is where you have compilation or best of albums.  The tracks on these albums are likely to be mistagged because they appear on one or several other albums....

while certainly not automated, another tool you might be interested in (I find it indispensable) is Free DB Easy Navigator (F.E.N) - get it here http://www.klaimsoft.com/salvoravida/

this tool works with a local copy of FreeDB (something of a sore point - FreeDB changed hands in the last 12 months or so and the new owners don't appear to be maintaining it...grrrr).   

I use it in preference to an online search because it gives me a choice, ie for a given album there can be tens of entries, and the variations are quite amazing.  Using FEN I can search through all the entries, and in the absence of a definitive result (and i average the results on the basis that the majority must be closest to the mark) I can use it to make a more educated search elsewhere...

regardless, keep us posted on what you 'find'...

[urlwolf]

I have tried tagscanner and wasn't happy with it.
Both MusicIP and winamp offer some sort of tag finding by hashing the songs.
Both work so-so.

I think right now it's not really possible to set loose a machine and expect a perfectly tagged collection. Some (a lot of) human intervention is needed.

Having said that, try iTSfv – iTunes Store file validator. It gets some of the existing tags and matchers that with apple's own store. These guys have an interest in having a complete metadata collection . I think it's probably the easiest way to make sure your tags are ok. You get covers for free. You don't need to be an itunes user, but you may need to install itunes and import your collection. Tags and cover are not intunes-dependent.

Hope that helps...