What tools exist for OS X to manage my music library?

January 12, 2008 11:17 AM

What tools exist for OS X to manage my music library?

My music collection is a huge mess, and I would like to fix this. I use iTunes to keep track of everything but there isn't really a way to make sweeping modifications to tags, to check the validity of the tags and titles, or to remove doubles.

My question is this: Are there any programs available for OS X (preferably free) to manage a music library? To remove multiple copies of the same song? To fix ID3 tags and song titles? Album art?

Thanks!

posted by Loto to technology (9 answers total)

Picard might work for you. I gave up on trying to sort my library in iTunes, so I just copied the music folder and emptied my library. Now I'm reimporting, tagging, and listening to one album at a time. Horribly inefficient though :D.
posted by fleeba at 11:21 AM on January 12, 2008

iEatBrainz (freeware) will go through your music files and fix the tags and titles. iDupe (shareware) intelligently removes duplicates. I have a 200+ gig music library and I have found them both to be very useful.
posted by streetdreams at 11:23 AM on January 12, 2008

Forgot to mention Doug's scripts - try Corral iTunes Dupes v1.0.
posted by fleeba at 11:26 AM on January 12, 2008

I use the Proper English Title Capitalization script from Doug's scripts a lot. It's not perfect and will obviously screw up weird names, but it is a good first pass to improve the data.
posted by smackfu at 11:41 AM on January 12, 2008

This may or may not help you, but you can change many tags at once in iTunes. Select all the songs you want to change, then hit apple-I. A window will pop up, and any changes you make in that window will be made to all of the songs at once. I use this to change the genre of whole sets of songs.
posted by procrastination at 12:27 PM on January 12, 2008

beTunes is surprisingly useful. I was originally looking for an automatic BMP calculator to help me create some workout playlists, and discovered a whole host of automatic iTunes library analysis tools. 1 week free trial.
posted by ZakDaddy at 12:40 PM on January 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

I should mention that I've had bad luck with IEatBrainz: I tried it on one album the CDDB had screwed up a little (swapping titles and artists on a compilation from Brazil), and the MusicBrainz database identified it as a completely different album. Definitely not a fire-and-forget proposition. It was also very slow.

You actually can make sweeping modifications to tags in a limited way in iTunes. Select a bunch of stuff, get info, and edit. You can't make algorithmic search-and-replace changes. There's a lot of good stuff at Doug's Scripts. Here are a couple I've found handy: this tag, that tag and track parser.
posted by adamrice at 12:50 PM on January 12, 2008

Media Rage is just retarded-powerful when it comes to mass-tagging, renaming, organizing, etc. Just absolutely crazy. The developers are really great too, as they very quickly (like, the next version or so) added a couple features I suggested.

I begrudgingly let iTunes handle everything for me now, but when I insisted on keeping everything in my own special system, under special OCD folders and whatnot, Media Rage was essential.
posted by Plug Dub In at 1:08 PM on January 12, 2008

Kind of like track parser that adamrice suggests, TriTag, will parse filenames. It also has an auto-numbering feature that I use all the time. It's really old ('04), but it's free and does most of what I need.

Maybe it's time for me to try out Media Rage. After some disappointing experiences with these sorts of things, I gave up some time ago after finding TriTag and using mostly Doug's scripts. Maybe the offerings are a bit more functional now.
posted by a_green_man at 2:48 PM on January 12, 2008