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

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

Loto — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:17:27 -0800

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!

By: fleeba

fleeba — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:21:51 -0800

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.

By: streetdreams

streetdreams — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:23:39 -0800

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.

By: fleeba

fleeba — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:26:27 -0800

Forgot to mention Doug's scripts - try Corral iTunes Dupes v1.0.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:41:50 -0800

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.

By: procrastination

procrastination — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 12:27:09 -0800

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.

By: ZakDaddy

ZakDaddy — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 12:40:51 -0800

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.

By: adamrice

adamrice — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 12:50:10 -0800

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.

By: Plug Dub In

Plug Dub In — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:08:30 -0800

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.

By: a_green_man

a_green_man — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 14:48:07 -0800

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.