Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with id3

Cleaning up messy music folders

1024x768 — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:11:46 -0800

Help me clean up my messy music files I am embarking on a clean up of my enormously messy MP3 folders. After several computer switches, and crash+restore jobs I have approximately a dozen different folders containing between hundreds and thousands of MP3s each. The issue is each folder is at least a partial duplicate of several others. Each of these dozen folders contains subfolders in various organizational formats. There's far too many files for me to devote the time to manually eliminating duplicates. Confounding matters slightly is that many of the MP3s have woefully inadequate tagging/ID3 data.

This motley collection lives on a Macbook pro running 10.5. I'd like to find an app/script/method that does the following

1) Eliminates all the dupes
2) Cleans up the ID3 info

The cleaned up collection will then be put into an iTunes library which I will let keep things from getting too messy in the future. I would prefer to use iTunes due to ease of syncing with my iPhone, but if there is a truly compelling alternative that will take care of everything, I am willing to consider it.

I'd prefer a free method of doing this, but would shell out a little bit of scratch if there were an app out there that did exactly what I wanted.

Expertly Organizing an MP3 Library

dantekgeek — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:36:35 -0800

Organizing a music library for the (very) OCD? Help me put every ID3 in its place! I'm more than a little bit OCD about my music collection. I'm bugged by stupid little things like the fact that a good deal of my files are tagged slightly incorrectly, that I don't have a consistent bit-rate, that album artwork is almost a lost cause, etc. All the standard craziness.

I've played around with MusicBrainz Picard, but that really just seemed to make things worse, since hardly any of the data the app pulled from the database seemed to match up exactly with the reality of my library (conflicting track lengths, missing songs from albums, etc). It was also a pain going back and forth between Picard and iTunes to cross-check things.

If not for the fact that a good portion of my library is already impeccably organized, I'd just run the whole thing through Picard or a similar app. But for fear of distorting what is already nice and shiny, I can't.

I know there have been a few similar questions on Ask before, but none for at least a year or so. I'm hoping some wonderful new tool or strategy has come along since then.

What apps/sites/techniques can you suggest to help in my quest? Or is my vision of metadata perfection a lost cause?

(I use a Mac, for what its worth)

tuneup

plexi — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:05:34 -0800

Is there a way to sort by blank or null id3 fields in iTunes?

Itunes is turning single albums into multiple ones..help, please?

ComeUndone — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:01:51 -0800

Trying to organize my iTunes library, but I'm going crazy. Itunes is displaying one album as multiple albums. Rather than trying to explain it, I've taken screenshots. Here is what I want to happen. But, this is what is happening to a very large number of albums.

I've checked my ID3 tags, and the album name is identical for each album. Has anyone had this happen to them? Is there an easy way to fix it? Any help would be very appreciated.

How can I batch import JPEG album art into MP3s?

ilumos — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:59:17 -0800

How can I batch import album art into MP3s from JPEGs on my hard disk? Hi,

I've got a fairly extensive music collection (10,000~ tracks), and I would like to batch import album art, which I already have on my computer into the MP3's ID3 tag.

I know how to do it one by one in a few different programs, but it would be very laborious to add each and every album's art manually.

The art has the filename;

Artist - Album Title [Front].jpg

and resides in the same folder as the album.

Any help, or a point in the right direction would be greatly appreciated!

ilumos

Help me clean up a musical mess.

Nixie Pixel — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:29:17 -0800

A server on our home network has over 100GB of mp3s in various states of disrepair. How can we organize them, get rid of duplicates, losslessly normalize volume, name and tag them, and prepare them for streaming? A chunk of these mp3s were burned directly from CD, but the majority were not. They were acquired as collections, albums, and single songs. Half of them have no ID3 tags, and some aren't even named properly.

Here are our major concerns: How do we get them all named correctly in a timely and efficient manner?

What is the best way to organize them, especially when we have some CDs that are "Best of" an artist, but have the artist's other albums with the same songs, and those songs are also part of compilations, and similar situations? Is it even possible to get rid of duplicates in this sort of situation? Especially when we have a lot of Electronic Dance Music, but would like to keep different mixes of the same song...

Where does musicbrainz, as mentioned in this thread, fit in? (Or is that even the best option here?)

How can we normalize the volume for the whole collection without losing quality?

What is the best platform for storing and streaming these files? They are currently on a Windows XP machine that I want to reformat with Ubuntu or Kubuntu.

I have searched the past questions, and most people have some sort of organization already for their collections, or aren't facing the same issues.

Oh, finally, what is the best way to create and organize two different collections for an iPhone and a 60GB iPod? Currently the music is on two different PCs running iTunes for two different collections (yay, more duplication!). Is there a better program than iTunes out there for this? Is there a good way to select songs for the devices without either copying xGB of data to other machines, or going through the tedious process of hand-selecting about 8000 out of 26000+ songs in a library?

Thank you in advance!

Where do I find a new MP3 player with all the features of my old iriver H320?

AZNsupermarket — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:15:59 -0800

Where do I find a new MP3 player with all the features of my old iriver H320? Hey Metafilter!
This is my first time asking a question so here goes. I really like my old iriver H320, but it's very old and it may be nearing the end of its lifespan. The weird thing is that it seems to have a lot of features that modern MP3 players don't have. I was wondering if anyone can recommend an mp3 player that basically does the following:

1. When you plug it in to the computer, the computer treats the MP3 player as a hard drive. I want to be able to rename, change, and move around songs without having to use itunes, Windows Media Player, or any other annoying software.

2. I want my MP3 player to act like a hard drive when I'm on the go. I especially want to be able to see my various folders that contain my music, see file names, and not have to use id3 tags.

Using third party firmware on a newer mp3 player isn't out of the question, but I really wasn't crazy about rockboxes' interface on my iriver, so I would prefer using first party firmware instead (assuming that any exists that meets my needs).

Thank You!

Help an iTunes hater out...

Area Control — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:46:40 -0800

Help an iTunes hater. I have 400 similarly tagged items I want to delete as I listen to them. Why won't iTunes let me have a column that is just "filename"? Every other media player can do that. And don't even get me started on the "keep my music organized" check box. The only way I could get my 400 items into iTunes with unique names was to turn that off, import the 400 items, and use a 3rd party id3 tagger to read the filename into the tag. I thought the Mac experience was supposed to be easy. I must be missing something really stupid. Is there an easier way?

Hey, iTunes? Knock it off.

phaded — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:36:13 -0800

iTunes has recently developed a new habit that makes me want to toss it out the window. When I play a song or go to "Get Info," iTunes adds to the "Album Artist," "Composer," and "Comment" fields, and changes my track numbers from "x of x" to just "x". I can't find any way to disable this. Do you folks know how? Running the latest version of iTunes for Windows Vista. As I described above, whenever I do one of those two things (I guess whenever the track is in my system memory? Not sure, really), iTunes decides that I'd like it to add information to my ID3 tags. While that information may be useful to some people, I'm pretty anal about keeping my tags the way I like them, and this new trick it's learned makes me want to stop using it altogether (not really possible, since I use an iPhone and rely heavily on the "Keep my collection organized" features iTunes offers).

At first I thought maybe this was just while I was signed into the iTunes Store, so I logged out, but it does the same thing. I can't find anything in Preferences to turn this off, or anything that refers to it (the closest thing I've seen is on the CD burning preference page, maybe that's it?); as far as I can tell, I'm stuck with this unless Apple fixes it. Has anyone else encountered this issue, and if so, have you found a way to make it stop?

Lightweight MP3 app for OSX?

rathikd — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:09:37 -0800

Looking for a lightweight MP3 app for OS X, any suggestions? I'm looking for something, preferably free, to preview MP3s in OS X in a way they don't automatically get dumped into iTunes. And before you jump on VLC, no. Nothing wrong with VLC, it's just not the droid I'm looking for. While we're at it, anyone know of any good ID3 editors for OSX? Bonus points if these two apps are the same but not necessary.

Thanks.

No more sweet music.

Skyanth — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 04:44:53 -0800

Say I wanted to fill the genre tags of my whole mp3 library automatically. Say I trusted the last.fm community enough to use the three most used tags for a certain song/album listed there (for example: New Order's Ceremony would get "80s" "new wave" and "post-punk"). Say I wanted to do this automatically. Say I had a Mac. How would I go about this? I hate that none of the software I know adds genre tags automatically. And yeah, I know that people think differently about different genres, but I'm willing to overlook that and just go for the most common genre "opinion" for now. This seems like a nice solution - I know it would go wrong on occasions, but it seems quite accurate overall.

I know /some/ Ruby. I'm not really proficient at it, but I could learn. Or can you think of a better way?

Tagging individual musicians

Silky Slim — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 08:20:24 -0800

Can I use iTunes to tag the specific musicians playing on a track? For instance, I'd like to be able to type "Herbie Hancock" in the iTunes search field and find all the tracks on which he played the keyboard, even if the Artist and Composer were other people. Is this possible?
Adding the musicians' names into the Comments field doesn't help. The names still don't show up in a search.
I tried an app called MP3 Rage, and its ID3 editor has a field called "People". Is this what I'm looking for?
Unfortunately, iTunes apparently ignores this field.

Editing MP3 tags with Explorer

danb — Sun, 27 May 2007 07:44:50 -0800

For a friend: How do I get the option to edit the mp3 tag in Windows Explorer with right clicking and going to Properties? In Windows, when I right click on an mp3 and go to Properties > Summary > Advanced, the option is greyed out. In the Properties > Summary > Simple I am given the option to give the title and leave a comment. But that is all. I am the computer owner and I have given myself full administrative rights for the account I am using.

iTunes file dupes and bad tag reads.

mykescipark — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 05:36:47 -0800

iTunes is creating duplicate copies of everything - and isn't faring too well with the id3 tags, either. I apologize in advance for yet another iTunes (PC) question.

I have my Windows iTunes (v6.0.1.3) set up to auto-organize my music into the standard iTunes folder configuration [iTunes Music > Artist > Album > Songs]. However, there seem to be a few bugs that I can't quite work out.

1. When using the "Add Folder to Library" function or when dragging files into iTunes, it creates TWO copies of each album in the iTunes directory. I then have to manually select one set and delete them. It isn't simply adding the files from the source directory as well - it's actually just double-importing them into the iTunes folders. (For what it's worth, it doesn't have this problem when I add music with the Add File(s) To Library function.)

2. Once imported, when I look in the Name (song title) field, it will list both "Artist - Song Title"instead of just "Song Title." The only way I can get it to list just the song title is by actually cueing up each song one by one, as if previewing every song in a given directory/album. I can't seem to find a universal command which will fix them in bulk when this happens.

For what it's worth, 95% of the albums in question were originally ripped in iTunes, so it's not like it has to figure out another program's id3-tags; I'm just reorganizing my file structure, and this is adding twice the necessary work.

Any thoughts? I could just tell iTunes to search for duplicates and nuke them all later on, but it seems like there should be a way to do this right the first time.

Best program to automate adding ID3s/album art to untagged MP3s?

stuckie — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 13:58:22 -0800

Can anyone share recommendations for software or "least-effort-techniques" for adding ID3 tags and album art to large sets of unsorted, untagged MP3s? Finally got an video iPod, and am now trying to be meticulous about getting album art and proper metatags for my music (LOVE being able to see album art). Currently using "Tag & Rename", which works pretty well, with a few limitations. It requires a LOT of manual interaction and can only be done an album at a time. Still, I've gotten a "process" down for new rips/downloads which is relatively straightforward.

Here's the problem: I just ran across a spindle of MP3s from the Napster-heyday. This music is often tagged only in the title or the containing folder, and is sometimes misnamed or misspelled. Few metatags and DEFINITELY no album art.

While I like most of the music on these discs and would love to jump-start my collection using this stuff I probably spent a year collecting and pruning, I'm torn by my need to "tag" everything properly and not start adding "junky" files to the iPod. Trouble is, to do this right I could literally spend weeks attempting to create order from this chaos.

The knee-jerk answer might be to dump everything and try to buy or re-download better versions, but since these are mostly "singles", tagging them using T&R would be nearly as time-consuming.

I've heard of programs like MusicMatch which supposedly will ID a song by "digital signature" and can tag it appropriately. Does anyone have any experience with programs like this (or know of anything that works better/faster/cheaper)?

What's the best method/software for storing/viewing ratings in ID3 tags for mp3s?

shinji_ikari — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 10:00:26 -0800

What's the best method/software for storing/viewing ratings in ID3 tags for mp3s? Hopefully somewhere out there in the Metafilter user base there are other people that are as anal as I am about something this obscure. I've got a collection of 9000+ mp3s that I rely heavily on being rated in order to build playlists. It took quite a bit of time to rate them all in the first place so naturally I'm quite concerned about making sure that those ratings are persistent. I initially rated them all in Windows Media Player 9 (I know, I know) mainly due to its easy of assigning 1-5 star ratings in the interface and the fact that it had a plugin that would write the ratings to the ID3 tag and then restore them to the media library if necessary. However, WMP10 doesn't seem to support that plugin and since WMP is otherwise pretty crappy (apart from its integration with allmusic.com) I'm planning on migrating back to the loving arms of Winamp. I've found some scripts I can use with ActiveWinamp to import the ratings stored by WMP9 into the Winamp Media Library so I seem to be set for the short term. However, long term I'm wondering what's the best way to make sure that I'm always able to use these ratings, independently of what media player I'm using at the time. It seems to be kind of tricky, since while the ratings field in the ID3 tag can have a value from 1-255, most programs that handle ratings seem to use the 1-5 star method and there are obviously multiple ways to map the values from the ratings field into a 1-5 star rating (the WMP plugin, not surprisingly, used a fairly non obvious approach). As a result, even when I examine the tags on the files in something like Tag&Rename the stored ratings don't show up. Of course this could also be due to the fact that each ID3 tag can have multiple rating fields, each rating tied to an id string (like an email address, for example) Some programs only seem to check for ratings that are associated with a specific string (for example in WMP it was "Windows Media Player Series 9") Basically the point of all that rambling is that I'm trying to find out if there's anything of a "standard" approach to storing ratings that will make them accessible in different programs without me having to write scripts or something to convert the ID3 tags to one style or another. Also, is there an ID3 tag viewer which will just allow you to see all the fields in the ID3v2 tag "raw"? Most ID3 tag viewers/editors I've seen don't always show every single possible field in the ID3v2 tag format, just the most common ones. I'd like to have a way just to quickly verify what's stored in the rating field in case I run into a problem with the rating not importing into some media player down the line.

ID3 tag utility

Infernarl — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 13:08:28 -0800

ITunes Filter: Is there a utility that will take track numbers or information in a file name and put it into the ID3 tag? I have 400 tracks that have track numbers in the file name and I do not want to manually add them all myself.

How do I change ID3 tags in many files, across many directories?

tomble — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 17:28:02 -0800

How do I change tags in many MP3 files across many directories? So, I finally got a decent MP3 player, which uses an organisational system based on the ID3 tags for files. What I now realise is that the tags in all my files are not at all well organised.

What I need to do is tag a bunch of files across a series of subdirectories, so all files below directory `X' get tagged `Audio Book' for example, then I could tag all files below directory `Y' as `Podcast' or whatever.

I've tried a few programs, but none of them seem to really work across subdirectories. Any suggestions?

A program that will let me copy an ID3 tag?

ascullion — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 08:12:10 -0800

Does anyone know of a (preferably free) program that will let me copy an ID3 tag from one MP3 file to another. ie.. I'd like to select the source and target files, and have everything transferred at the press of a button. Bonus points if it can batch process files. Thanks

Organizing music on a computer

Who_Am_I — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 06:32:46 -0800

How do you organize your music on your computer? Shortly after I started digitizing my music, I ran into this problem of how to sort it so that it can be easily navigated. On one hard drive I have a folder for music, inside that is a folder for each artist, and inside that a folder for each album by that artist. Soundtracks are in the "Soundtrack" folder and random compilations (like Best of the 80's or whatever) are in a "Miscellaneous" folder. For mixes by DJs there is a folder for that DJ as if they were the artist.

But when it comes to ID3 tagging, this system sort of falls apart because there is only one "artist" field. A DJ mix by John Digweed for example will have about 14 tracks, all by different artists, but obviously I want to be able to find this album by looking for "John Digweed." What I have been doing for years is to use the "genre" field to hold the artist that I want the album associated with (so [DJ mix] Global Underground 19 has a genre of "Digweed, John" and Eat a Peach has a genre of "Allman Brothers Band").

The old Real Jukebox had an option to sort by genre->album, WinAmp3 had this same option, and Foobar2000 lets you sort by directory structure (which is by far the best solution I have found). But this whole system is obviously a kludge, and most media players don't seem to have these optioins, so what gives? How do you tag and sort your music so that you can find it in your media player of choice?

How do I rename folders based on ID3 tags?

themadjuggler — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 12:38:29 -0800

How can I rename my music folders on my Mac based on ID3 tags? Doug's Applescripts and iTunes have done wonders in helping me organize my music, but I'm looking for even more nit-pitcky precision. I already use Plaid Cow Solutions' Rename Files to get my filenames to reflect my ID3 tags, but I wanted to know if there were a way to do something similar with the folders.

For example, I would like the contents of my Built to Spill folder to look like this:

[1994] There's Nothing Wrong With Love
[1997] Perfect From Now On
[1999] Keep it Like a Secret
[2000] Live
[2001] Ancient Melodies of the Future

... and so on. Is there any solution short of renaming every single folder by hand?

How can I include ID3 tag information on a burned CD?

OmieWise — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 11:40:28 -0800

How do I make ID3 tags persistent? [+] When I make a mix CD for a friend on my Mac, I add all the data tags: song title, album, artist etc. When I insert the CD into my Mac again, I can see the information. When my friend puts the CD into her Mac, no song titles or any other info is present. Why not? We have the same hardware and software. When I download a song the ID3 information is persistent, so why is this different?

How can I make changes to ID3 track tag metadata with iTunes 4.7 on WinXP and have those changes stick?

grimmelm — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 08:48:35 -0800

How can I make changes to ID3 track tag metadata with iTunes 4.7 on WinXP and have those changes stick? [mi] I have a large and heterogenous collection of MP3/AAC files. They've been ripped from CDs at various times with all sorts of programs. Especially with the classical CDs, I've had to do extensive surgery on the track tags, which I've usually done with whatever program I used to rip them. But I've had some annoying problems with tags reverting back to old, uncorrected values.

I use iTunes 4.7 for Windows XP (in the past, I've used earlier iTunes versions, MusicMatch, Windows Media Player, and probably some other stuff) and in particular, I've noticed that sometimes when I go to play a track, it will disappear as I click on it. It will then have reappeared under some other artist or genre (the fields I most frequently change). Invariably, that other artist/genre is the one that the track formerly had, and that I thought I had "fixed."

I'm pretty sure that the problem is that the iTunes database and the actual metadata stored with the files gets out of sync and that iTunes decides that the files are authoritative. This would be okay, if iTunes bothered to update the files whenever I changed tag info using it. But no, it likes both to leave the files untouched and then, at some later point, to overwrite the changes I was trying to make because the files say different. What's worse, if I go in through, say, Windows to change the tags on the files directly, iTunes is no longer willing to play them -- it just skips the track when it comes up on a playlist.

How can I fix my tags and have the changes stick?

Help retag my mp3s

ticopelp — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 00:15:40 -0800

Concerning a large batch of mp3s and their id3 tags: I have about 5 GB of music that I downloaded from Emusic about a year ago. Due to an exceedingly stupid maneuver on my part, I accidentally stripped all the id3 tags from the files, which ended up physically renamed to something like "Untitled Album - Untitled Track 1," etc. -- so I now have about 500 songs like this.

They're organized in folders by artist and album name, so that much information I have -- I'm now in search of a utility that will allow me to get the appropriate information from CDDB or something, and then batch rename the files so I don't have to manually, and painstakingly, do so 500 times. I have both Windows and OS X, so platform's not much of an issue. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

MP3 renaming software

skryche — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 05:31:28 -0800

Is there a tiny (and free) Windows program I can put in my "Open With" menu for mp3s that will simply rename the file to [Artist] - [Title] based on the file's ID3 tags?