Help, I need to organize 120 hours of music!

August 11, 2012 7:10 PM

I've come into the position of being responsible for DJing a certain amount of music. I have a big archive of music but it's completely disorganized, and there's a lot that just doesn't work at all. Software suggestions for organizing it?

I've been using Rhythmbox to "star" remotely acceptable songs but it's a bit slow going and awkward; there's no "star this" keystroke, and it's not going to help me tagging if I want to go that far. I haven't found a rhythmbox plugin to do what I want, though I'm sure I could write one I don't especially want to spend the time.

Are there any good, free-as-in-beer programs (running under Ubuntu) that will accelerate the process of tagging and rating them? If possible it should let me do everything by keystrokes.

(bonus if it can take a stab at calculating bpm for me as well)

posted by BungaDunga to Technology (3 answers total)

Amarok has comparable features to Rhythmbox, and a set of keyboard shortcuts for rating songs. For mass editing of tags, I use Kid3. I've been looking for a more elegant, command-line solution but am yet to find a program quicker at cleaning up a large, messily-tagged collection of music. You could also use it to batch edit the "Rating" tag and most programs would recognize that. Thanks to the linux software philosophy of doing one thing well, it might take a few tools to cover all bases.
posted by Lorin at 8:50 PM on August 11, 2012

This might be overkill, but MIXX is an open source DJ app for Mac/Win/Ubuntu. Designed for mixing/beatmatching, but if you don't need that, it also has library sorting, bpm features, etc:
http://www.mixxx.org/features/
posted by p3t3 at 11:50 PM on August 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

Rhythmbox is awful. I use gmusicbrowser, but that doesn't have the ability to hotkey stars either. BPM detection can be done a variety of ways
posted by rhizome at 2:34 AM on August 12, 2012