Need a program to match orphaned songs to albums in Windows 10

September 21, 2019 8:42 AM

I have about seventeen thousand songs that I extracted from an iTunes deleted file using digital forensic software. I need something to help me automatically match up these songs to their respective album. Some were done but are not completed. Thus far I've spent two full days doing them by hand and I'm exhausted and just now got to the "A's" alphabetically! Is there anything I can do to facilitate this? I'm organizing files for PLEX server. (It has very specific requirements for file order)
posted by ~Sushma~ to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

If they still have their metadata I think that iTunes can organize them by folder when you import them. Could you drag them into iTunes or another media manager app that will sort by folder?

I believe Plex imports using the id3 info, so it should also be able to cope with filenames that aren't perfect for music. (Not so much for TV shows or movies...) But I'd let iTunes or another app do the initial pass.

For tweaking id3 info I use Kid3, which is multi-platform. You can also use Clementine to do some of this - it tags MP3s and Oggs, maybe also AAC? I think it will also sort info folders.

If the files are missing metadata that's going to be trickier. Sorry.
posted by jzb at 8:59 AM on September 21, 2019

Beatunes is another application you could use to to this. It is nominally a playlist builder - but it will also help group songs into albums as well as organising by values like BPM, key, and so on.
posted by rongorongo at 10:48 AM on September 21, 2019

Seconding Musicbrainz Picard. Use the "scan" option. If the tracks are not from super-obscure albums it should find them.

If they're classical it could be more difficult, there are gaps in their database and a lot of classical recordings have been repackaged multiple times.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 11:09 AM on September 21, 2019

Picard was a little hard for me to understand at first, but eventually I got it and it helped my library a great deal.
posted by lhauser at 7:24 PM on September 21, 2019