Massive mp3 tagging and deduping — what to use?
January 28, 2022 1:07 PM Subscribe
I've recently recovered the mp3s (and various other audio files) from every hard drive I had going back to 2000. This is... hundreds if not thousands of albums, some mistagged, with lots of duplicates, in various bitrates etc, with no consistent file naming scheme. What programs and what workflow are currently my best bet for getting them sorted, tagged, and deduplicated? I use a Mac by default, can run Linux software easily enough, and... could probably borrow a Windows machine if I had to.
A big question, in my experience, is if you want "clean up the metadata, but use the metadata that's here" or "Acoustic scan, match against an external database". (I recommend the latter, but I understand why someone might want the former)
On the latter, Musicbrainz Picard has been a long-time friend of mine, & it's cross-platform. I don't think it handles deduplication on its own, but it'll churn through albums like a champ & handle mistagging without any trouble.
MP3Tag is excellent for general tag-updating, looks like there's a (paid) Mac version, & it'll handle whatever sort of "I want this to be reformatted like that" metadata goals you have.
posted by CrystalDave at 1:30 PM on January 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
On the latter, Musicbrainz Picard has been a long-time friend of mine, & it's cross-platform. I don't think it handles deduplication on its own, but it'll churn through albums like a champ & handle mistagging without any trouble.
MP3Tag is excellent for general tag-updating, looks like there's a (paid) Mac version, & it'll handle whatever sort of "I want this to be reformatted like that" metadata goals you have.
posted by CrystalDave at 1:30 PM on January 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
Came here specifically to recommend Picard and Mp3tag, both of which have Mac versions. Also MusicBee is a very solid windows only free music player and organizer with built in identification stuff.
Picard is great but i wouldn't call it automatic. it will search audio fingerprints as well as metadata but will still sometimes get things way wrong, or identify things as part of compilations rather than albums (depending on the source of the file). you can set the weight of each type of result relative to each other.
it will speed this up considerably, but if it was my collection i wouldn't necessarily assume the first result is gonna be correct.
posted by softlord at 1:45 PM on January 28, 2022
Picard is great but i wouldn't call it automatic. it will search audio fingerprints as well as metadata but will still sometimes get things way wrong, or identify things as part of compilations rather than albums (depending on the source of the file). you can set the weight of each type of result relative to each other.
it will speed this up considerably, but if it was my collection i wouldn't necessarily assume the first result is gonna be correct.
posted by softlord at 1:45 PM on January 28, 2022
Response by poster: Yeah, I've been using Picard for tag correction and finding it good but slow.
If the tagging is going to be that labor-intensive, I'd kind of like to deduplicate first, so that I'm not semi-manually tagging five versions of an album only to delete four.
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:54 PM on January 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
If the tagging is going to be that labor-intensive, I'd kind of like to deduplicate first, so that I'm not semi-manually tagging five versions of an album only to delete four.
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:54 PM on January 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
This is my future! Thank you for asking this question.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 4:16 PM on January 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 4:16 PM on January 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
If you like the command line and/or python, you might like beets.
posted by pullayup at 4:30 PM on January 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by pullayup at 4:30 PM on January 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
+1 for beets, it's what I use and it's excellent. Not sure how well it handles terribly mistagged files, but it gives you a fair amount of manual control to fix things if you need it, while handling most things automatically.
posted by wesleyac at 7:46 PM on January 28, 2022
posted by wesleyac at 7:46 PM on January 28, 2022
+1 for beets it's amazing. If you use Linux you won't have any problems getting it set up how you like.
posted by bradbane at 8:44 PM on January 29, 2022
posted by bradbane at 8:44 PM on January 29, 2022
« Older Things are good; how can they be _better_? | I want to build a miniature castle home - how... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 1:14 PM on January 28, 2022